Fall enrollment at the University of Hawaii at Hilo has dropped from last year, preliminary figures show, but interim Chancellor Marcia Sakai remains optimistic the campus can buck the trend.
“I know the enrollment numbers are a concern, and they are also a concern to me,” Sakai, 69, said Wednesday in an interview with the Hawaii Tribune-Herald. “But you don’t turn something around overnight. And I think we know what we have to do. We just need to keep on doing it.”
As of Tuesday, UH Hilo had 3,446 students enrolled, a 4.3 percent drop from Aug. 22, 2016, enrollment of 3,600.
Sakai said enrollment is expected to fluctuate in the coming weeks, at which point official numbers will be posted.
But the drop follows five consecutive years of declining enrollment. It’s also lower than what the campus originally predicted.
Administrators drafted a plan last school year to manage its decreasing enrollment. The plan predicted a 1.2 percent decline this school year, followed by incremental increases through the 2019-20 school year, at which point it’s aiming for 3,830 students to be enrolled.
The number of continuing students showed the largest decline this year, according to preliminary numbers, dropping from 2,384 on Aug. 22, 2016, to 2,227 as of Tuesday.
The number of first-time freshmen, however, increased from 374 in 2016 to 421 on Tuesday.
“That’s a good sign,” Sakai said of the freshman increase. “That’s something we can look at with positive interpretation because it would indicate we are successfully communicating to students what UH Hilo has to offer them. … It’s the returning students … students we would have expected to return … that is smaller than the (number) who returned last year.”
