Overcoming a decade of declining enrollment, Marshall is experiencing a significant increase in the number of students choosing to call it home.

Jerry Ross, the vice president for enrollment management, said the university is seeing success in enrolling new students.

“We’ve been on a three-year journey now to grow enrollment, and we’ve been successful,” Ross said. “This is our third straight year of growth. Both total enrollment and new students coming into the institution, and this follows a decade plus of declining enrollment. So, it’s been really impressive what the university’s been able to do in a short period of time.”

Ross said the university’s ability to communicate has played a major role in the recent successes with enrollment.

“You’d love for it to be one thing that does it, but it starts with Marshall and who we are,” Ross said. “We have gotten so much better at telling our story to prospective students, families and high school counselors about the amazing education you get at Marshall University at a tremendous value.”

Ross said the university has also shifted to a wider approach with enrollment, focusing on several different categories of students at once.

“We also have a very broad strategic enrollment plan where we’re focusing on 10 student segments,” Ross said. “We’re not just focusing on freshmen, but also transfers, graduate students and everything else to make up the total enrollment for the university. That’s been a really important shift for us as an institution to take a more holistic view in growing enrollment.”

Ross said they’re seeing enrollment increase across the board among freshmen, transfers from both community colleges and four-year institutions, graduate students and dual enrollment. He said online degree options are proving to be appealing to many of Marshall’s students.

However, Ross said one area the university is seeing difficulty in is among international students.

“It’s a challenging time to improve international students. We are up slightly with total international students, but our incoming class is probably going to end up being down a little bit. It’s a hard year with the general environment and a lot of noise around it,” Ross said. “Coming out of the pandemic, we were starting to rebound, and that’s where we’re seeing that growth, but this was a hard year for international students.”

With the increase in enrollment comes an increase in demand for student services, Ross said. He said the enrollment office works closely with partners across campus to ensure the demand is met, such as the housing office to address increased demand for student housing and the academic affairs office to address class and instructor availability.

Among the challenges facing Marshall’s enrollment efforts are declining high school graduation rates in West Virginia.

“We are bending against this demographic decline,” Ross said. “What we’ve pulled off in spite of that, with West Virginia’s high school graduation numbers, has been even more impressive. We’ve been doing this with even fewer people. The top of the funnel is smaller.”

Ross said competition with other institutions is increasing, with other schools putting more focus on recruiting in the region.

“We are all playing in the same pool of prospective students, and there’s fewer of them, so that competition gets harder every year,” Ross said. “These last three years, a lot of people have been put on notice about what Marshall is doing and how we’ve been able to grow enrollment. They’re asking, ‘How is Marshall able to do that?’ so they’re starting to work harder in our backyard while we’re working in other areas.”

Ross said another major challenge the university faces is a lack of confidence in college degrees, citing a recent Gallup poll that illustrated declining confidence that college degrees are worth the investment. 

“Those are just some of the things we’re trying to counter in this business,” Ross said. “We’ve got to sell people on higher education, that it’s worth it, that Marshall is the right place and that they can afford it all at the same time.”

Ashton Pack can be contacted at [email protected].