After five straight years of sliding enrollment at the University of Hawaii’s flagship Manoa campus, university President David Lassner has set an ambitious goal to hold enrollment flat for the upcoming fall and boost it back up to 20,000 students by 2020.

Enrollment at UH Manoa climbed to more than 20,400 students in fall 2011 — its highest level in the past decade — as the state’s economy was recovering from the recession. Manoa’s student count has since plummeted by 12 percent over the last five years, with the drop in students growing steeper each year.

As interim chancellor for the campus, Lassner says he’s determined to turn around the trend. Soon after taking on the chancellor role in September, he assembled a special work group to begin tackling the problem.

“People’s first reaction tends to be, ‘We’re doing OK. Enrollment is down across the country.’ And I just think that’s not good enough,” Lassner said in an interview. “We’ve had five years of decline, and each year the decline has been a higher percentage than the year before. That’s just wrong in every way.”

Nationwide, enrollment at colleges and universities has been dragged down in recent years by a decline in birthrates, which has reduced the overall college-age population, and an increase in the number of young adults entering the job market under a healthier economy. Overall fall enrollment at the nation’s degree-granting institutions has dropped for five straight years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

At Manoa there were 18,056 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in fall 2016. Without interventions the university’s internal reports predicted enrollment would decline another 2 percent to 17,659 students when the fall semester gets underway in a month.

“The first target in terms of declaring a goal is to say, ‘Let’s stop the decline.’ That’s just putting a stake in the ground to say we should be trying at the very least to not lose enrollment anymore and hold even,” Lassner said, noting that the aggressive goal initially made some administrators nervous.

“The return to 20,000 by 2020 — that’s where we were at our recent peak during the recession, so we know we have the capacity,” he said. “That should not be unachievable. … I think there are enough things we can do in terms of students who we’re not reaching.”

Lassner says part of the reason enrollment has trailed off is because UH is graduating more students on time. A record number of Manoa students are earning undergraduate degrees within four years, a feat reflected in a 15-percentage-­point improvement in UH Manoa’s graduation rate since 2010.

But even as more students complete programs on time, Lassner says, the university needs to do a better job of attracting new students and holding onto existing students.

“We like increasing graduation rates even if it hurts us on the enrollment side, but over the long term we can’t sustain that. We have to be bringing in more people and keeping more people to provide the educated citizenry that Hawaii needs,” Lassner said.

Fewer students also means less tuition collected. On top of that, the UH Board of Regents voted last summer to hold tuition flat for the upcoming academic year. Annual full-time resident tuition is $10,872 at Manoa.

“This obviously puts financial stress on the campus,” Lassner said at last month’s regents meeting. The drop in enrollment is “both a concern because it’s our job to educate students, but it’s also a concern as it impacts the campus as tuition makes up almost half of the campus operating budget.”

Enrollment initiatives

Lassner tapped Clifton Tanabe, director for institutional transformation in the chancellor’s office, to head the work group in charge of turning around enrollment. The task of enrollment management previously was split under two Manoa vice chancellors.

Tanabe said the team, which meets weekly, has implemented immediate strategies and pilot tests as it works on an overall strategic plan.

Strategies underway include targeting financial aid incentives, offering attractive new degree programs, increasing branding and marketing, improving technology to better track student trends, personalizing academic advising for students and improving the student experience overall.

“We’re trying to make innovative changes that are positive for the student experience,” Tanabe said in an interview. “It’s too early for predictions, but we’ve certainly worked very hard on trying to do things in new ways. … We should see some improvement.”

Lassner said he’s been unhappy with Manoa’s performance on the retention side — the percentage of students who re-enroll each year.

“Our retention numbers are nowhere near where we need to be. We are still losing 25 percent or so — and that’s a pretty steady number — of freshman who do not come back as sophomores,” Lassner said. “I’m told it’s really hard to get that number above 85 (percent), but we have a lot of room between 75 and 85 percent to work with there.”

Tanabe said one of his group’s strategies involved offering so-called “retention grants” in the spring to 230 undergraduate students after performing a statistical analysis of students who were most likely to not return.

“The idea is something, I think, we’re going to try to keep going,” Tanabe said. “It’s really about meeting a student at a point in their college education where they may need a little extra help to move into that next year, to finish up that last year. … They don’t have to be huge, but they have to be deployed at the right time and to the right students.”

Target populations

Officials said UH also wants to more aggressively go after student populations including Hawaii public school graduates, students at the university’s community colleges, active military and veterans, and mainland and international students.

Several students on campus last week said they were attracted to UH Manoa for its affordability and degree programs. Local students also said attending UH allows them to stay in Hawaii and save on rent while living with family.

Xiaoyu Bai came to Hawaii from China three years ago to study at UH Manoa and recently graduated with a master’s degree in atmospheric sciences. She’s working as a research assistant in the department while she contemplates a doctorate degree program.

Bai, 25, said having most of her tuition waived and earning income for doing research factored into her decision to study at UH as well as the reputation of the university’s research programs (UH was recently ranked No. 19 out of 70 leading universities “that succeed in both promoting opportunity and producing research” by the Brookings Institution). She added that the “nice weather and nice climate” were also a big draw.