Fall enrollment across the University of Hawaii system dropped for a fourth-straight year — something the unversity anticipated, but said it is working to reverse.

Since climbing to an all-time high in fall 2011, when the local economy was recovering from a recession, enrollment has been steadily declining. The 10-campus system enrolled 55,756 students statewide this fall, down by nearly 1,300 from the previous fall semester. UH as a whole is serving 4,500 fewer students than it was five years ago.

Risa Dickson, UH vice president for academic affairs, said the numbers aren’t surprising.

“When the economy is good, the college-going rate tends to drop,” Dickson said. “Along with that, college-age students have leveled off so there are fewer students going to college. It is concerning in the long-term and we need to think about how to change things because we’re competing for fewer students nationally.”

She said UH is looking to expand the types of students it attracts.

“If the college-age population is slightly declining at this point, we need to start reaching out to veterans, returning students, international students — nontraditional populations,” she said. “For so long we’ve thought of a college student as the 18-year-old freshman. We need to broaden our idea of what is a college student and clear pathways for students to get degrees.”

Eight of the university’s 10 campuses saw enrollment decreases this fall, with only Honolulu Community College and UH-West Oahu posting year-over-year increases. UH-West Oahu, which opened its Kapolei campus in 2012, is the only campus that has posted gains in each of the past five years, but the double-digit growth seen in previous years — as much as 20 percent — slowed to a 1.4 percent increase for the current semester, according to figures from the UH Institutional Research & Analysis Office.

Enrollment at the flagship Manoa campus dropped to 18,865 students this year, down by 642 students, or 3 percent, from last year and down from 20,429 students five years ago. Meanwhile, the seven community colleges collectively enrolled 30,370 students this fall, down 2 percent from last fall and down by 11 percent from five years ago.

Lower enrollment usually translates to fewer tuition dollars. But UH is in the fourth year of a five-year tuition schedule to ultimately raise tuition by more than 30 percent. The annual increases were approved in 2011 when UH faced drastic cuts in state funding. Revenue from tuition and fees totaled $377.5 million in fiscal year 2014, according to the university’s most recent external financial audit. That’s up almost 16 percent from the year prior.

Earlier this summer, to keep tuition affordable, the UH Board of Regents took the unusual step of scaling back tuition increases built into the last two years of the schedule. Annual tuition at UH-Manoa is $10,332 for the 2015-16 school year under the smaller increase.

Jim Shon, director of the Hawaii Educational Policy Center, contends tuition and student debt factor into the enrollment fluctuations.

A survey of more than 500 UH students administered last fall by the center found that for more than 60 percent, rising tuition was making them reconsider their graduation plans; undergraduate students rated their concern with tuition costs as an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being “very concerned”; and roughly 10 percent said that without scholarships or tuition waivers they would not be attending UH.

In 2012, the center surveyed students who dropped out of UH-Manoa that year; the students cited unaffordable tuition and fees as their top reason for not returning.

At Manoa, 38 percent of undergraduate students have federal loans to help pay for college, and the median federal debt of borrowers who completed college is $19,509, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard website. Nationally, graduates from four-year colleges owed an average of $28,400 in federal and private student loans, according to a 2014 report by the Institute for College Access & Success.

But even as the number of students enrolled at UH campuses has been going down, the total number of certificates and degrees awarded has been going up thanks to recent efforts by the university’s so-called Hawaii Graduation Initiative, which aims to increase the number of educated citizens in the state.

The number of certificates of achievement awarded across the UH system, for example, has nearly doubled over the past five years to 888 certificates in 2014-15. Associate and baccalaureate degrees awarded also are up over the same time period along with doctorate and professional practice degrees such as doctorate degrees in law, medicine and architecture.

“We graduate an unusually high number of graduates, which means our graduation initiatives are working,” Dickson said. “But when more students graduate, we have fewer students returning.”

The university also supports the “55 by ’25” campaign led by the nonprofit Hawaii P-20 Partnerships for Education to achieve a goal of having 55 percent of Hawaii’s working population holding two- or four-year college degrees by 2025. The current tally is at 44 percent.

“We’re saying Hawaii needs to hit 55 by ’25 wherever they choose to go to school,” UH spokesman Dan Meisenzahl said. “It’s not about boosting UH’s enrollment. It’s about educating our state.”

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