Fewer students attend this fall

The board ratified the faculty contract but didn't vote on a pending classified employee pact.
By HAROLD GWIN
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Youngstown State University won't quite meet its fall 2005 enrollment projection.
John Habat, vice president for administration, told the university's Board of Trustees that there will be an enrollment decline compared with last fall.
The good news is that enrollment is sufficient to meet the university's budgetary needs, he said.
The trustees met Thursday as their Internal Affairs and Finance and Facilities committees to review terms of a new three-year contract with the 380-member faculty union and a proposed three-year agreement with the university's 400 classified employees.
Latest counts show that YSU may have nearly 300 fewer students this year.
YSU had 13,101 students in class last fall, but only 12,869 enrolled as of Wednesday, Habat said. That's about 2 percent below registrations at this time last year, he said, adding that the final number could drop between 25 and 50 more.
Total enrollment includes both full- and part-time students.
Possible reasons
The university had projected a 0.5-percent enrollment increase, he said, suggesting that some of the loss may have been due to "casual" students who chose not to re-enroll and to students who panicked in light of the faculty and classified employee strikes and chose to enroll elsewhere for the semester.
However, the budgetary bottom line is that the full-time equivalent enrollment stands at 10,530, and that's above the 10,415 full-time enrollment estimate upon which the university's $131.2 million general fund budget is based.
Full time is considered 12 credit hours or more in a semester.
The FTE total has met budgeted projections and any number above that mark will mean additional tuition revenue that can be used to meet other costs, Habat said.
Following a review of the two proposed contracts, the committees voted to recommend formal board approval of both.
The board then convened a special Board of Trustees meeting and voted to ratify the faculty pact, which was approved by the faculty Sunday, but took no vote on the classified contract as that union has yet to vote on its terms.
About the ACE situation
Christine Domhoff, ACE president, said the union will hold an informational meeting on the agreement at 5:15 p.m. Tuesday and a ratification vote at 5:15 p.m. Wednesday. No site for the meetings had been selected Thursday.
Dr. H.S. Wang, chairman of the board of trustees, said the last two or three weeks have been a very harrowing and difficult period for the university and a lot of people deserve credit for getting classes started Monday.
Work stoppages are not the optimal way to settle disputes in today's environment, Wang added, saying, "I wish, with our collective wisdom, that we can devise a better way of settling our differences in the future."
The faculty contract provides annual raises of 3 percent in the first year and 3.5 percent in both the second and third years, reduces the pay scale for retired faculty who come back to teach classes and requires faculty members to begin picking up a portion of their health care premiums at the rate of 1.5 percent of their base salary for family coverage and 0.75 percent for individual coverage beginning with the fall term 2006.