BYU-Idaho expands enrollment

BYU-Idaho President Kim Clark announced Tuesday that the board of trustees agreed to raise the school's enrollment cap from 11,600 to 12,500 per semester in fall 2010.

The cap could expand to 15,000 students per semester in 2015 without the need to construct any new buildings. The growth makes room for more members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at one of the church's three BYU campuses. The church also operates the flagship BYU in Provo and BYU-Hawaii.

Expanded enrollment is possible because BYU-Idaho has adopted a three-semester system unusual in American higher education, one designed to maximize campus resources.

BYU-Idaho keeps the campus humming at full capacity year-round with semesters in fall, winter and spring. Each student is assigned to one of three tracks. Some attend the two traditional fall and winter semesters. Others attend winter/spring or spring/fall tracks.

In Provo, BYU operates two full semesters in the fall and winter. In fall 2008, 32,992 undergraduate and graduate students attended BYU. Shorter spring and summer terms draw fewer than a third as many students.

The board approved the changes in December, BYU-Idaho spokesman Andy Cargal said. Clark announced the new enrollment cap to university and community leaders in Rexburg, Idaho, on Tuesday. Some of the new growth will be managed through expanded online courses.

The move follows a decade of change for the former Ricks College, which in 2000 was a junior college with an enrollment of 8,500. Clark left his post as dean of the Harvard Business School to take over as president of BYU-Idaho in June 2005 at the call of the late LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley.

Cargal said BYU-Idaho will add a modest number of faculty and staff to accommodate the increased enrollment. A temporary hiring freeze is in place on the Provo campus.

"The Board of Trustees has invested a great deal in BYU-Idaho," Clark said in a written statement, "and with all the innovation and new construction we have virtually created a new campus since our change to a four-year institution."

Church leaders regularly tell students at the BYU schools that studying at the Utah, Idaho or Hawaii campuses is a privilege others would like to share. The church provides hundreds of millions of dollars to the schools each year to subsidize tuition, a major reason all three schools have been honored for having some of the lowest private-school tuition costs in the country.

Clark's list of BYU-Idaho imperatives includes serving more students and reducing students' costs. The plan to raise the enrollment cap to 15,000 by 2015 is subject to additional board approval. That approval is subject to conditions that set milestones for cost per student, space utilization and academic performance.

All three schools face pressure because the church has hundreds of thousands of college-age members. Admissions officers regularly hear complaints from prospective students who aren't accepted, as well as from their parents and and those in their LDS congregations.

E-mail: twalch@desnews.com

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