Enrollment UVSC chief's top priority

OREM — Long-hoped-for university status at Utah Valley State College will not be the school's No. 1 priority in 2006, the school's president said.

Rather, gaining university status is No. 2 — ranked after a goal of increasing enrollment at UVSC and at other Utah colleges and universities, President William Sederburg said Tuesday during his third State of the College address since arriving at the Orem school in 2003.

"The Commissioner (of Higher Education in Utah) has given us permission to talk about the university status thing," Sederburg said after the speech. "(But) we have no big announcement about that."

University status, however, is closely tied to the other priorities at the school.

"We have no desire to be a (national) university," he said. "We have a desire to be a regional state university."

A group of college professors and administrators from in and around Utah visited the campus in November and are writing a report about the feasibility of UVSC becoming a university. UVSC and the commissioner's office are sharing the costs of the study.

Sederburg last year hired James Phelps, an education consultant from Michigan, where Sederburg was a state senator and college president before coming to UVSC, to study what UVSC needs to do to make steps toward becoming a university.

Phelps' 17-page report is based on discussions with students, faculty, state officials and members of the community. The report noted that in some states, schools similar to UVSC are universities.

Yet Sederburg emphasized in his speech the trend of decreasing college enrollment. At UVSC, the head count — the total number of students — increased even though the number of students taking at least 12 credit hours of classes decreased in fall 2005 from the previous year.

"I don't think anyone in this room saw it coming," he said to about 400 students, faculty, administrators and community members who attended the speech.

Sederburg partially blamed the good economy for causing

people to stall returning to school.

Although Utah ranks 12th in the United States in the percentage of college-educated adults aged 45-64, it ranks 31st for people age 25-34. That means high school graduates are not attending college in high numbers like their parents' generation.