Tidbits, Resources, and Discussion for ELI Faculty

Friday, June 5, 2009

Summer Enrollments: Who's in Our Classes?

As you know, we saw phenomenal growth at ELI this summer (about 14% higher than last summer's enrollments--and still counting!). Are you noticing anything in particular about the nature of the students we have enrolled? I'm curious whether we're seeing simply greater numbers of the same types of students we always get, or whether we're seeing new categories of students altogether.

One noteworthy thing I can see from the administrative side is that enrollment patterns are unusual--really slow enrollments in some of our core courses that normally fill rapidly (and that we staffed up for) and really high enrollments in some courses that are usually quite small. It will be interesting to see whether these patterns are just artifacts of the summer population (more transient students, who have different needs than our fall/spring population) or if they continue into the fall.

2 comments:

Laura said...

is this 14% compared with last summer or with any previous semester?
At any rate, I wonder how much the economy is to account for this. We usually hear that when people are out of work they may turn to education, if not to fill their time, then to better their standing to get a new job or enter an entirely different field.

Jennifer Lerner said...

The 14% is higher than at that time last summer. We always compare like semesters (otherwise, for example, it'd always look like we had dropped half our enrollment each summer, since summer is much smaller than spring or fall). Yes, the economy surely is playing a role--that's why I'm wondering what types of students we are seeing in our summer classes (that is, is the economy just sending us more of the same type of student, or new types of students altogether?).