- August 12th, 2006, 8:22 am
#24540
Record-breaking enrollment at LUhttp://www.newsadvance.com/servlet/Sate ... ws!archive
Ron Brown
rbrown@newsadvance.com
August 11, 2006
With new students scheduled to arrive Sunday and Monday, Liberty University is anticipating a record fall enrollment hovering around the 10,000 mark.
“It’s clearly the largest enrollment we’ve ever had,” said Ron Godwin, the school’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. “It is approximately a thousand more students than we had last year.”
The 10,000 figure will include both undergraduate and graduate students attending classes on campus.
It is a growth rate driven largely by the undergraduate population, which has more than doubled since 2001.
Five years ago, the school’s undergraduate residential population included 4,376 students. This fall, the school expects to enroll 9,300 undergraduates.
This year’s enrollment figure includes 3,200 new students comprised of about 2,300 freshmen and 900 transfer students from other colleges.
Just about every state in the union will be represented in the student body. It will also include students from about 83 foreign countries.
About 52 percent of the student body will be women, which is actually a couple of percentage points lower than in previous years.
The school has 26 residence halls for women and 30 for men.
To meet its booming enrollment, LU built five new residence halls this year on the school’s East Campus. Men will occupy all those residence halls.
Those five buildings will have 14 apartments each and will house a total of 420 students.
Godwin said the school plans to begin construction of even more dorms shortly after the school year officially begins Aug. 23.
The exact configuration of the dorms has yet to be determined.
The school could build apartments similar to the ones most recently constructed or could opt for a twin tower of residence halls that would have large assembly areas for dorm meetings on its lower floors.
The school is also negotiating with a builder who wants to put 180 rental units on 20 acres adjacent to the LU campus.
If that builder can have those units ready by fall 2007, LU may opt for the twin towers, which would likely have a completion date of fall 2008. If the school builds the twin towers, it would lease apartments from the apartment builder for the 2007-08 school year.
“It will be like any nice apartment complex in Lynchburg,” said Jerry Falwell Jr., the school’s vice chancellor. “After we move out after the first year, it will be available to anybody. We suspect our married students and our off-campus students will end up there.”
The school is currently spending at least $7 million a year on new construction to meet its student housing needs.
For the past several years, the school has been bringing in about 1,000 additional students per year.
“We’re not building dorms in hopes that they’ll be full,” Godwin said. “We doing that with the knowledge that we’ll need every room and every last bed. We are confronting the challenges of a dramatically rapid- growing institution.”
The growth is also causing the school to re-evaluate its needs for off-campus housing.
Currently about 62 percent of Liberty’s undergraduate students are housed on campus, leaving 38 percent to reside in off-campus housing.
“We’re going to have to increase the percentage of our students that live off campus because we’ll more than fill up all our dorms,” Godwin said. “That will mean another 100 or 200 students will have to live off campus.”
Godwin said he expects the school will be in a perpetual building program as it works toward the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s goal of 25,000 on-campus students in the next 10 years.
“About 1,000 new students is all we can swallow each year,” Godwin said. “That’s about all we need to grow each year residentially.”
“This year, we planned five dorms and estimated at the time, that they would do the job. Our enrollment has exceeded what our planning and expectations were. We’re like many large universities. We’ll have a large component of our student population that will live off campus.”
- By Chippy