ANALYSIS OF ENROLLMENT CHANGES AND THE VARIABLES THAT AFFECT THE CHANGES IN RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES.

Abstract

The purpose of this investigation is to identify various economic, societal, and institutional variables that can be associated with enrollment trends of the Research Universities I and II. These variables will then be used to formulate disaggregated enrollment forecasts by enrollment-change categories and by institutional classification, using Carnegie Commission and Office of Education taxonomies. These disaggregated trends along with appropriate variables and forecasted variables will be used to construct prediction models by category and institution. The results indicate that the research universities have not experienced declining enrollments and that their growth was slower but more stable than the national norm. They have not experienced the growth of part-time students that occurred nationally. Instead, the increased enrollment was caused by a growth in the female student population. The enrollments of research universities can be predicted by the one variable of time with an error of less than 3.0 percent. The predictors based upon individual institutions produce an error of 0.993 percent for the Research Universities I and 1.650 percent for the Research Universities II. The predictions based upon trend groups produced an error of 4.32 percent and 2.29 percent for the respective research universities. The enrollment of the research universities can be predicted with an accuracy of 13.54 percent for the Research Universities I and 8.134 percent for group II.