Mississippi Valley State University student Veronica Willis can tell there are more people than ever on campus every time she parks her car.
"What really made me notice it was the parking," said the junior from Cary. "It was hard to find a spot before, and it's really hard now."
But if crowded parking lots are somewhat of an inconvenience, they also have a bright side.
"I think it's a good thing that our enrollment is going up," said Willis, who lives on campus.
For the second year in a row, Valley has made record gains in enrollment, and university officials are now caught between celebrating that spurt and scrambling to accommodate about 500 more students than last year. Preliminary data shows that Valley's total head count jumped 14.5 percent to 4,008 for the fall semester. The numbers are even more impressive when taken over a five-year period, showing an enrollment increase of 1,056, or 43.2 percent.
The new enrollment shatters the goal of reaching 3,500 students by this fall that Dr. Lester Newman made when he became president in 1998.
University officials see the growth as a sign of vitality for a school that less than a decade ago was marked for closure by the state's College Board. Dr. Roy C. Hudson, MVSU vice president for university relations, says Valley welcomes the changes, even if its recruiting success involves a few growing pains.
"Certainly being over 4,000 in that five-year period is very rewarding," he said.
Hudson attributes Valley's success at attracting students to a new recruiting strategy. That effort is now headed up by an enrollment management group that combines all aspects of the process - admissions, financial aid, student records and academic departments, among other areas.
"All of those groups have an impact on students before they get here and after they get here," Hudson said. "That was the focus on getting an increase in enrollment from freshmen all the way to graduate students."
The university has seen growth also in its satellite campuses in Greenwood and Greenville, he said. Counts from those sites are forthcoming.
At those campuses and the main one in Itta Bena, people all over the region are realizing what Valley has to offer, says Pam Smith, spokeswoman for the College Board.
"The campus folks believe the students in that part of the state are understanding at this time that they can get a good quality education at the Valley," Smith said "The timing is just working well."
But with these bursts in sheer numbers of people coming to campus, there are complications. Parking is an issue, Hudson acknowledges.
"For a long time, we had space and everybody could drive up to the front door of the building and park," he said. "That's not the case any more because we have more students and more students have cars."
But Hudson and the rest of the administration have more pressing concerns.
Unable to find enough teachers to meet the needs for all the new students, Valley has placed classified ads to attract adjunct professors in foreign languages, English and social sciences. While those continue to dangle out there, some administrators are having to pick up some of the slack. "I'm teaching a class," Hudson said. His English class meets at night.
The graduate and upper-level vacancies will be harder to fill, he said. "You just can't go out and get an adjunct professor to cover an upper-level class."
And even if Valley finds quality full-time replacements, hiring them will tax an already tight budget. While the school has grown in enrollment faster than any other university in the state in the last three years, its allotment of the College Board's appropriation continues to be the lowest among the other public universities.
The state gave Valley about $13,260,000 in 2002. Two universities with lower enrollments received more. Alcorn State University, which has 3,300 students this fall, received $21,754,000 from the state last year, and Mississippi University for Women, which has an enrollment of 2,063, got almost $13,305,000. MUW's enrollment dropped 2.1 percent since last year.
Delta State University, the closest to Valley in enrollment with 4,073, was appropriated $20,380,583. University of Southern Mississippi has the most students, with a fall enrollment of 16,662, a 9.1 percent increase over last year.
"We're not trying to knock any other institution," Hudson said. "It's just that when you have the number of students to serve that we have, what is a very positive thing - growth in enrollment - can turn into something ugly if you don't have supporting funds to serve those students."
But Valley's situation reflects a greater problem throughout the state system. The Legislature has cut the College Board's funding even as enrollment at the state's universities has jumped 21 percent in the last 10 years. The result is a budget crisis and an exodus of quality professors from the state, Smith said.
"We've been cut $71 million since fiscal year 2000, so we don't have enough money to hire all the full-time faculty we need to hire, and our salaries aren't high enough to attract people who would be interested in coming to Mississippi," she said. "We're having to hire more adjunct professors than we would like."
Next week, Hudson and administrators from other universities will accompany College Board representatives in lobbying for changes in the way universities are funded. Among their requests are a 12 percent salary increase for faculty over three years and a stabilization of contingency funds. Right now, 12 percent of the College Board's budget is patched together with one-time funds.
"They aren't necessarily available next year, and we can only use them on things like paper," Smith said. "We can't use them on people, which are recurring needs."
Valley also faces the challenge, set up by the $503 million Ayers settlement last year, of reaching 10 percent enrollment of non-black students of other races by 2012. The numbers of students of other races at the historically black university are higher than ever, but as a percentage, they aren't necessarily keeping up with the overall growth rate.
"I think we'll get there, but that's something I think will come together within its time," Hudson said. "We're working toward it."
Much of the other-race recruitment has come from the athletic fields, where Valley is attracting more white and Hispanic students than ever for baseball, softball and its new women's soccer team. The trend is a reverse image of the way other universities integrated in the 1960s and '70s, Hudson said.
"That's the way historically white colleges did it too," he said. "The first black students in numbers went there for athletics."
In an economy of scale, Hudson says, the assets of Valley's growth spurt greatly outweigh any problems it is creating. Costs of services are going down, and there's still plenty of space on the dorms.
"It's not all numbers, but numbers do help," Hudson said.
