USF St. Petersburg will have about 560 first-time freshmen this summer and fall – about a hundred fewer than last year, according to the admissions office. Jonah Hinebaugh | The Crow’s Nest
By Nancy McCann
Freshman admissions at USF St. Petersburg have fallen since administrators decided in January to stop accepting high school graduates with a GPA below 3.0.
But university officials disagree on how strongly the two developments are related and why the decision was made.
Interim Regional Chancellor Martin Tadlock attributes the decline in enrollment primarily to a national trend, not the higher GPA threshold.
“College admissions have been going down around the country,” said Tadlock. “This tends to happen when the economy is good and more people have confidence in the job market.”
Other USF officials, however, link the enrollment dip to the higher GPA requirement – an academic improvement the St. Petersburg campus must make as it loses its independent accreditation and the three campuses of the USF system are consolidated under Tampa’s control in 2020.
The number of first-time-in-college students fell from 253 in the summer of 2017 to 191 this summer, officials said, and freshman enrollment this fall is expected to drop from 400 to about 371, although final figures won’t be available until later this month.
That means the campus will have about 560 first-time freshmen this summer and fall – about a hundred fewer than last year, according to the admissions office.
Tadlock and Serge W. Desir Jr., St. Petersburg’s director of undergraduate admissions, said they hiked the admissions threshold to improve incoming students’ chance of academic success.
They said they made the move in January – before they became aware that the Legislature was considering consolidation.
Whatever the reason, the sobering enrollment statistics come at an uneasy time for USF St.Petersburg, which thrived after it was granted independent accreditation in 2006 following decades under Tampa rule.
That changed suddenly last spring, when legislators voted to return to yesteryear and consolidate the Tampa, St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee campuses.
Now, everything from admissions standards to staffing numbers and faculty tenure is undergoing scrutiny amid uncertainty in St. Petersburg.
The decline in freshman enrollment seems to underscore an issue raised by some St. Petersburg campus veterans and their allies in Pinellas County government, who warned last spring that consolidation would jeopardize the recent successes of the campus.
Concerns arose that higher admissions standards associated with consolidation would shut out some students in the community, like those who have done well at USF St. Petersburg despite lower GPAs.
Desir acknowledged that high school students with a GPA below 3.0 will have to go to other schools, but he said the campus will continue to accept transfer students who earn an associate degree at community colleges, like St. Petersburg College.
“There is always the possibility of students with GPAs under 3.0 being admitted on a case-by-case basis due to special circumstances,” he said.
About 25 percent of current undergraduates at USF St. Petersburg are SPCtransfers, according to a university news release.
Last spring, the Legislature appropriated additional funding to expand the pipeline between SPC and the university.
That money will go toward scholarships and programs to help community college students move on to USF St. Petersburg.
One program – called FUSE – helps students begin earning an associate degree from SPC while receiving some of the perks of being a USF St. Petersburg student, such as access to advising and campus events.
University officials predict that the decline in enrollment will be temporary and will rebound once it becomes more widely established that USF St. Petersburg is raising its expectations for incoming students.
A sprawling bureaucracy
As interim regional chancellor, Tadlock is walking a tightrope as he tries to ease concerns on his campus while embracing the inevitable and planning for consolidation with the administration of USF system President Judy Genshaft.
In an interview with The Crow’s Nest, Tadlock said that scores of people on all three campuses are involved in the planning for consolidation and that St. Petersburg’s interests are well represented.
In fact, the planning for consolidation has spawned a sprawling bureaucracy.
At the center of things is a 13-member task force led by Dr. Jonathan Ellen, the president and CEO of Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg.
The task force, which has five Pinellas members, and its three subcommittees have held public hearings on the three campuses to learn from experts and conferred repeatedly by telephone.
The subcommittees will make recommendations to the task force by the end of the year.
By law, the task force must submit recommendations to the USF system Board of Trustees by Feb. 15. The trustees must submit a consolidation plan to the Board of Governors – the state agency that oversees Florida’s 12 public universities – by March 15.
The separate accreditation for the three campuses ends and consolidation takes effect by July 1, 2020.
Although attention has been focused on the task force, much of the consolidation planning is apparently being handled by an internal committee that ultimately reports to Genshaft through five “work groups”: general education and curriculum alignment; faculty affairs; research; business and finance; and external affairs.
There are 66 people in the work groups, with 13 from USF St. Petersburg and 18 from Sarasota-Manatee.
Amid this whirl of activity, even the USF Board of Trustees has a four-member consolidation committee.
On the St. Petersburg campus, some are watching the proceedings with a wary eye.
Six times in her 18 years as USF system president, Genshaft has changed the top leadership in St. Petersburg. That has generated some distrust of her administration.
Only two of the 13 members of the Board of Trustees are from Pinellas. And virtually every key campus leader in St. Petersburg is either an interim – like Tadlock – or relatively new.
The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences began her job July 1. The dean of the College of Education has been here for a year, and the dean of the College of Business for two.
When Genshaft was asked how she would respond to concerns about consolidation in St. Petersburg, she replied in an Aug.17 email to The Crow’s Nest.
She said St. Petersburg is well-represented in the planning for consolidation, which “was designed to ensure transparency and to encourage participation” from all three campuses.
“We expect students will benefit from a simplified admissions process, access to more degree programs, increased efficiencies that result in graduating faster and with less debt, and expanded opportunities in graduate or doctoral research,” Genshaft said.
“Consolidation will also provide more clarity to employers because students will be required to complete the same coursework to earn a degree in a specific field, regardless of which USF campus they attend,” she said.
“Each campus will maintain its distinctive identity.”
Bettering the benchmarks
In June, USF Tampa was designated a “preeminent state university” entitled to extra state funds each year .
When the three campuses are consolidated in 2020, legislators and Genshaft say, St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee will get a share of the extra funds and their students will have enhanced academic opportunities.
But consolidation also means that St. Petersburg must pull up its performance on key academic benchmarks – called metrics – so that the USF system can maintain its preeminent status.
One of those metrics is admission requirements.
As a preeminent university, each year the USF system – combining data from all three campuses – must have an average weighted grade point average of 4.0 or higher and an average SAT score of 1200 for fall semester incoming freshmen. (A weighted average includes points added by the high school to account for more difficult classes, resulting in GPAs that can be above 4.0.)
“As the admissions process goes along, adjustments are made toward achieving the desired goals,” said Tadlock. “The more students admitted with GPAs above a 4.0, the more you can admit below a 4.0.”
The average GPA of all freshmen enrolled is the number that appears with test scores in a school’s “student profile” – one of the first things students applying to college want to know.
“We were down this summer in (first-time-in-college) enrollment … but the student profile went up from an average GPA of 3.36 to 3.56,” Tadlock told Campus Board members on Aug. 6.
The summer profile was lower than the campus goal for this fall, when first-time freshmen are expected to have an average 3.8 GPA and a 1200 SAT or 25 ACT.
The 2018 fall student profile goals for freshmen are higher at the Tampa and Sarasota-Manatee campuses. Tampa’s is an average 4.2 weighted GPA and a 1300 SAT, and Sarasota-Manatee’s is a 4.0 GPA and 1225 SAT, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
In the spring 2019 semester, Desir said, the St. Petersburg profile will be lower – with “an average GPA from 3.3 to 3.5 and 1100 to 1150 for the SAT or 22 to 23 for the ACT.”
The reason for the lower student profile in the spring is to make the campus accessible to some good students who do not meet the higher fall requirements, he said.
Not all universities admit first-time students in the spring, and of the ones that do, not all have lower admissions requirements. For some universities, the smaller pool of spring enrollment helps keep residence halls full and tuition flowing.
By the summer of 2019, all three USF campuses will begin using identical admissions criteria, Tadlock said, in anticipation of single accreditation starting in the fall of 2020.
Details about student profiles for admissions beyond the spring 2019 semester were not available.
“I think the lower summer and fall (2018) enrollment numbers are a temporary blip,” said Desir. “As we improve our student profile, USFSP becomes a more serious destination, including students from other states.”
“As we continue to focus our attention on consolidation, there will be access to more majors and more resources,” he said. “In the long run, it will benefit students.”
