When walking around campus, Mark Gordon, 52, can be easily identified by the faded purple and gold hat with Defiance College’s logo that he wears.FORT WAYNE – IPFW’s fall enrollment saw a 3.9 percent drop, school officials announced Wednesday.
The school also saw a decrease in the number of credit hours taught, though both decreases were smaller than expected, officials said.
School officials said they were not surprised.
Mark Franke, associate vice chancellor for enrollment management, cited three reasons for the decline: the high job-growth rate in northeast Indiana, IPFW’s stricter admissions standards and changes to financial aid regulations.
There are 13,771 students enrolled for fall classes – a 3.9 percent drop from last year’s record enrollment of 14,326. The number of credit hours taught this fall is 139,647, which is a 6.1 percent decrease from last fall.
Other areas saw similar decreases, including the number of students enrolled at IPFW for the first time, which is 1,629 this fall as compared with 2,044 a year ago.
One area of growth was the number of students enrolled in the Collegiate Connection, which is a dual-credit program for high school students that saw an increase of about 28 percent with 2,438 students.
IPFW’s total minority enrollment decreased 3.9 percent, from 2,273 in 2011 to 2,184 this year.
Departments that showed an increase in enrollment above 5 percent included English and linguistics, physics, women’s studies, engineering, allied health and fine arts.
Before this year, enrollment at IPFW had been increasing for much of the past decade, with much of that growth attributed to the university’s expansion of housing options on campus.
