Over the past four years, the University of Mississippi has experienced steady growth and record-breaking enrollment that has put pressure on the housing market and university infrastructure.
While the university has announced construction projects aimed at addressing those concerns — a new student housing project is set to add 3,500 on-campus beds by 2029 and a new parking garage is set to add 1,300 parking spaces by fall 2026 — many members of the Lafayette-Oxford-University community continue to ask the question, “Why hasn’t the university capped admissions?”
In light of application booms and high enrollment numbers, universities across the country have limited admissions and introduced enrollment caps as growth management strategies. Earlier this year, Texas A&M announced that it would limit new undergraduate enrollment to 15,000 for the next five to seven years to develop the capacity of its infrastructure and student services. Similarly, in 2023, the University of Tennessee Knoxville announced that it would accept fewer students in that year’s application cycle and continued to maintain higher standards for out-of-state admissions in 2024.
Despite UM also showing upward trends in enrollment and applications, University Marketing and Communications said in a February 2024 article from The Daily Mississippian that conversations about restricting admissions were off the table. However, somewhere in the past year, a cap became an option.
Chancellor Glenn Boyce first announced the university’s consideration of a limit in undergraduate admissions in a meeting with the Associated Student Body on March 6.
“The freshmen class next year is exploding again. The applications are up (to) over 40,000. We will probably land in the neighborhood of about 6,300 to 6,500 freshmen for next year,” Boyce said. “We are not slowing down, and there comes a time when we are going to have to cap and stop (accepting applicants). We will probably stop around that 6,300 to 6,400 mark.”
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Noel Wilkin said in a March 17 interview with The Daily Mississippian that the university is considering all the options that would help to make its growth rate more manageable.
“We’re looking at all the different levers we have to pull that might slow the growth to a digestible amount or percentage,” Wilkin said. “One of them may be a cap on the freshman class. One of them may be the number of students who come in from out of state. Again, those are conversations that are being had, but the way we’ve talked about it in enrollment management is what are the levers and how effective are each of those levers?”
While the university is considering those options, Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance Steven Holley said that it is not moving toward making a formal announcement.
“It is my job to be thinking about the best case scenario — many thousands (of students) up — and it is my job to think about many thousands less. So, should I think about a cap? Certainly, but we’re not moving towards some formal announcement,” Holley said.
Factors that affect a cap
Holley said one of the factors that affect the consideration of an enrollment cap is the university’s size.
Schools that have instituted caps such as Texas A&M and the University of Tennessee boasted 2024 enrollments of 72,560 and 38,728 students, respectively, at their main campuses. Comparatively, UM enrolled 23,981 students at its main campus for the 2024-25 school year.
“For (Texas A&M) at 75,000 students, if they were to allow 1% fewer students to be admitted, that’s almost 1,000 students,” Holley said. “For us, 1% is closer to 200 students.
“… Each one of us have been growing anywhere from 8% to 10% every year,” Holley said. “You do 10 times almost 1,000 (students) — that’s 10,000 students that really want to get (into Texas A&M). … They had to do a formal announcement and say, ‘We’re doing this,’ because tens of thousands of kids are trying to get in.”
Tuition and the role of out-of-state students
Another common consideration for universities considering an enrollment cap is how it would impact tuition revenues.
UM, like many other public institutions, relies on tuition as its primary source of income. In 2024, tuition and fees made up 78% of UM’s operating budget, according to the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning.
The role of out-of-state students is particularly prominent in considerations about tuition. Due to the 2002 settlement of an equal admissions lawsuit, Mississippi has an open admissions policy that makes all eight public universities accessible to in-state students. This means that an enrollment cap would most likely affect out-of-state students, who made up 46.9% of the student body for the 2023-24 school year and pay almost three times the amount of tuition that in-state students pay.
Wilkin said that tuition revenue and the in-state/out-of-state dynamic is something that the university takes into consideration with enrollment decisions.
“We made the commitment that in-state students, if they meet the admissions criteria, will be admitted and will have the opportunity to come here, and that our out-of-state enrollment would not affect our ability to live up to that commitment to in-state students,” Wilkin said. “We can also admit knowing that the revenue that comes from (out-of-state students) helps us to fund the overall operation of the institution that benefits all students.”
While their admission to the university is not explicitly capped, out-of-state students are already feeling the impact of growing enrollment. This year was the first time in several years that the university instituted a priority deadline, which was Feb. 1, that could impact a student’s chances of admission, according to UM’s Director of Admissions Jody Lowe.
Lowe also explained that non-resident freshmen faced an expanded review process.
“The Office of Admissions has implemented an expanded review process for non-resident freshmen that allows us to waitlist students if the university believes that it will exceed capacity,” Lowe said. “The evaluation process is ongoing and involves waitlisting a segment of students with lower academic credentials and potentially those who apply later in the admissions cycle. Students waitlisted may be deferred for admission in the spring or could be pulled off the waitlist if space allows.”
Wilkin said there was concern that decision might have an impact on students’ desire to come to UM.
“We are always concerned about how decisions we make might influence the enrollment in the institution and the desire of students to come here, along with the experience they have when they’re here,” Wilkin said. “The dynamics around the state, number of students graduating from high school and going to college in the state of Mississippi, and balancing that with the number of students coming from out of state is something that we have to consider.”
Holley said that if a choice were made that would limit enrollment, tuition revenues would not decline but rather would grow by less.
“What do you do in anything in life, in your personal household, in your own finances, or what do you do as an organization when you realize that a normal and large increase in revenue is going to be a moderate increase? You just have to make finer prioritized decisions,” Holley said.
Holley also pointed to the fact that tuition is one of four or five revenue buckets at the university. In past years, other buckets of revenue — such as state appropriations and donations — have increased at the university.
“You’ve got to give credit to our government officials. They’ve been very generous in increasing state appropriations consistently the last several years. There’s whole stretches in our state where it was the opposite,” Holley said. “We’re at an incredible economy in the state of Mississippi, therefore that taxpayer base allowed us to grow appropriations.”
UM’s operational planning process
In addition to providing insights about long term enrollment management, Holley and Wilkin explained how the university manages enrollment on a year-to-year basis. For the administration, those finer prioritized decisions that Holley talked about are already the name of the game.
In addition to meetings of an enrollment management committee — which consists of administrators and various campus departments — the university undergoes a yearly operational planning process.
“Every year, we go through what’s called an operational planning process where we put out a prediction to the deans and to others on campus and say, ‘This is what we expect, maybe the number of students who come to our institution in the next year,’” Wilkin said.
Predictions about the range and volume of students that are set to attend are made by the Office of Enrollment Management, the Budget Office and the Office of Institutional Research, Effectiveness and Planning.
“Given that number, (we ask) what resources do you need to do the things that you do for the University of Mississippi?” Wilkin said.
According to Wilkin, all the units on campus submit operational plans that outline critical and strategic needs.
“Those are reviewed by the relevant vice chancellors,” Wilkin said. “(Vice Chancellor Holley) and I sit in a room with our chancellor, and we go through those requests and we approve the things that are critical for us to continue to operate.”
Holley added that the university asks departments to prioritize their requests.
“(We ask) if the university has to prioritize all these requests and not do 100% of them, what’s the trade off if you don’t get all that investment? What will happen?” Holley said. “That allows the chancellor, the provost and myself to look and say (what are) the most valuable priorities.”
Growth’s impact on the campus experience
For the past two years, the university has had to enter into master leases with off-campus apartment complexes to house both freshmen and upperclassmen who could not be accommodated in on-campus residence halls. Many students have raised concerns about this solution and how it impacts the campus experience.
“That’s something that we’ve talked a lot about,” Wilkin said. “We are making strides to try to bring that campus experience back to campus, if you will, for all freshmen and hopefully some upperclassmen as well, based on what’s in (the public private partnership housing agreement).”
The public private partnership, which The Daily Mississippian first reported in March, is a plan to dramatically expand on-campus student housing by 2029. After initial plans for the university to build three dorms on the former Kincannon lot turned out to be too expensive, the university sought a private developer to construct and manage a new set of dorms.
Partnering with a private developer will keep construction prices affordable and housing costs down for students.
“With regard to these efforts, it just takes time for that solution to be implemented,” Wilkin said. “In the meantime, we have done everything we can to try to help those master leases be as close to the campus experience as we can.”
Wilkin pointed to retention rates as evidence that students are getting what they need when they come to the university despite some of the growing pains.
“I would also point to a couple of metrics that are in somewhat general but are an indication that students are getting what they need to be successful, and that is our record high four-year graduation rate and our record high six-year graduation rate,” Wilkin said. “Students are earning degrees at a higher rate than ever before, and yet our retention rates are remaining high, well above the national average.”
“Why doesn’t the university just stop admitting students?”
When the DM posed the question, “Why doesn’t the university just stop admitting students?” here’s what Wilkin and Holley had to say.
“I understand that individual experiences are relative,” Wilkin said. “Focusing on the data and what truly we’re able to provide to the students who are here, what amount of growth could be managed or handled by the groups that we have on our campus and listening to the people who do this every single day in their areas of expertise, we are effectively keeping our finger on the pulse of what that growth looks like and balancing against all of the other factors within the environment while living up to our mission to educate as many people as we can for society.”
Holley talked about the experience of his sons who attended UM.
“I would hate for my sons all these years ago to miss an experience because we only admitted 10,000 students, like when I was here — they loved it at 20-something thousand. So I think we need to continue to strike the best balance between maximizing that experience,” Holley said. “It’s tough when you’re adding to your household and expanding a bathroom and the construction is dirty and it takes a while, it’s uncomfortable, and then when you have a big get-together with all your friends and family… it’s such an amazing experience. What we see is the world, particularly the state of Mississippi, wants to be at our doorstep, and we want to host them. That’s the balance.”
Editor’s Note: The February 2024 statement attributed to UM Marketing and Communications was initially attributed to Jody Lowe, UM’s director of admissions. It has now been updated with the correct attribution.
