Fall enrollment at the University of Hawaii in Hilo was down last year, continuing a years-long trend.
During a presentation Tuesday to a Hawaii County Council committee, UH-Hilo Chancellor Bonnie Irwin was frank about the college’s current struggles to attract students.
According to statistics presented by Irwin, 2,781 students enrolled at UH-Hilo in fall 2023, a 6.5% drop from the previous year, and the second year in a row that fall enrollment has decreased.
However, fall enrollment has consistently declined each year since 2016, with 2021 — when the university was recovering from a pandemic-fueled enrollment decrease from the previous year — as the only exception.
Irwin noted the pandemic years actually brought record numbers of first-time freshmen — 462 in 2020, 458 in 2021 — but suspected that those numbers were fuelled by students who would have otherwise gone to school elsewhere but chose to remain closer to home when the pandemic hit.
Seemingly bearing out that hypothesis, 2022 saw first-time freshmen numbers dip, and they continued to decline last year, only reaching 364.
Consequently, Irwin said, UH-Hilo’s tuition revenues have declined, forcing the university to “get creative” in terms of securing funding. She added that she is grateful to the state Legislature, which for years has consistently provided about half of the university’s budget.
“This is not unusual in the nation,” Irwin told the committee. “We are seeing that the flagship universities — the R1 (research universities), the (larger state universities) like UH-Manoa here — are doing better than the regional universities. This is just the state of where things are today.”
However, Irwin said Hawaii itself — both the state and the island — are lagging in comparison to the bigger picture.
Nationwide, 62% of high schoolers go into college within a year of graduation — which is the lowest rate in two decades, she added. But statewide, that rate is only 51%, and the Big Island has only reached 43%.
“I’ve been asked by a number of people, ‘If you want to grow UH-Hilo, why don’t you just bring in more people from the outside?’” Irwin said. “I don’t think that’s the answer to the economic development of this county thriving.”
Irwin said that, “for what it’s worth,” UH-Hilo is still a bargain compared to other universities, having not raised tuition for years — a semester’s tuition is typically around $7,000, she said. However, a student living on campus still pays about $25,000 a year, to which several council members reacted ruefully.
Puna Councilman Matt Kaneali‘i-Kleinfelder said he recently spoke with Canadian college students who told him that they pay a similar amount of money for their entire four-year college career.
“The cost of education, when it gets prohibitive, we see less people enrolling, and we don’t get the education we’re looking for in our youth,” Kaneali‘i-Kleinfelder said. “But if we’re not subsidizing that on a federal level, then the kids don’t have access to schooling like they do in other countries.”
Kona Councilwoman Rebecca Villegas reminisced about her time at UH-Manoa in the 1990s, when tuition was $700 a semester, and recalled an old program wherein UH would pay for a student’s next semester if they got a 4.0 GPA in the previous one.
Irwin mentioned in passing that UH is looking into resurrecting similar incentive programs through its “Student Success Initiative,” but didn’t go into further detail.
Irwin also added that UH is considering offering “microcredentials,” a growing educational trend that allows students — whether traditional college-aged students or adults already in the workforce — to take short, week-long courses that train for specific workplace skills.
Offering such courses, she said, can help trade school graduates continue to develop in their careers as their jobs evolve over time.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.