By Naomi Yee
The amount of new students coming to Eastern New Mexico University rose again in Fall 2013 for another record-setting semester.
Enrollment reached 5,814 students graduate and undergraduate students in Fall 2012. This semester, that number has reached to 5,856 students. An increase of 42 students is a small increase, but it is an increase nonetheless.
Despite the constant growth of students from semester to semester, the total number of credit hours being taken campus wide has decreased by 1.2 percent since the Fall 2012.
Currently, students are enrolled in 58,063 credit hours.
The funding for ENMU provided by the New Mexico Legislature is based on the amount of credit hours students are taking, but President Steven Gamble said that this slight decrease is nothing to worry about.
“Other schools are decreasing even more,” he said.
Gamble said that there is no need to worry unless this decrease becomes bigger and more of a trend throughout subsequent semesters.
In addition to reduced credit hours, several New Mexico universities, including ENMU, also are struggling with their retention rates.
At ENMU, the current retention rate is 58 percent. This means that for every 100 freshmen that began in Fall 2012, only 58 returned for the Fall 2013 semester.
Gamble said that the retention rate at ENMU is not as low as those at many other universities, so he takes that as an indication of progress. Similarly to credit hours, he will not worry too much about the retention rate unless numbers dramatically change.
Gamble also said that he doesn’t think the building of a new multipurpose stadium will effect student enrollment even though student fees would increase by $80 a year.
He said an increase in fees would have little to no effect because ENMU currently has the second-lowest tuition and fees of any university in New Mexico.
A second reason that a new stadium, if it were to be built, would not effect student enrollment, according to Gamble, is because the students get to vote on whether they want to raise their fees to help fund the proposed stadium.