The university will reduce its use of an outside consulting firm because of the fall’s disappointing enrollment trends, a university official said.

In November 2011, the Board of Trustees approved hiring the enrollment management-consulting firm Noel-Levitz to help reverse the trend of declining enrollment at Eastern. Now, after almost two years, enrollment is still declining and contract with Noel-Levitz is coming to an end.

Blair Lord, the provost and vice president for academic affairs, said the consulting contract with the firm was originally set to expire on June 30, but because of setbacks, the contract will officially end around November. Eastern, however, will still retain some additional services such as a proprietary system that helps determine which admitted students have a high tendency to choose Eastern.

“(The proprietary system that Noel-Levitz will still handle) is a fairly elaborate model to develop in house,” Lord said. “We were going to try to develop it over this past year, but we are not ready to do without Noel-Levitz’s assistance at this time. Hopefully we will get there soon.”

The current total enrollment of 10,417 (8,347 of which are undergraduate students) is approximately 1,000 students less than what Lord said he would like it to be consistently.

“The ultimate goal is to stem the declines that we have faced in enrollment and ultimately to reverse the trends of enrollment,” he said. “We want to stem that decline for a number of years so ultimately the numbers will start going back up again.”

Lord said optimum enrollment for Eastern is between 11,500 and 11,800 students, including off-campus students. At its enrollment peak in the fall of 2006, Eastern had 12,349 students.

The decline in enrollment has been a problem in the last few years and Eastern experienced a 6 percent decline in students this year. Lord was quick to point out that in other areas, such as retention, Eastern is doing well.

“Eastern’s retention rate compared to state norms is very good,” Lord said. “We retain students at a much higher rate than other similar universities.”

Mary Herrington-Perry, the assistant vice-president for academic affairs, is undertaking the application of Noel-Levitz’s ideas to Eastern’s recruitment system, including a strategic enrollment planning process that created a steering committee under her leadership.

“The committee has identified six strategic objectives and individual action plans to each accomplish each of those six goals,” Lord said.

Lord said Herrington-Perry’s work will, in turn, help decide what strategic directions to implement and how most efficiently to use the resources available to recruit traditional-age undergraduate students.

“That will give us a plan to move forward in addition to the operational adjustments that Noel-Levitz recommended,” Lord said.

After finishing streamlining recruitment and enrollment for traditional students, Lord said the committee will shift its focus to recruiting non-traditional students.

Lord also pointed out that the enrollment standards for admission have not actually waned. Average ACT scores, GPA and overall academic profiles have actually increased among incoming freshmen.

The average entrance ACT among freshman students this year rose approximately one point, from 21 to 22, while the average entering high school GPA rose from 3.07 to around 3.31.

During the Sept. 27 Board of Trustees meeting, President Bill Perry said that while the campus academic profile is improving, the enrollment numbers still disappoint him.

For this semester, the school admitted 2.5 percent more freshman, but the ultimate goal was to raise the freshman level by 10 percent. The number of transfer students also went down from last year.

“We want to bring in the most well-qualified cohort of students that we can attract,” Lord said. “At some level, we would always like to have a slightly improving profile of students, but we are not going to get only people only qualified to Harvard. The improvements this year were grand, but I would like to see more improvements in the next few years.”

Jack Cruikshank can be reached at 581-2812 or at jdcruikshank@eiu.edu.