Even with enrollment dropping, Eastern has and will plan to maintain its current application requirement standards to allow a better student enrollment yield for the following semester.

Lowering standards or allowing more applicants from the application pool is a common tactic in higher education to make up for lowering enrollment.

The University of Illinois has accepted 11 percent more students to improve their yield.

Chris Dearth, the director of admissions, said Eastern only accepts roughly 50 percent of the people who apply.

“It is a good thing when your selectivity is there. We are hoping to have 5,000 students admitted in yield,” Dearth said. “They are all going to be academically strong students.”

Instead, Dearth said admissions is working the applicant pool harder this year.

“We are working with more students in that applicant pool to get them to an admissible level,” Dearth said. “We haven’t dropped our standards. We are trying to raise the kids up.”

Admissions is doing this by keeping in contact with those who apply.

Anyone under university admission requirements is encouraged to retake the ACT test if they have lower scores.

They are also encouraged to send mid-term grades, allowing the university to see if their GPA has shown a major increase.

“We have been working a little bit harder with our applicants and its been working,” Dearth said. “We have admitted more students than we have in the past.”

Freshman applications are just over 8,100 and freshman acceptance offers are just over 4,000, as of press time. Both numbers represent a 2 percent increase over the last cycle.

“Both of these numbers will grow as we continue through the admissions cycle,” Dearth said. “We operate on ‘rolling admissions’ so we will receive applications throughout the cycle and admit students as soon as the application is complete.”

Dearth said lowering standards has typically been the old model to increase enrollment in higher education, but is ineffective in the long run. He added that model has not been used as much now because there are actually fewer students to chose from in the application pool.

“You have to be very careful once you start lowering standards and what I call ‘opening the flood gates,’” Dearth said. “You have to have certain academic standards, or it is going to hurt you on the retention end and the graduation end.”

Blair Lord, the provost and vice president for academic affairs, said the standards are set to ensure those who are accepted can be successful during their Eastern career.

“Students who meet our standards have a high probability of being successful students here,” Lord said.

Blair added Eastern needs to have a certain academic expectations for the students admitted to campus.

“We have been very good at holding our standards,” Lord said.

Dearth said admissions is still looking more for more traditional undergraduate students, which includes the freshman and transfer students.

While they are still seeking those who wish to study through Eastern’s online component, their focus is on students who will take advantage of the residential institution.

He added most of the online courses are meant for those in continuing education and graduate programs. Online is still important, he said.

“You need to be looking at many different sources of tuition revenue,” Dearth said.

Jarad Jarmon can be reached at 581-2812 or jsjarmon@eiu.edu.