Enrollment in graduate-level business programs offered here or at nearby campuses that draw students from Orange County areas dipped 27% for the 12 months through June, according to this week’s Business Journal directory.
It was the second-straight annual decline.
The dip wasn’t as drastic for the entire field as the numbers indicate—Trident Univer-sity International in Cypress accounted for all of it and then some, shedding more than 1,700 students compared with a year earlier. The 55% decline at Trident left the online university with Southern California enrollment of 1,406.
Without TUI—which remains the largest program, with more than 30% of all MBA students in OC—enrollment here saw an uptick of 1.5%, to 3,159.
TUI currently is under review for its credentials, according to the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.
Other schools saw smaller declines in enrollment.
California State University, Fullerton, saw a 4.8% dip in its enrollment numbers, down to 535.
“There’s a drop in evening-based, flexible part-time MBA programs,” said Van Muse, director of the MBA program at the Mihaylo College of Business and Economics at Cal State Fullerton.
“A number of factors relating to the economy are affecting that,” he said, adding that employers may be contributing less to the cost of education, and people with jobs may be more sensitive to the amount of pressure given the “tenuous nature of the economy and jobs.”
According to Muse, while enrollment for some programs declined, certain programs at the school, such as the master’s for accountancy, saw increases.
In a more unstable economy, “with more anxiety in the marketplace, students tend to shift toward specialty degree programs,” he said (see related story, page 14).
Pepperdine University, which offers only part-time programs at its satellite campus in Irvine, saw a 24.4% decline in enrollment, to 186 students.
“During a weak economy, full-time enrollment goes up, and part-time enrollment tends to go down,” said Douglas Gore, spokesman for the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine. “That’s what we’ve been seeing in the last three years since the crisis came on board.”
Chapman, Brandman
Enrollment at Chapman University in Orange continued to shrink, with an 8% drop to 241. It dropped 7.1% a year earlier.
The declines have come as Brandman University in Irvine, a relatively new part of the Chapman University system, has seen steady growth for its MBA program (see related story, page 20).
Brandman’s enrollment nearly tripled when it added 51 students this year, reaching 78.
Brandman Chancellor Gary Brahm said the school is bucking a nation trend.
“There are more applications and a slight drop-off (in enrollment) in general,” Brahm said, referring to the nationwide trend at all graduate school programs. “People are having to position themselves to be competitive in the marketplace.”
Brandman wasn’t alone in posting gains in enrollment.
UCI Up
The University of California, Irvine, saw enrollment at its Paul Merage School of Business increase 6.5% to 840, after falling a year earlier to 789.
Alladi Venkatesh, associate dean of masters programs, said tactics such as a “focus on personalization, our participation in recruitment events (and) our student outreach” combined to result in a higher enrollment in the past year.
The Paul Merage School is the second-largest program on the Business Journal list in terms of enrollment size.
Concordia University in Irvine saw enrollment swell by 35.7% in the past year, reaching nearly 100 students.
“Part of it is just increased emphasis in the school in marketing it, and the program has been developing further,” said Bruce Hanson, director of the MBA program at Concordia.
“The economy is slowly coming around, and that’s good, too,” he added.
Experts in academia said they are still wary of drawing any conclusions about the overall economy based on graduate-school enrollment numbers.
“Everything is protracted at this point,” said Pepperdine’s Gore. “It’s going to take a few more cycles to really understand where things are at. This is an incredibly unusual situation.”
The Business Journal’s directory includes a number of for-profit schools along with public and non-profit colleges and universities.
DeVry University’s OC campus in Anaheim boosted enrollment by 46.8% to 91 students.
The Illinois-based school has about 870 students in its MBA programs across Southern California, up by more than 300 compared with a year earlier.
University of Phoenix saw its numbers hold steady at 225, according to a Business Journal estimate.
