Category Archives: EMU Branding

From annarbor.com comes “Eastern Michigan University sees growth in number of students, credit hours.” Here’s a long quote which for me highlights both the good news, the fuzzy news, and the potentially bad news:

EMU enrollment has grown by nearly 7 percent over the last two years, Martin said.

That includes a 2.74 percent growth in the number of students enrolled for the winter semester, compared to the same semester last year. The university has 22,159 students enrolled as of the middle of January.

There’s also been a nearly 2 percent increase in the number of credit hours students are taking compared to the same time last year.

Martin credits that growth to the school’s “zero, zero, zero” campaign, which included no increase in tuition, fees or room and board for this school year.

However, the growth is short of the 3.4 percent growth in credit hours EMU projected it would have in its budget for this year.

For me, the good news is clear:  EMU is growing, and I think that’s a good thing.  I’m all for it.

But the fuzzy news is the 0/0/0% campaign.  President Martin (and all the other suits, of course) credit this move for raising enrollment, but as far as I can tell, they have no evidence to this.  I mean, has anyone even done something as basic as a survey where they ask newly enrolled students about the part the 0/0/0% campaign played in their decision to come to EMU?

Maybe it’s a factor, but maybe not.  I think as likely a cause for the increase in enrollment is the bad economy and the generally good press that EMU has received over the last couple years that has nothing to do with 0/0/0%– the first popular and seemingly sane permanent president the university has had in at least a decade, no murders or other extreme campus problems, forward-looking building projects, no faculty strike, etc. etc.

The bad news?  Well, two bits of bad news, it seems to me.  First, even if we give the 0/0/0% move the bulk of the credit for increasing enrollment at EMU, it didn’t work as planned because for the books to balance as the administration wanted, we needed an increase of 3.4% in enrollment this year.  Second, no one is expecting anything but tuition and fee increases next year; so, if that happens, doesn’t it seem likely that EMU might see some fall in enrollment?

Actually, that might be the way to retroactively get an answer to the question of the success of 0/0/0%:  if EMU raises tuition and fees next year and we see more than a 2.7% increase in enrollment, then isn’t as likely/more likely to argue that those increases were the cause?