Undergraduate enrollment in Eastern Michigan University’s College of Education has dropped 37 percent from fall 2007 to fall 2014. In response, the COE is downsizing.
According to the Institutional Research and Information Management Data Books for 2011 and 2014, the undergraduate student headcount went from 2,860 students enrolled in the college in 2007 to 1,787 students in 2014.
Shawn Quilter, associate dean in the COE, said he believes this drop is due to both the drop in birthrates in Michigan and the fact that positions left by retired teachers aren’t always filled.
“And then on top of that I mean I think right now there’s a lot of rhetoric and debate going on in education about what the purpose of schooling is,” Quilter said. “And I think teachers are at the center of a lot of I think really challenging discussions about what their role is and what they’re supposed to be doing and whether or not they’re living up to expectations.”
In addition to reducing the number of sections of classes offered, the college is reducing the number of instructional staff.
Since 2011, the number of faculty members has gone from 90 to 75; the number of full time lecturers has gone from 18 to 8; and the number of part-time lecturers has gone from 61 to 44. There are six faculty members on Voluntary Phased Retirement.
Faculty members on VPR have signed an agreement with EMU to continue working for no more than three years before they retire. Their workload is reduced by 50 percent in the fall and winter semester or by 100 percent in the fall semester and zero percent in the winter. Their pay is 50 percent of what their annual base salary was.
The COE welcomed their new dean, Micheal Sayler, June 1.
“Once we get back with faculty and everything, I think [Sayler is] definitely going to work with faculty to talk about ways that we can grow our enrollments and promote the programs that we already have,” Quilter said. “And then improve the programs that we do have to make them maybe more accessible.”
According to Education Week, the federal estimates from the U.S. Department of Education’s postsecondary data collection found that enrollment rates in teacher-preparation programs have dropped by about 10 percent nationwide from 2004 to 2012.
In Michigan, the 23,372 students enrolled in teacher-preparation programs in 2010 dropped to 14,372 in 2014, a decrease of 38.5 percent, according to data collected under Title II of the Higher Education Act.
Quilter said he thinks the COE is always going to be “a large preparer of teachers.”
“If you go around the state, particularly in Southeast Michigan, but probably other parts of the state, if you ask people what their knowledge of Eastern is, for a lot of them, one of the first things they’re going to say is, ‘oh, that’s where they prepare teachers,’” he said. “And so I think that brand and that understanding is still very, very strong.”
The COE is accredited and nationally recognized by 16 national professional organizations.
“So the quality level that we submit ourselves to under review I think is always very high,” Quilter said. “We’ve always had that commitment, we’ve always kept that commitment. So people know when they come they’re going to get a good quality program.”
Quilter said he thinks all the colleges at EMU are held accountable for their budgets and “maintaining quality programs.”
“If you don’t have quality programs, people know that pretty quickly and they stop coming to you,” he said. “So we’re not going to change that commitment.”
