About 15 members of Cornell’s staff, faculty and students gathered in Duffield Hall yesterday afternoon to eat “Brown Bag” lunches as part of a series to facilitate dialogue about the University's strategic planning initiative, “Reimagining Cornell.”

Susan Murphy ’73, vice president of student and academic services, and Deputy Provost David Harris conducted this informal discussion on the results of the student enrollment task force report, which was submitted along with the other 19 task force reports to the Provost’s office in October. The student enrollment task force report examined how increasing student enrollment could generate $20 million of the $215 million gap in Cornell’s revenue and spending by 2014.

This lunch is one of several ways administrators plan to gather information about community members’ reactions to the reports. Next week, Provost Kent Fuchs will moderate a more formal discussion on the reports.

Harris emphasized the unique nature of the enrollment task force. “Why this task force is different than most of the task forces is that it is not about an academic unit. It is a task force that came out of the question that, given the budget challenge, could we increase the budget by increasing [Cornell’s] enrollment of students … It is actually a lot more complicated than you might think.”

The task force examined the possible effects of increasing student enrollment. “There is the issue of how it will affect the student experience, what it would do to our rankings, [and] basically how it would affect Cornell. In the end, those factors are what informed our final conclusion because if we went at it simply from a budgetary perspective we would have said do it right now.”

In their examination, members of the task force looked at whether the University could sustain an increasing student body and looked at a variety of ways to implement the increase, including increasing enrollment of only undergraduates, splitting increased throughout first-year students and transfer students and increasing professional masters graduate students.

“We went through a variety of scenarios, [and] concluded [that] yes you can increase enrollment but that no you shouldn’t,” Murphy said.

Harris emphasized that increasing student enrollment is not an ideal solution to decreasing the expected gap between revenue and spending by 2014. “There is a lot of evidence that this wouldn’t be a positive student experience. It would be very difficult for us to increase enrollment, have an increase in net revenue and hold the student experience constant.”

Ben Heavner grad asked about the specific effects of increasing student enrollment on class size and teaching load. Murphy insisted that even if enrollment increased, a certain number of seminar-sized classes would remain.

“There is a value in seminar sized classes and [we would] keep a certain number of those [especially] in language, arts, music and lab instruction,” she said. “But whether Jim Maas is teaching 1,000 or 1,300 probably does not affect the experience in Bailey Hall all that much.”

Additionally, Murphy commented on the task members’ consideration of financial aid in the event of increased enrollment. “In our planning, we took the same changes that occurred in 2008 to financial aid and that was assumed to continue, but on a bigger basis of people.”

The task force accounted for what would be the increased monetary need for financial aid. “If we needed to net 20 million, we assumed that we would have to gross 30 million — and while some of that difference is additional staffing and student services — most of it is extra financial aid,” Murphy said.

Harris emphasized the importance of maintaining financial aid and other amenities like guaranteed housing for freshman, transfers and sophomores. “There is a way to increase revenue without cutting faculty, dining or other services and that is by cutting financial aid. But we don’t think that is what Cornell is about.”

Not only could increasing enrollment negatively impact Cornell students’ experience, such a strategy could also severely damage Cornell’s ratings, according to Harris.

“On the rankings there is nothing we could see positive,” Harris said “It will make us less selective, maybe our financial ratios would go up, class size goes in a negative direction … Overall, everything is negative or neutral.”

Although the task force ultimately concluded that they could increase enrollment and have enough net revenue to meet their goal, they decided that there are other things that ought to be done first before implementation because of its possible averse consequences. These include finding the savings administratively or through other ideas.

Jolene Scaglione, program analyst specialist, echoed the task force’s plan to exhaust all other options before increasing enrollment. “I agree with their strategy of waiting to see if all measures are considered first before cutting enrollment.”

According to Murphy though, “If the only alternative is to stop hiring faculty, which would also have a large impact on student experience, research and core of the University, then we would consider [increasing enrollment].”

In addition to the informal and formal discussions mentioned, summaries of the 20 reports are available electronically, and the full reports are available for review in the Dean of Faculty office at Day Hall.