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The competition for college students is only going to get tougher in the years ahead.

Troy University Senior Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs Dr. Kerry Palmer said the academic landscape had changed in the 21st Century and the university was developing options to meet the needs of today’s college students as well as the needs of future students.

Palmer said the challenge higher education is facing is two fold. He said after the Great Recession (2007-2009), for whatever reason, parents began having fewer children, which means fewer high school graduates each year.

Palmer said the “enrollment cliff” is coming and there is no way to avoid it. According to the Chronicle on Higher Education, the United States will reach a peak of about 3.5 million high school graduates sometime around 2025. After that, the number of graduates are expected to decrease by as much as 15 percent for the next five years to a decade.

At the same time colleges are facing a decline in potential college recruits, Palmer said states and industries are pushing hard for workforce development in high schools. As a result, many students graduate high school and go straight into the workforce, foregoing college all together.

“College is not the rite of passage that it used to be,” Palmer said. “If we align our programs properly, they will lead to high-paying jobs with a four-year degree. But, we don’t want to do that at the expense of the collegiate experience and the arts.”

Palmer said Troy University had been reclassified as a Doctoral University, which is a Carnegie classification which “includes institutions that awarded at least 20 research/scholarship doctoral degrees during the update year and also institutions with below 20 research/scholarship doctoral degrees that awarded at least 30 professional practice doctoral degrees in at least 2 programs.”

Palmer said the Doctoral University classification would also allow the university to expand its doctoral program offerings as well as work towards an R2 Doctoral University classification, which indicates the university has a high level of research activity.

Palmer said the university’s new Center for Materials Manufacturing was developed as a research facility for plastics. Palmer said the new facility would play an important role in reaching the R2 classification. However, Palmer said reaching the R2 goal was still something that would take five to seven years to accomplish.

Palmer said instead of focusing solely on the R2 goal, a plan had been developed to help position the university to be competitive in student recruitment in the face of the proverbial ‘enrollment cliff.’ He said the plan would place an emphasis on new programs that would hopefully be attractive to potential students.

Palmer said engineering programs could lead to high paying jobs for graduates. However, he said Troy couldn’t compete with well established engineering programs at nearby Auburn, Alabama and Georgia Tech. He said the university was looking at niche programs that weren’t covered by other universities in areas where Troy University already had academic strengths.

Palmer said the university was looking at biomedical engineering because the university had a well established nursing program. He said Dothan is a growing area with a high number of junior college graduates with associate degrees in the medical field. He said that was also an area where a biomedical engineering program could be attractive to graduates wishing to further their education.

Palmer said there were also three academic programs the university was developing that had been internally branded as an ‘academic renaissance.’ He said the programs would be new offerings that filled a void in traditional programs.

The first program – a Global Studies Honors Program – already had its elements in place at the university, and Palmer said plans were underway to officially formalize the program. Palmer said this program would be wrapped in with a student’s general studies programs and a study abroad course and a research course would be required elements of the program. He said because the program would be part of the student’s general studies, it would have no impact on what the student could major in at Troy University.

“I think this is a program that will be attractive to students and has the potential to become a full-fledged college,” Palmer said.

Palmer said the university was also working on an AI Forward program. Palmer said the university wanted to take an aggressive approach to emerging AI technology and put it in the classroom. “We want to embed AI into the classroom and teach students how to use it the right way,” Palmer said.

The final component to the plan would be the development of a Teaching Excellence Center. Palmer said Alabama already had good teachers, but the idea behind the Teaching Excellence Center was to create a program that educated teachers on the most effective teaching methods.

“What we want to do is to attract new students by meeting the [academic] needs of the region,” Palmer said. “Then, we want to be able to keep them in the region after they graduate.”