Some Philly colleges are overflowing into hotels, while others lack enough students to pay the bills

Jaime Suero wrote that he was a flexible person when he applied to be a resident adviser at Widener University. That’s how he came to be the RA on the third floor of the Best Western.

Widener had its largest freshman class in history last year, at 892, and beat that record this year by 20 students. The all-out effort to retain students there has proven so successful that the on-campus dorms cannot house all of them. Instead, 80 returning students, including Suero, are living at the Best Western Plus on the edge of the Chester campus, next to the bookstore and across from an Uno Pizzeria.

Widener isn’t the only school with a housing shortage: Holy Family University, a small Catholic school in Northeast Philadelphia, and Delaware Valley University in Doylestown also are housing some students in hotels this year.

After years of declining student populations, consolidation, and closures, some Philly-area colleges are reporting gains — albeit unofficial until after the add/drop period — in overall and first-year enrollment, according to an Inquirer survey of about two dozen schools. Among schools surveyed with more than a 50% acceptance rate, Rowan and Eastern both stand out for their expanding student body, with overall enrollment increasing by 7.4% and 20%, respectively.

Overall enrollment at Widener is up, too, by about 2%. Suero, a junior studying early childhood education, said his friends who still live on campus believe he got the better deal. His room came with a TV, a microwave, and a king-size bed. (Before students moved in, Widener hired an outside cleaning company and purchased new mattresses, the school said.) In another hotel-room-turned-dorm down the hall, Widener replaced the standard-issue beds with twin XLs.

For schools, if not for parents and students, the problem of overflowing dorms is a good one. It’s a bright spot in a grimmer picture.

In most schools nationwide, excluding the highly selective ones, enrollment is down, budgets are tight, and a long-feared enrollment cliff is finally arriving, when the number of students graduating from high school will be lower than in years past. Coupled with the aftermath of the pandemic and a botched federal student aid rollout last year, schools across the country are struggling to fill seats and fund classes, said Angel Pérez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. The implications are bigger than the sustainability of any one institution.

“This is about the future of a nation,” said Pérez. “The future of the economy, the future of the tax base, the future of civic engagement — all the things we know higher education gives students access to.”

In the 10 years between 2012 and 2022, fewer students overall enrolled in college in Pennsylvania, declining from fall enrollments of nearly 800,000 in 2012 to just over 645,000 in 2022.

So far locally, overall enrollment at Gwynedd Mercy is slightly down this year, as it is at Temple University, La Salle University, and Rosemont College. All but Rosemont, though, saw large increases in the number of first-year students who enrolled.

Temple’s first-year enrollment rose nearly 30% to 4,926 students and, notably, among that boost is a 71% uptick in Black students, raising the number to 1,456. That’s a 605-student increase from last year. Temple, one of four state-related universities in Pennsylvania, in recent years had faced criticism for enrolling smaller percentages of Black students.

Overall, Temple’s enrollment just cleared 30,000, which is down by 1.7% from last year. University officials are heartened that the dip is much lower than last year, when enrollment had dropped by 9.2%. Still, Temple’s enrollment has fallen dramatically from its all-time high of 40,240 in fall 2017.

More than a half-dozen schools, including Chestnut Hill College, Arcadia University, and Drexel University, which will start classes Monday, declined to answer The Inquirer’s questions about enrollment.

Nationwide, roughly one million high school seniors who would have otherwise attended college were “lost” because of the pandemic, said Pérez. He estimated that an additional 500,000 students may be lost this year because of the FAFSA debacle, during which technical glitches prevented hundreds of thousands of students from being able to access the federal aid system for months. Some gave up, saying they would try again next year — an aspiration that many will not follow through on, Pérez said.

There are some standout successes, though. Rowan, which is the third-fastest-growing public doctoral university in the country, reported a whopping 50% increase in its first-year class, which exceeds 3,500 students. Overall, the university’s enrollment this fall stands at 19,609, up 7.4% over last year.

“We’re at 97% housing capacity,” said Joe Cardona, a university spokesperson. “It’s a big bounce back from what we have seen since the pandemic.”

Other triumphant schools included St. Joseph’s, which merged with Pennsylvania College of Health Sciences in January, and saw a nearly 20% increase in overall enrollment this year. Moore College of Art and Design, a tiny school with just 396 students last year, saw fall enrollment increase by nearly 40%, partly because it is absorbing more than 100 University of the Arts students.

When it comes to the job market, degrees are in demand.

“Jobs that require college-level education continue to be growing,” said Hironao Okahana of the American Council on Education. He said that even while traditional college-age students — 18 to 22 — might be tapering off, the number of people who are older and do not have degrees is large, a potential market for schools.

At Widener, freshmen increased 67% last year, which university officials largely attributed to Widener’s remake of its on-campus experiences for prospective students, an expansion in recruitment areas, and president Stacey M. Robertson’s emphasis on making students feel comfortable and at home. She invites all freshmen to her house for dinner over the course of multiple nights at the beginning of the semester.

This year, the university also cited recruitment success in Philadelphia, noting a 51% uptick in undergraduate applications from the city.

“We are grateful the Best Western, at the edge of campus and above the university bookstore, made it possible for us to extend housing to everyone who wanted it,” a spokesperson said.