Booming UNL enrollment creates squeeze
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BY MELISSA LEE / Lincoln Journal Star
New students are flocking to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in numbers not seen in a quarter-century, an enrollment trend universally cheered by UNL leaders.
Among the stresses, though, brought on by more bodies: fewer and fewer places to put them.
UNL already has announced plans for a new residence hall that will open in 2010 and alleviate a severe housing squeeze, a project to be paid for by student fees and revenue bonds repaid by room and board fees.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has only six classrooms that seat 200 or more students, a number it would like to increase with a new undergraduate academic facility. The new building could house multiple large lecture halls. Total breakdown of UNL’s 137 general-purpose classrooms, by capacity:
Up to 50 students: 100
50-99 students: 17
100-149: 8
150-199: 6
200-250: 5
250+: 1
Source: UNL Institutional Research and Planning
And now UNL is dreaming of another project to manage its space crunch: A state-of-the-art undergraduate academic building with classroom space for hundreds of students that Chancellor Harvey Perlman says would streamline and improve teaching.
The building is among a handful of high-priority construction projects for which NU will seek state funding in the upcoming legislative session, the NU Board of Regents learned this month.
Whether lawmakers will actually grant the funds — data presented to regents show the project is estimated to cost $40.5 million — is a big if, Perlman acknowledged Friday.
“The Legislature hasn’t been in a position to fund physical facilities for a number of years, so my expectations are not high,” he said. “But yes, if asked, this would be a priority for us.”
Need for more desks is urgent, Perlman said. Last fall’s freshman class was UNL’s largest since 1982, and enrollment looks to rise again this year.
And about two years ago, a consultant found UNL was in serious need of more classroom space, particularly large lecture halls often are used for freshman- and sophomore-level classes.
According to the consultant, UNL would benefit from a facility with the following classrooms: one 400-person hall, two 300-person halls and four 100-person halls, said Bill Nunez, director of Institutional Research and Planning.
UNL now has only one hall that seats more than 250 students, and only a handful more seat more than 200.
That often forces faculty to teach the same class two or three times in a row, Perlman said.
A 300- to 400-person hall would allow the faculty member to teach the class just once, freeing up time for a wider variety of course offerings or more one-on-one time with students, he said.
“We could do a more efficient job of teaching undergraduates — without reducing the quality of instruction — by having larger rooms,” he said. “That would allow us to do more teaching and better teaching.”
In addition to large lecture halls, the new academic facility could feature modern teaching technology, computer labs, a student advising center and even a small coffee shop or places for students to gather or meet with faculty, Nunez said.
Its location — and even whether it would be one building or two — remains undecided. Space north of the Kauffman Academic Residential Center or north of Love Library offer possibilities for growth, Perlman said.
Nebraska Innovation Park, the university research campus planned at State Fair Park, would not be an appropriate home for core undergraduate facilities, he said. That space will be used for high-level research and development.
So UNL will keep hoping for funds to come through so it can relieve its current classroom crowding.
“Yesterday would be my timeline,” Perlman said. “But that’s not realistic.”
Reach Melissa Lee at 473-2682 or mlee@journalstar.com.
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That means you need enough office space to support enough staff to recruit, admit, support, house, financially administer, and maintain data for these 90 students as well as human relations office space to support the instructors (and to give the instructors space to prepare for class, assuming they do nothing but teach).
So once you sit down and work through these kinds of calculations you become aware that it takes a great deal of office space to support even one classroom - and that's without any kind of research mission! "
The point of many of these large lectures is to point you in the right direction and to overview the material for further examination through the aforementioned mediums. Once people get into their upper-level major courses where real one on one, back and forth conversation style learning in the classroom with the professor is beneficial, the numbers are incredibly impressive, in terms of student:teacher ratio. "