Kutztown U. Meeting a Growing Need
By Genevieve Marshall, The Morning Call, Allentown, Pa.
Jan. 14–KUTZTOWN students (from left) senior Missy Coleman, junior Allie Cavallaro, and junior Aaron Smyk say the school’s new Academic Forum building diminishes the effectiveness of small classes.
Kathleen Cook
Special to
The Morning Call
The newest classrooms at Kutztown University have wireless Internet access, two digital projectors, three lectern locations for professors and a station that controls all the lighting and technology in the stadium-style rooms.
The seats in each room rock back and forth, as if the classrooms were movie theaters instead of a place to take notes and listen to lectures.
The $17 million Academic Forum building, which opens for classes this month, is the latest addition to the 326-acre Berks County campus. It’s also part of a building boom at Kutztown fueled by a period of explosive growth in enrollment and a desire to compete with what private schools are offering students.
Kutztown’s building spree corresponds with the same level of unprecedented construction at the 14 state-owned universities.
Six state universities are in the midst of building new residence halls — three are tearing down and rebuilding all of their residence halls. Four universities are planning or have recently completed new science and technology centers, including Kutztown.
“Students are becoming increasingly savvy and particular about what they want in a university,” Kutztown Provost Carlos Vargas said. “They want to go to a place where they see these fancy facilities, even if it is not an Ivy League school.”
In August, Kutztown opened a new recreation center for $14 million. School officials say that suite- and apartment-style residence halls with only a few bedrooms arranged around a common living area are what students want. In December, Kutztown broke ground on yet another modern residence hall, a project that is expected to cost $62 million by the time it’s ready for students to live there in 2008. A new $9 million central heating plant will be completed in May, and a major renovation and 30,000-square-foot expansion of the Sharidan Art Center will begin in March.
“There is a significant amount of new construction and major renovations on most of our campuses,” said Kenn Marshall, spokesman for the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. “We have a lot more students, but we also have to meet the needs of those students and their expectations.”
Enrollment at state universities increased by more than 15,000 in the past decade, with Kutztown gaining more students than any of the other schools. Kutztown’s undergraduate and graduate programs increased by 30 percent from 7,843 in 1996 to a record 10,193 students in the fall of 2006.
A boom in the number of students graduating from high school in eastern Pennsylvania was a major factor for the increase in enrollment at Kutztown and at East Stroudsburg University, which added almost 1,500 students in the past decade.
Kutztown’s location in rural Berks County has allowed it to expand and accommodate the number of recent high school graduates, which has gone up every year since 1995 in Pennsylvania. Demographic growth has been concentrated mostly in the eastern part of the state.
Much like the areas feeding into Kutztown, East Stroudsburg can at least partly thank a 30 percent increase in enrollment since 1999 — from 5,600 students then to 7,300 this past fall semester — to Monroe and Pike counties, Pennsylvania’s fastest-growing counties.
East Stroudsburg is in the midst of building a $30 million science and technology center. An $18 million private residence hall with 541 beds was completed at the state-owned school in August 2005. And a renovation that will turn an old dormitory into classrooms and faculty offices is in the planning phase, said Bill Pearson, assistant director of facilities management at East Stroudsburg.
Schools in other parts of the state grew as well, but often because of their distance-learning programs..
Because West Chester University, just west of Philadelphia, is virtually landlocked, it has maxed out with about 12,900 students — still a 14 percent increase over the fall of 1996, Marshall said. Kutztown and East Stroudsburg universities have therefore been the biggest beneficiaries of the influx of new Pennsylvania residents from New York and New Jersey.
Absorbing the area’s growth
As a regional university, Kutztown’s mission is to draw from Berks County and the Lehigh Valley, President Javier Cevallos said. More than half of Kutztown’s students are from Berks and Lehigh counties.
“The region is experiencing growth, so we are experiencing growth,” Cevallos said. “We will start leveling off in a couple of years and then it will decline slowly.”
Much of the construction under way was planned in response to rapid growth in the late 1990s. Kutztown’s projections show the number of students starting to decline after 2016.
“We’re just beginning to catch up with our enrollment,” Cevallos said. “Everything we are building now is to accommodate the students we already have.”
The newest residence hall will be the largest to date on campus — 258,000 square feet, with beds for 857 residents. The hall is laid out in a junior-suite style, with two single bedrooms or two double bedrooms sharing a bathroom, and is designed for first- and second-year students.
The as-yet unnamed residence hall is a far cry from old-fashioned dorms with long hallways of doubles with shared bathrooms. “That’s just not what students are willing to accept these days,” said provost Vargas. “It’s very important to have brand-new and remodeled facilities.”
The American School & University magazine reports that nearly three out of four colleges and universities expect to complete a construction project within the next two years.
Private schools began focusing on building new places for students to eat, sleep and play in the late 1990s. Deluxe fitness facilities, bright and airy dining halls and luxurious residences were seen as the best way to attract students.
Now, public schools are catching up.
“Building state-of-the-art facilities is a matter of staying competitive,” Vargas said.
One of the ways Kutztown has tried to keep pace with private colleges is by upgrading its buildings with the latest technology. The classrooms in the Academic Forum have “smart boards,” multiple projectors and lecterns, and wireless capability.
Concerns about class size
No one has complained about the amenities so far, although the large size of the rooms in the Academic Forum — all seven are the same size and the capacity to seat 85 to 200 students — is a concern to some faculty members and students.
Kevin Mahoney, an assistant professor in the English Department, worries that a state-owned school known for individual attention is moving toward bigger class sizes and anonymity.
“One of the reasons I came here and turned down other job offers is because Kutztown didn’t have the large, impersonal classes I experienced elsewhere,” Mahoney said. “When you have 50 or more students in a class, it’s less likely that you will get to know each student personally or have the office hours to meet with everyone.”
Vargas said the number of classes that have been consolidated for the spring semester and moved into the large classrooms represent 3 percent of all courses offered at Kutztown. Of the 2,200 sections taught in the spring, 70 will be taught in the Academic Forum.
“This is one building,” Vargas said. “It’s not a trend. We’re not planning on building any more like it. We needed some large classrooms years ago, and now we have them.”
But some instructors say the new building is already having a noticeable effect: The history department will no longer give essay questions on final exams to students in the larger lecture hall classes. The department recently purchased a machine to grade test answers on Scantron sheets, the so-called bubble sheets, Mahoney said. Finals will consist of multiple-choice questions instead of hand-written essays because instructors will not have the time to read 200 “blue books,” he said.
A forum in November organized by The Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties, which represents the faculties of the 14 state-owned universities, warned students the new building will limit their ability to enroll in small classes.
“Classes were consolidated to make bigger classes so they could use this building,” said Mahoney, a Kutztown delegate to the faculty union. “It is more work for the faculty member teaching the class and less beneficial to the students in the class. There are no winners.”
In response to the forum, students have taken up the cause. Aaron Smyk, a junior from Douglassville, said several of his professors were outspoken about the impact that larger classes could have on his education.
Smyk and two other Kutztown students created an online “anti-Academic Forum” petition on Facebook that cites the potential downside of large class sizes. “In my mind, this building represents a movement toward bigger classes and a larger teacher-student ratio,” Smyk said. “It’s eating away at my access to professors.”
But Kutztown president Cevallos said classes with 50 or more students are acceptable for the 19 introductory level courses that will be taught in the Academic Forum. The new building will give the university more flexibility in scheduling, and more professors the chance to teach higher-level courses, he said.
Cevallos and other administrators believe that their schools are drawing more applicants than ever because the state universities are a good value.
Tuition for full-time undergraduate residents at the 14 state-owned universities is $5,038 this year. Full-priced tuition and fees at the Lehigh Valley’s private schools range from $26,775 at Moravian College in Bethlehem to $33,770 at Lehigh University in Bethlehem.
genevieve.marshall@mcall.com
610-820-6585
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Morning Call, Allentown, Pa.
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