For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, Western Washington University has announced an increase in total enrollment, wavering at 14,700 students as of Oct. 7., 2024.
In fall 2020, Western felt a strain on its budget, with a loss of nearly 800 students in 2019 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. About half of the university budget comes from tuition, said university President Sabah Randhawa.
An October announcement from the university highlighted a string of large incoming classes, backed by the university’s largest first-year class in 2022, second-largest first-year class in 2023 and sixth-largest incoming class in fall 2024 with 3,019 first-year students.
A big challenge for the university is adjusting to the new student body’s diversifying choice of majors, Randhawa said.
“What happens, is not so much an issue at the global level, but an issue more at the major level, [where] faculty are typically tenured, so you can’t just move a history professor to teach computer science. That takes time, and so how do you accommodate that change?” Randhawa said.
In anticipating budget cuts, Randhawa said the university put temporary measures in place over the past few years on hiring, among other things. These limits exacerbate the challenge of matching faculty with new student academic needs.
Despite fall 2024 seeing a high enrollment, the university feels confident in housing its students; the on-campus residence halls can comfortably fit 4000 students, according to Melynda Huskey, the vice president for Enrollment and Student Services. Shelli Soto is the associate vice president for Enrollment Management at Western. Due in part to the strong first-year class numbers, Soto and the university expected to see an uptick in total enrollment.
“Our new cohorts coming in more than made up for where we had been pre-pandemic. So, it was just a matter of time letting those two years worth of smaller pandemic cohorts cycle through,” Soto said.
Stan Sloboda is a first-year student at Western, who has two years of experience working at an Italian restaurant in his hometown of Tacoma. After moving to Bellingham, one of his goals was to find a new job.
After half a dozen Bellingham businesses rejected Sloboda’s applications, he suspected the job market had become tight on openings already filled by students.
“It’s really hard to find a job up here,” said Sloboda. “I feel like there’s a disproportionate amount of younger people with a lot of time on their hands who aren’t in professional capacities.”
The Bellingham job market can get even tighter post-graduation, as higher numbers of undergraduates like Slobada enroll and earn their degrees.
As of September 2024, the proportion of young adults working in underemployed positions — ones that do not fully utilize their skills or qualifications — lies at 40%, as reported by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Amid the university announcing budget cuts and elimination of divisions, partially due to Western having the lowest state funding on a per-student basis, Randhawa and the university stress they intend to avoid negatively impacting the swaths of students arriving on campus, as well as current ones.
“Our goal still is to protect the academic side as best as we can,” Randhawa said. “But at the end of the day, it's hard not to have an impact.”
Austin Wright (he/him) is a campus news reporter for The Front this quarter. He is a third-year journalism/news ed major. When he’s not reporting, you can find him playing ultimate frisbee, watching soccer or hiking. You can reach him at austinwright.thefront@gmail.com.
