It's time to make some educated projections about how many students we will have

I’ve talked about envisioning the future several times as I’ve blogged about the creation of Huntsman Hall, our new building. It’s one thing to talk, in general terms, about our upward trajectory, but it’s another when we have to start thinking about actual numbers. One of the things we have had to do in this process is project how many full-time students we think will be here by the year 2025.

Ken Snyder

Our architects, who have experience in this sort of thing, say that it’s not realistic to try to project the needs of a business school 50 years into the future. There are too many changing variables and who knows what technology, education or even the typical student will be like 50 years from now. Our architects have learned, however, that projecting needs about 15 years out makes better sense, so that’s why we picked 2025.

At last count we have 1,523 full-time-equivalents on campus. (No one has ever seen a full-time-equivalent even though we are always counting them. That’s a way we have of measuring how many students we have because some students go part-time and we may combine two of those part-timers and count them as one full-time-equivalent. They are people but sometimes they are composite people. Try not to think about it and just trust me.) Based on Utah State University’s growth estimates and our own enrollment trends, we believe that we’ll have about 2,371 full-time-equivalent students on campus in the year 2025. We consider this to be a semi-conservative estimate because it’s based on assumptions that we won’t continue to grow as fast as we have the last five years.

That’s the easy part. Each department head and program leader is tasked with figuring out not just how many students will be entering their areas in the next few years but how many professors we’ll need to teach them. We need to calculate what the demand for classrooms will be and what kind of technological advances we may need to accommodate. Each of the program areas need to figure out just what kind of space and staff it will need to deal with in their programs.

We need to come up with the best projections we can about what our needs will be 15 years from now. We won’t know for sure how we did until the year 2025, but the good news is that, at least initially, when we move in we should be a pretty comfortable fit in Huntsman Hall and there should still be plenty of room to grow.

- Ken Snyder