Rhode Island College, one of the most affordable schools in the state, has managed to increase its freshman class, while some others cope with a decline in enrollment.

The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

In an especially tough year for admissions, about half the colleges and universities in Rhode Island have failed to fill their freshman classes, a sign of the recession, say higher education officials.

Two institutions — Rhode Island College and Roger Williams University — expanded their incoming classes this fall by taking dramatic steps to widen their applicant pool and attract students.

“Unpredictable and emotional. Those are the two best words to describe this year,” said Christopher Lydon, Providence College’s dean of admission. “The level of unpredictability is what made the year so tense. So many families made their decisions late this year. And for people in our financial aid office, it’s emotional and draining, hearing families’ stories and trying to help them.”

Colleges and universities with smaller incoming classes say they will simply make do for the year, spreading already thin resources and dipping into endowments to keep operations in the black. A drop of even a couple dozen students can represent a significant loss to institutions that rely on student tuition and fees.

Admissions officials called this year one of the most volatile they remember, as families struggled with the worsening economy, their own unstable or diminished resources and the escalating costs of college. This year, tuition and fees, room and board at Rhode Island’s colleges and universities range from $15,000 a year at the public Rhode Island College to $50,000 a year at Ivy League Brown University.

This spring, many students weighed their options up to the last moment, sometimes sending deposits after the May 1 deadline, which made it difficult for colleges and universities to plan.

Colleges and universities took extraordinary measures this year to attract students, pumping millions more into financial aid, having professors personally call students to recruit them and expanding summer visits for admitted students in the hope they would want to come once they set foot on campus.

While these efforts helped, they were not always enough to reach enrollment goals.

As predicted by admissions officials, Bryant University, University of Rhode Island, Salve Regina and Providence College are welcoming slightly smaller freshman classes for the 2009-2010 academic year, although at URI and Salve, an increase in transfer students has helped balance out the drop in first-year students.

Bryant’s goal was 800 freshmen, but the incoming class is 760, said Lorna Hunger, vice president for enrollment management. “It was a very challenging economic environment,” Hunter said. “But we made a decision we would not compromise our academic standards.”

URI’s freshman class is about 3,100, 50 to 100 students fewer than admissions staff were hoping for. But an increase of 75 transfer students, up to about 575 this year, helped cushion that drop, said Provost Donald DeHayes.

Salve, a small Catholic college in Newport, will welcome a freshman class of 510 students, or 10 to 15 students below target. But 40 transfer students — about 15 more than the college anticipated back in June — will help make up for that loss, said Laura McPhie Oliveira, vice president for enrollment.

Providence College, another small Catholic college, will dip into the school’s resources to make up for a drop of about 30 students, Lydon said.

Johnson & Wales University said in June its admissions office planned to accept 200 fewer students this fall — 100 fewer on the Providence campus — as part of an effort to make its incoming class more competitive. Officials there say they won’t know until next week whether they achieved that goal.

Meanwhile, RIC and Roger Williams managed to increase their freshman classes because of significant changes in their admissions processes. Roger Williams, a private institution in Bristol, lowered its average SAT score by 9 points and increased financial aid by $3 million.

“We have surpassed all our targets,” said Lynn Fawthrop, RWU’s senior vice president for enrollment. “Our goal was an entering class of about 1,100. We are up about 56 students, so we are about 30 students over where we thought we’d be.”

RIC — one of the most affordable colleges in Rhode Island — has about 457 more freshman and transfer students than it did last year, and more of the college’s 9,200 students are taking more credits, straining the public college’s resources, said Ron Pitt, vice president for academic affairs. Because of a lack of jobs, more students are choosing to attend college full-time, he said.

“Our full-time-equivalent students went up 6.4 percent over last year, so with more students and more students taking more credits, it’s like 400 more undergraduates,” Pitt said. “That’s huge. We have a lot more teaching to do.”

RIC hired 10 new faculty after many veteran professors took an early retirement package last year and also hired several part-time instructors to handle the surge in enrollment, Pitt said. The college is offering about 20 extra sections of popular freshman courses.

In an effort to attract more out-of-state students, who pay more than in-state students, RIC expanded its “metropolitan area” from a radius of 20 miles to a radius of 50 miles around the Providence campus, adding more than 200 communities in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Students who live in these areas pay a “metropolitan” tuition and fee rate that is 1.5 times the in-state rate, or $2,600 more a year, while significantly less — $8,500 — than the out-of-state cost.

“We gained about 256 new metropolitan area students,” Pitt said. But students who live farther away need housing, and the 367 beds in RIC’s new dormitory are already filled.

“We need to build another residence hall and we need another parking lot,” Pitt said. “It’s very difficult to manage this size of an enrollment because at a state institution, tuition and fees do not cover the whole cost of instruction. That is the whole point of public institutions — the citizens of the state help support the college.”

But RIC’s growth is happening just as the state is cutting its support for the college. This year, the state trimmed $2.5 million from RIC’s budget. Over the past three years, the cuts have totaled $4.4 million.

The Community College of Rhode Island, which often expands during economic downturns, is holding steady at 16,863 students, and the college expects more students to enroll this week. Even so, college officials are estimating that enrollment figures will only be slightly higher than last year. In addition, about 2,800 students who wanted to take classes were dropped because they didn’t make payment deadlines.

Perhaps most telling, more CCRI students are applying for financial aid. As many students applied for loans and grants during the first six months of 2009 as for the entire years of 2007 and 2008 combined, said CCRI spokeswoman Kristen Cyr.

Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, two highly competitive institutions, had no problem filing all their seats, but even those schools were compelled to increase financial aid in response to greater need by students and parents.

As for total undergraduate enrollments, colleges and universities do not have final numbers available until after Oct. 1.The class of 2013

Many R.I. colleges and universities have struggled to fill their freshman classes this year in the face of economic hardships facing families.

jjordan@projo.com