Spanier: No Enrollment Growth Planned for Penn State University Park

Penn State enrollment at University Park was nearly 39,600 when university President Graham Spanier took office in 1995, official data show.

That figure, officially, is now 45,194, having ticked up steadily, according to the Penn State website.

But the university has no plans to grow University Park enrollment any more, Spanier said Friday.

Delivering an annual talk before the Chamber of Business and Industry of Centre County, Spanier suggested a bigger student population could overburden the local infrastructure. The local community ‘can’t and shouldn’t’ expect to handle more students, he said.

‘The number is higher than it’s ever been, and we do not want to get any bigger,’ Spanier said. ‘ … We’re at a point where just looking at the buses — they’re backed up on campus.’

And that’s not even to mention the passenger-car drivers trying to navigate around the buses, Spanier added.

‘We’re as big and complicated as a university should be,’ he said. ‘We do not expect to be’ any bigger in enrollment at University Park.

Next year’s freshman-enrollment target at the campus is 7,200 — about on par with the fall 2011 freshman enrollment, Spanier said.

The CBICC event was a regular lunch gathering geared toward chamber members. Among Spanier’s other remarks there:

• A number of downtown-State College business leaders have encouraged Penn State to open a branch of the Berkey Creamery in the downtown. But the university has not agreed to that, Spanier said. He said the university does not want to be seen as competing with commercial entities. ‘What we don’t want to do is to get in competition with the private sector,’ he said, though he invited feedback from business leaders on the downtown-Creamery concept.

• Penn State doesn’t have a specific plan for the properties it’s been acquiring lately along the West College Avenue corridor, largely in Ferguson Township, Spanier said. The university knows that it will have long-term needs in that area of the Centre Region, but has yet to establish construction plans, he said. In fact, Penn State ‘could go out and build 50 more buildings’ right now — because it has uses for them — but the university just does not ‘have the money’ for that at the moment, Spanier said. Rather, in the immediate future, the university will focus its capital dollars more on the improvement of existing facilities, he said.

• The single biggest challenge facing Penn State, Spanier said, may be the excessive consumption of alcohol. He referenced some efforts the university has undertaken in attempts to curb the problem. Some of those appear to be making an impact, Spanier said.