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Univ. Of Tampa Reverts To Hotel Living, Temporarily

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By ADAM EMERSON

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 23, 2008

TAMPA - Alex Guerra discovered a surprising fact of student life this month at what has been one of the region's fastest-growing colleges.

Eager to experience on-campus living at the University of Tampa, the freshman from New York learned that her first home away from home would be the Howard Johnson hotel at Ashley Plaza.

"I was kind of disappointed," Guerra said. "I wanted the campus life experience."

She joined 43 of her UT schoolmates who were initially squeezed out of dorm life at a university that continues to grow without a blueprint for new residence halls.

The university's plan now will focus on how to manage an enrollment that its leaders anticipate will reach 6,000 by 2010, growing by nearly 4 percent from its current count of 5,790.

Although it doesn't plan to shed its residential college image, UT may recruit more graduate and transfer students who don't all need campus housing, said Barbara Strickler, UT's vice president for enrollment.

The private university also had hoped to partner with potential housing developments nearby, but the dismal real estate market has kept that from happening.

"We'll probably always have a little overflow," Strickler said. "We're thinking we'll be OK. We're not in a housing crisis."

Hotel living for UT students is nothing new - just two years ago, 200 students spent a semester at the Hyatt Regency downtown - but the university was able to accommodate everyone on campus last year, thanks to a new residence hall.

Guerra and the others who stayed at the Howard Johnson have since moved in to on-campus dorms that opened up when some who were admitted didn't come or moved out. Although Guerra says she met someone who became her best friend living in the hotel, she was happy to move out.

Additional campus living has sprouted over the past few years. The last residence hall to open was the $45 million Stadium Center off North Boulevard in 2007. The year before, UT opened an 11-story residence hall on West Kennedy Boulevard.

Neither has been enough to stop the overflow.

The university's enrollment has nearly doubled over the past decade, and sometimes increased at a pace of 10 percent and 11 percent each year for several years.

Growth slowed this year to 3.4 percent from last year, but UT's share of transfer students increased 15 percent.

The number of applications for this fall grew 15 percent from the year before, but to contain its growth, the university became more selective, admitting just 49 percent of its applicants, the same as the previous year.

Its student-to-faculty ratio remains 15 to 1, compared with an average 31 to 1 at Florida's 11 public universities.

UT can't be too selective, however. Most of its revenue comes from paying students. Tuition, fees and room and board at the private university total nearly $30,000 a year.

As other private universities in Florida have done, UT made more trips to local community colleges to recruit students who had a harder time transferring to a public university. The University of South Florida, for one, raised the admissions bar higher for two-year college students seeking entry, mostly to control its growth in a souring economy.

Among the transfer students, UT received a larger share from Florida's community colleges than it had in the past.

Although that share may increase in the future, Strickler said the school will not become a commuter campus. Getting everyone into dorms was "challenging," she said, but she added students were out of the hotel in a few weeks. In years past, students spent entire semesters living at a Holiday Inn or Hyatt.

Some didn't find hotel living that bad. All students lived on one floor, and Leah Abramson, a freshman from Wisconsin, said everyone became close in a matter of days.

"It wasn't a bad thing at all," Abramson said.

BY THE NUMBERS

5,790

Total number of students enrolled this fall at the University of Tampa

3,028

Total number of students enrolled 10 years ago at UT

43

Number of students living at the Howard Johnson Ashley Plaza Hotel in the first few weeks of the fall semester

15

Percent growth in number of full-time transfer students this fall, which compares with a

5.2 percent decline from 2006 to 2007

Source: University of Tampa

Reporter Adam Emerson can be reached at (813) 259-8285 or aemerson@tampatrib.com.

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