Following a shortfall in student fees at Wichita State for fiscal year 2026, which was due in part to a decrease in enrollment, the monthly meeting of the Kansas Board of Regents — the body that oversees higher education in the state — revealed that lower enrollment is a trend across Kansas.
While WSU reported record-high enrollment in the fall semester of 2024, KBOR reported a 3.9% decrease in headcount and a 6.7% decrease in full-time equivalent across public universities statewide since 2014.
However, headcount and FTE across public universities statewide did increase by around 1.5% from 2023 to 2024.
Headcount includes the total number of people enrolled at a university. This includes full-time, part-time, Lifelong Learning and high school students taking college credit.
The University of San Diego described FTE as “a calculation showing how many students would be attending if all were enrolled full time.” This means full-time students are treated as one enrolled student, and part-time students are fractions of a full-time student based on the enrolled hours of the part-time student.
A large deficit in student headcount comes from international students. From 2021 to 2022, there was a 4,000 student decrease from international students alone in public universities statewide. In a Fiscal Affairs and Audit meeting earlier that day, Senior Vice President for Administration, Finances and Operations at WSU David Miller said Wichita State held a survey with the international students who enrolled in spring but did not come back for the fall.
“For the international students that were admitted to WSU, that ultimately did not enroll — what we found was that for 50% of those students, they were denied visas to be able to come,” Miller said.
The future of international students’ enrollment is unclear. WSU did not share a plan to increase international enrollment in the monthly meeting or the fiscal affairs meeting, but Miller said international students’ impact on schools both socially and fiscally is important to WSU.
“International students are a really important fabric for Wichita State and they always have been,” Miller said. “And from just purely a financial standpoint, the international students are also very important to our bottom line because they traditionally pay the higher tuition rates.”
The full 2025 enrollment report is available here.
The regents will meet again on April 16 at Pittsburg State University. Agendas and previous meeting minutes are available on the KBOR website.
