Trey Berry
Amid a spike in enrollment, Southern Arkansas University of Magnolia will break ground Friday on a $12 million construction project to build two new residence halls.
According to SAU President Trey Berry, enrollment at the university is at 4,138 students. The two new buildings, Columbia Hall and Magnolia Hall, will provide enough room for the students currently at the school as well as provide extra room for growth, he said.
“We know if we’re going to have another increase we’ve got to have another residence hall,” Berry said. “We’re having two halls and right now one will help us facilitate the overload we have right now and the other will be for future growth.”
Construction of the halls will be complete in August so students can move in for the 2016-17 school year. The project’s general contractor is Kinco Constructors and the architecture firm is WER Architects/Planners, both of Little Rock.
Arkansas Business talked with Berry about the construction and growth at the university.
Q. SAU reported a 16.7 percent jump in enrollment this year. To what do you attribute that growth?
A. One is that we had some really innovative practices going on in our recruitment in our admissions office. We’ve really started to hone in on using social media and other means of recruiting our students. We tried to make it more personal recruitment process.
The second thing is that we have established several new academic programs over the past several years that are very unique and are attracting students to SAU from literally all over the country and all over the world.
We have an engineering program that’s two years old and that now has about 130 majors … We have a game and animation major, and we’re the only ones to have a full major in game and animation in the state and that’s been attracting students from all over the country.
We have a master’s of computer science that has become extremely popular. We have a new musical theater program, a new wildlife biology program, a new marine biology program. So these academic programs, which are new and unique and I think very attractive to this generation of students, have been attracting increased numbers.
The third thing is that we really tried to keep our cost down. We were just picked in a national poll to be the sixth most affordable small university in the nation. So I think that’s resonating with people.
We’ve gained a reputation around the state as a very caring university that cares for the individual and we feel like that that reputation is really getting out there. So it’s all those things combined that have really started attracting students to our campus.
Q. Do you expect enrollment to continue to increase at this rate?
A. I sure hope so. It’s become a good trend. This is our third year of record enrollment. We think we’ve kind of found a recipe for attracting students and caring for our students and so we hope that we continue that.
We had a record freshman class, we had record enrollment in our graduate program, we had record enrollment in international student population, we have a record number of students living on campus. And so we know we need the space. We think we’ve got a pretty good pattern going on, so we know we need the space to help us continue that growth.
Q. The Magnolia City Council recently reconstituted its public facilites board to create a bond issue to help build the dorms. Can you explain the board’s purpose?
A. Our alumni association is really the people who are facilitating this construction for us as a 501(c)(3) and the facilities board are the ones that issue the tax-free bonds. The organization was never defunct, it just hadn’t been active. We knew we had a timeline, and if we went through the normal construction that, we would take out a bond as a university, it would take us a lot more time to do that.
We knew we were under a timeline to have these residence halls ready for August. It’s already going to be a tight timeline. This helps us facilitate the timeline and expedite it. Otherwise there’s no way we would have it ready for August.
Q. Are there plans for construction after these dorms? Other growth?
A. We left room on the building site in case we had an additional need for another residence hall. That’s our hope. We do have room to expand if we need to. We’ve hired new professors to meet the growing student body, and that’s been great because it’s helped us keep our student-to-teacher ratio the same, which is 17 to 1.
[W]e know as we grow … we’ve got to grow with quality and not just grow. We’re really being conscious that as we grow we have the facilities and the personnel to meet that growth.
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