Some applicants will be referred to other campuses
Applicants rejected by USC-Columbia could soon find an acceptance letter from one of the university’s regional campuses.
Starting this year, they could be accepted by one of USC’s two-year campuses in Sumter, Lancaster, Union or Salkehatchie without submitting a separate application. And next year, they could get acceptance letters from the system’s other four-year campuses, Aiken, Beaufort and Spartanburg.
USC President Harris Pastides said the new system could help bolster enrollment at the university’s other campuses and ease the Columbia campus’s growing pains.
The Columbia campus’s student body grew 15.6 percent from 2008 to 2012, outpacing Aiken (2 percent), Lancaster (5.9 percent), Upstate (2 percent) and Sumter (-26.1 percent).
And according to Dennis Pruitt, the vice president for student affairs, the new system, which targets South Carolina residents, gives applicants plenty of time to consider another option.
“It works for everybody,” Pastides said.
Talks about such a centralized system began about a year ago, Pruitt said, but details of how it will work haven’t been set. The change is expected to affect a few thousand students.
A campus could opt to review the files of each applicant itself, or it could choose to let the Columbia campus’s admissions office take care of that work, using criteria set by the regional campus, Pruitt said.
Scott Verzyl, associate vice president for enrollment management, said in an email that USC didn’t plan to hire more employees in admissions this year but that it was evaluating how big a staff would be needed to implement the plan.
The system isn’t entirely new, Pruitt said. For the last 20 years, USC-Columbia has sent a list of rejected applicants to other campuses, who could then reach out with information about their programs.
And Pastides said USC has long encouraged those students to start at a two-year campus and transfer to Columbia.
“It’s just a simple evolution of where we’ve been for 20 years,” Pruitt said.
Verzyl pointed to Penn State as an example of a similar system. Applicants there use one application for 20 campuses.
But the USC system is different, Penn State spokeswoman Annemarie Mountz said in an email, because USC’s four-year campuses are accredited independently and Penn State’s are “one university, geographically dispersed.”
That distinction could be a point of contention, Pastides said, because the four-year campuses can be reluctant to admit students who intend to transfer.
Still, admissions officials at Aiken and Beaufort wrote in email responses that they welcomed the new system.
“Our experience is, once students see us and have the chance to experience first-hand life at [USC-Beaufort], they want to stay,” said Mack Palmour, Beaufort’s vice chancellor of enrollment management.