The Open University’s mission is to attract a wide diversity of people to university study. For most of our history the OU has been only partly open because, for what seemed good reasons, we limited our intake each year and asked the thousands of disappointed applicants to come back a year later. But times change. The sellers’ market of our first quarter century is now history. Government policy has encouraged us to expand our intake throughout the 1990s but has also created increasing competition from other universities. This means that we must now market our courses vigorously in order to recruit the students required to meet the targets that the funding council sets for us. For the year 2000 the funding council asked us to take nearly 9,000 more students (2000 full-time equivalents at the end of their courses) than in 1999 – which is the equivalent an additional university.
Another trend is that people are making their decisions about taking an OU course later in the year. In a world where an Internet bookstore delivers a book less than 24 hours after we ordered it we expect to be able to register close to the start date of a course.
How does student recruitment look for 2000? First, this is a dynamic situation. We are finding, as we did last year, that the autumn is a time when many potential students come forward. Enquiries and registrations are currently brisk. Present projections suggest that by a cut-off date in mid-December we could reach our record target of nearly 100,000 new undergraduate reservations. Some trends are encouraging. Comparing similar dates we have had 45,000 more undergraduate enquiries this year than last. Certain courses are proving particularly attractive. For example, T171 You, Your Computer and the Net looks as if it could attract over 10,000 students unless we cap it. Already new student reservations for this course are 5,000 higher than for T102. Similarly there are almost 4,000 more reservations for DD100 Understanding Social Change –An Introduction to the Social Sciences than there were for D103 this time last year.
The major concern is that the total of registrations from continuing students is running about two weeks behind the pattern last year. This may be because, knowing that we now hold registrations for most courses open well into the autumn, current students wait until nearly the end of their 1999 course before making a decision about 2000. Mailings to current students are planned to encourage them to register now for next year.
The overall lesson is that today we have to plan and react in a climate of much greater uncertainty and volatility than in the days of the sellers market. To be a truly open university we must pay close attention to the changing expectations of the public as regards the timing and pace of our courses. The work now under way on shorter courses and more frequent presentations is therefore particularly important.