ENERGY-RELATED TRENDS IN ENROLLMENT IN A LARGE UNDERGRADUATE GEOLOGY PROGRAM, AND PREDICTING ENROLLMENT FOR THE FUTURE

With a peak of 550 majors in the fall of 2015, the Department of Geology & Geophysics at Texas A&M is one of the largest undergraduate geology programs in the US. However, enrollment has fluctuated rapidly in recent years, with total enrollment doubling between 2012 and 2015 and then falling to just under 300 in 2018. Both undergraduate and graduate enrollment Texas A&M has traditionally been strongly linked with the energy industry and responsive to fluctuations in employment and student perceptions of career options. We attempt to isolate the effects of the energy industry on enrollment, with the goal of better predict demand for our program.

Total enrollment in a program is subject to variations in acceptance rate and yield rate that don’t necessarily reflect student interest in geology. Therefore we have focused on the history of undergraduate applications to our department, both by freshmen and transfer students. Because Texas has a rapidly growing public university population, we control for this growth by subtracting out the overall trend of Texas A&M. The resulting “excess applications” during the 2006-2018 period can be then compared to the perceived health of the oil industry. Informal surveys indicate that 2/3 to 3/4 of our freshmen are interested in a career in the energy sector. From 2001 to 2013 there is a very good correlation between the number of first-time-in-college freshmen applications with total employment in the energy sector (R² ~0.87). However, when the price of oil began dropping in late 2014, applications drop significantly below trend, about two years before employment decreased. We will also use data from transfer student applications to try to make predictions about the effect of the energy sector on undergraduate applications.

Because the last boom cycle in the oil and gas sector was short-lived relative to the time required to get an undergraduate degree, it is important that students have training that keeps multiple career options open. Many of our majors switch their career emphasis during their degree to environmental issues, particularly water use and quality, while those who leave the department often transfer to liberal arts majors. We will discuss modifications to our undergraduate curricula that emphasize problem-solving and communication skills.