SEMO HOPES FOR ENROLLMENT GAIN IN SPRING SEMESTER

Kristina St. Clair missed her high school graduation because she gave birth to a son.

That was 18 months ago. On Tuesday, the 19-year-old single mother will become a freshman at Southeast Missouri State University as the spring semester gets under way.

"I thought about waiting and starting in the fall," said St. Clair, who works as a nurse's aide at Southeast Missouri Hospital.

She decided, however, that if she waited, she might never go to college.

She wants to pursue a career in the culinary arts, a move that will involve transferring to a cooking school.

St. Clair is one of the students university officials are counting on to boost student spring enrollment.

Although never as high as fall enrollment, university officials still put stock in spring enrollments.

"Usually spring enrollment is a little bit smaller because we have more students graduating in December than new students coming in," said Dr. Pauline Fox, vice president of administration and enrollment management.

Spring enrollment totaled 8,524 graduate and undergraduate students last spring, up about 400 students from the 1999 spring semester. Undergraduates accounted for the bulk of the increase.

"We are expecting the same kind of pattern this year," Fox said. "We expect to be up over last year."

Most students enrolled in the spring semester also studied at Southeast last fall, but university officials said there are some new students, including beginning freshmen like St. Clair, students who transferred from community colleges and international students.

Hope to beat last spring

Fox said doesn't know how many new students will enroll this semester, but last spring, 142 freshmen enrolled in January.

University staff spent last week making final preparations for the upcoming semester. Workers handled last-minute maintenance chores in classrooms and residence halls.

"We are trying to do as much of that extra cleaning and that sort of work before classes begin as we can," Fox said.

Students began picking up textbooks last week from Southeast's textbook rental service at the University Center.

Southeast is one of 21 public universities nationally where students rent textbooks rather than buy them.

The textbook service distributes around 30,000 undergraduate textbooks a semester. The university has about 50,000 textbooks in all, but some aren't used every semester.

"We always start issuing books a week before classes start," said Laurie Taylor, who heads up the textbook rental operation as assistant manager of the university bookstore.

Students pay just a textbook rental charge of slightly more than $14 a course. "Where else can you rent or borrow something for $14 for a whole year?" asked Taylor.

Textbooks are used for at least two years and often longer.

"Computer textbooks are probably obsolete by the time they hit my shelf," Taylor said, while "English ones don't change very often at all."

While students rent the books and return them at semester's end, they are free to highlight passages in them just like they were their own books.

Taylor said a customized computer program keeps track of all the books and who checks them out, a vast improvement over the handwritten checklist used years ago.

All this will be new for 18-year-old Heather Mize of Jackson, Mo. She'll begin her college career at Southeast on Tuesday, little more than a week after graduating from Jackson High School.

"I am not going to know anybody," said Mize, who admits to being nervous about starting college.

Still, Mize is ready to move on.

"I have a job right now I'm trying to keep up with," said Mize who is a clerk at a Cape Girardeau department store.

While students like Mize and St. Clair know they will attend Southeast this semester, some students won't make up their minds until the last minute and enroll on the first day of classes.

Fox said, "Especially in the spring semester, first-day enrollment can be affected greatly by the weather."

Snow and ice can keep students away, sometimes affecting final enrollment, and graduate students, in particular, might decide to wait until fall to take classes, Fox said.