While everything is beginning to look up for Baker University, the administration does not need to overlook how to keep recruiting students.

Retention rates for freshmen this spring have returned with record numbers, with a 93.4 percent fall-to-spring retention rate.

This is significantly higher compared to the past years when freshman fall-to-spring retention rates fell as low as 88.6 percent in the spring of 2007.

With such impressive numbers, it may be easy for the administration to become confident in current strategies.

Although the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Nursing enrollment is moving in the right direction, the School of Professional and Graduate Studies and the graduate School of Education numbers are falling significantly. Just this year, 440 fewer students are enrolled at the School of Professional and Graduate Studies.

The School of Professional and Graduate Studies has proved to be one of the most successful programs and schools for the university in recent years. But since the economic decline, businesses have retracted programs with Baker to send their employees to the graduate programs in Kansas City, Kan., because of financial woes.

Now, the School of Professional and Graduate Studies needs to focus on ways to continue to enroll new students without the help of large businesses sending their employees.

Baker needs to continue to create new, innovative and creative strategies to keep successful high school students coming not only to the declining programs, but also the programs that are gaining success.

The university needs to take advantage of an opportunity; to keep enrollment numbers climbing at the successful schools, while finding a balance to also generate a climb in enrollment at its other schools.