CARBONDALE, Ill. – Enrollment at Southern Illinois University’s flagship Carbondale campus likely will again slide for the fledgling spring semester, continuing the downward trend the school is pushing to stem, the school’s interim chancellor said.

Without publicly revealing the school’s spring enrollment, John Dunn said administrators want “as rapid a turnaround as we can.”

“One of the things we’re looking at in the fall of (2007) is to stem the tide,” he said.

In the fall, SIU reported a two percent dropoff in enrollment _ one of the biggest population decreases the campus has experienced in recent years.

Duane Stucky, the SIU system’s vice president for financial and administrative affairs, said that enrollment dip accounted for a $1.8 million loss in revenue for the first quarter of the university’s fiscal year.

The enrollment decline contributed to last November’s ouster of chancellor Walter Wendler by SIU president Glenn Poshard, who among other things was displeased with the school’s student population that last fall dropped to 21,003.

The school’s student population has stagnated around 21,000 since 1996 and enrollment has declined each year since 2004. Fifteen years ago, the school had 24,869 students, according to the Illinois Board of Higher Education, which tracks enrollment at public universities.

“We’re the only public university in the state losing students,” Poshard said in November when he replaced Wendler with Dunn on an interim basis until a permanent chancellor is tapped during a continuing nationwide search. “We have to turn this around.”

Dunn has said he hopes to boost the campus’ enrollment to about 23,000 by 2010. To get there, he said, the school has hired two new recruiters to attract student prospects from the Chicago area and has pledged that colleges at the school that show increases in undergraduate enrollment will get corresponding budget increases next fall as incentives.

The university also is exploring new partnerships with community colleges, with plans to invest more in marketing.