Northern Illinois University isn’t the biggest college in Illinois, however, it offers a wide variety of specialized programs, some of which are severely under-attended due to unawareness.
A majority of NIU’s advertising fails to mention these programs, those including law and mechatronics engineering.
Most of the advertising from NIU revolves around building community or “finding your pack,” and not how amazing their specialized programs are. Changing this could get more students into these programs and help NIU’s enrollment.
Dave Grewell, dean of the College of Engineering and Engineering Technology, said that most students come in for mechanical engineering thinking that it is all that NIU offers despite NIU being one of four schools in the entire country that offers a bachelor of science degree in mechatronics engineering.
“Other universities have mechatronic programs that are not ABET accredited,” Grewell said. “Ours is, and so that gives you that credibility of being able to put on this on your resume that it’s an ABET-accredited program.”
ABET originally stood for the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, which is a non-profit, non-governmental accreditation organization whose sole job is to go across the country to certify that university engineering programs can provide degrees and those degrees mean something.
Grewell also talked about NIU’s other small but specialized programs such as biomedical engineering, which only had 75 undergraduate students in 2024 out of the 1,095 total students enrolled in the college of engineering.
Whitney Wright, president of the Student Bar Association at NIU, explained the benefits of going to NIU to pursue law, such as how all colleges in the state of Illinois now offer free test prep, such as for the LSAT.
“So, I think a lot of kids are students that come to NIU law,” Wright said. “One of the top things is its affordability because our school doesn’t charge out-of-state tuition. Like for myself, I’m an out of state student so, because we don’t charge out of state tuition, that’s something that brings a lot of people in from Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, and because, comparatively to other programs, what we pay is a lot less.”
Out of the 741 people who passed the LSAT at NIU, only 121 chose to become students which is only 16.33%.
NIU should put more focus in its advertising on its specialized programs considering how good they are. If NIU is going to raise enrollment numbers, they need to target students who would have a great reason to go here.
