Closing Helser Hall for a year and keeping the Linden Dining Center closed will get the Department of Residence more than halfway toward its $1.7 million expense-cutting goal.

But why are the new cuts necessary in the first place?

“There’s certain things we don’t control,” said Thomas Hill, vice president for student affairs. “For example, we don’t control the decline in enrollment. … If you have fewer students, your revenues are down.”

Hill likened several closings of popular residence halls during the past year to layoffs at manufacturer Maytag of Newton. More than 300 workers at Maytag have lost their jobs since February.

“The difference is, we’re moving people around … [we’ll] place them somewhere else in the system,” Hill said.

Staff members in Helser Hall, including community advisers and academic resource coordinators, should be able to be placed elsewhere in the residence hall system, Hill said.

“I feel pretty confident that we’re going to get everybody taken care of,” he said. “There are other opportunities that aren’t RAs or ARCs.”

The fault for this and previous rounds of unscheduled moves lies in large part with faulty enrollment projections, said Randy Alexander, director of the Department of Residence. He said the expected figures for freshmen and transfer students have proven wrong the past two years.

“I think we have a first-rate admissions staff,” Alexander said. “The biggest thing they’re dealing with is demographics. … It’s really hard to analyze all this.”

Marc Harding, director of admissions, said reasonable accuracy in predicting enrollment is critical for departments all over campus.

“It’s an imperfect science,” he said. “There are other factors which you couldn’t probably predict.”

Harding said the admissions office is able to plan for a shrinking pool of Iowa high school graduates in coming years and to a lesser extent for the tuition set by the Board of Regents — although even that is a volatile practice lately, he said.

“Just go back and look at the tuition increases — who could have predicted that?” he said. “No one could have predicted the budget cuts on the order that [the University of Northern Iowa], [University of] Iowa and Iowa State have had to endure.”

Totally unpredictable, Harding said, are events such as the pending merger of the College of Education and the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, the cancellation of Veishea and the Campustown riot that led to it or the embarrassment of a nationally televised soap opera featuring former men’s basketball coach Larry Eustachy.

Not only are the events difficult to anticipate, Harding said, but the effects of publicity on prospective students’ decisions — as well as its influence on parents — create another wild card.

“It’s definitely become much more difficult for us to predict,” Harding said. “We have our work cut out for us.”

Critics of Helser Hall’s closing said they were most frustrated by the decision — caused by a lowered enrollment projection, officials said — coming out just before finals, and when the best rooms elsewhere on campus have already been chosen.

“This is the second or third year they’ve had really bad estimates,” said Drew Larson, president of the Inter-Residence Hall Association. “You would hope there would be a better way.”

Harding said revision of Iowa State’s projection process is a possibility.

“We’re going to be looking at the model,” he said. “We’re going to be looking at what the university’s goals are.”

The official date each year for incoming students to cancel their offers of admission is May 1, meaning concrete figures aren’t available to ISU administrators until after the spring semester in most cases.

“It’s a fascinating business that we’re in,” Harding said. “Predicting enrollment is a really challenging kind of thing.”