For generations the natives have stayed close to home. The starting quarterback on the championship high school football team now coaches the team. The crime rate is so low, front doors are left unlocked at night, and a youngster can disappear over the hill on her bicycle without putting a mob of mothers on high alert. The grownups know where all the children like to play — in the desert, the same sand box that activated their childhood imaginations.

Growing up in Mesquite, Nevada, Jenn Putnam ’01 was sheltered from the hazards of the modern megatropolis, yet she yearned for something more. She picked Utah State University because “it had a community feel to it but I didn’t know anyone there. That was part of the appeal. I wanted to find me, to expose myself to a larger world.”

Today her memories serve her well when she’s recruiting prospective students. As USU’s admissions director, she oversees a paid and volunteer staff that visits high schools throughout the region, conducts campus tours, and fields questions from parents and their teenagers. The business has become more sophisticated than that in recent years as tech-savvy prospects are contacted by e-mail and kept informed with blogs and videos.

The old-fashioned way, the campus tour, is still effective. One look at the sweep of the valley below and the upward thrust of the distant Wellsville Mountains, and the entire group — student Aggie ambassador, alert parents and gawking teenagers — feels the enchantment and the sense of freedom that inspired novelist and native Texan Rick Bass ’79 to write, “ … everywhere I looked, things looked just fine to me — certainly wilder and prettier than in Houston, Texas.” And: “It was as if I had been released … from the notion of captivity.”

Putnam’s job is not free of constraints. She lies awake at night sometimes, thinking about her responsibilities to the university. The competition is especially fierce these days and the pressure unrelenting.

Rick’s College in Rexburg, Idaho, a prime source of transfer students, is now a four-year, bachelor-degree-granting college with an impressive name–BYU-Idaho, and former community colleges along the densely populated and rapidly growing Wasatch Front have been elevated to the same status.

But even on the Wasatch Front public colleges and the only other public research university in the state are feeling the pinch. The number of high school graduates in Utah dipped in 2005 and that trend is expected to continue for seven or eight more years. “We had a recession in the 1980s,” says Amanda Covington, communications director for the Utah Board of Regents. “And whenever there is a downturn in the economy, we have fewer babies.”

Drops in enrollment mean tighter budgets. The state funds its colleges and universities according to the number of full-time students enrolled. The more students admitted, the more resources available for classroom instruction and student services.

After two years of noticeable enrollment declines, USU’s numbers are on the rebound. The legislature restored funding for in-state tuition agreements with southern Idaho and Wyoming and reversed its decision to double the length of the residency requirement. Students from elsewhere can now qualify in one year.

Meanwhile, the admissions staff and its volunteers have worked hard to recruit students from previously neglected areas. “If people think I rest easy at night, I must be putting on a good front,” says Putnam with a laugh. more