North Dakota's public colleges are overhauling how they tally their enrollments to give administrators an extra week to count students and make sure their tuition bills are paid.

The new policy starts this spring on the North Dakota university system's 11 campuses. Had it been in effect this fall, it would have reduced student numbers at four colleges, including a 16 percent drop at Lake Region State College in Devils Lake.

"Honestly, I don't think it's going to affect enrollment reporting at all," said Michel Hillman, the system's vice chancellor for academic affairs. "But it will give us greater confidence in the numbers that we do report."

Under current policy, students are supposed to pay their tuition bills by the 12th day of classes or detail their plans for doing so later. Colleges use that information to report their number of enrolled students on the 15th day of classes for each fall and spring semester.

The new procedure, which was adopted by the Board of Higher Education last week, says North Dakota's public colleges must report their fall and spring enrollments on the 20th day of classes instead of the 15th day.

The policy also sets out rules for judging whether a student who has not paid tuition should be included in the school's enrollment count. For example, if a student's financial aid check is late, or if he or she is getting scholarship aid from the military, that student will be counted.

"It more directly ties … a student being enrolled to actually having paid a bill," said William Goetz, the chancellor of the state university system. "It's going to make it a lot easier for our institutions to be able to arrive at that count."

Hillman said the criteria for deciding whether a student made sufficient arrangements to pay his or her tuition bill have varied among campuses. The new policy sets out detailed guidelines for making those judgments and should encourage more uniform standards for enrollment reporting, he said.

"Before, we have never really defined what 'arrangements to pay' means," Hillman said.

The North Dakota university system's most recent enrollment report says if the new policy had been in effect this fall, it would have lowered student "head count" enrollment at North Dakota State University, the University of North Dakota, the state College of Science at Wahpeton and Lake Region State College in Devils Lake.

Of the 1,520 students counted at Lake Region this fall, 239, or 15.7 percent, had not paid their tuition nor been granted a payment extension on the 15th class day of this fall's semester, the report says.

NDSU had 24 students in that category, out of a head count of 12,527, while UND had 40 out of 12,559. Of 2,417 students at the College of Science, 71, or 3 percent, had not paid their tuition or been granted a payment extension.