St. Andrews Presbyterian College saw spring 2010 enrollment drop by nearly 100 students.

College officials said 600 students were enrolled in the fall compared with 502 students currently. The enrollment figures were released Tuesday.

School officials say a decline in enrollment from fall to spring is typical. School spokesman Melissa Hopkins said the 10 percent drop in enrollment is pretty common for St. Andrews.

St. Andrews saw a 16.3 percent decline between semesters this year.

St. Andrews reported that 109 students left the college while 11 new students enrolled, with eight students that transferred from other colleges and three new freshmen.

More than one-third of this decline in the student body is from mid-year graduates, with 37 earning their degrees in December, according to Hopkins.

"The numbers look good to us," Hopkins said.

Hopkins said exit interviews with students showed that some left because of the college's loss of accreditation with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

St. Andrews just recently settled a more than two year court dispute with the accreditor where the college will retain accreditation from the SACS until May. The college is also accredited by the American Academy of Liberal Education, a nationally recognized entity, and is in the process of changing AALE to act as its primary accrediting agency with the U.S. Department of Education.

But the exit interviews suggested that the main reasons had more to do with personal issues rather than SACS, according to Hopkins.

Other reasons included family and medical issues, Hopkins said, including one who was told a parent did not have long to live.

Hopkins would not release the results of the exit interviews, but said they are often unreliable.

"These exit interviews are really informal," Hopkins said.

The college doesn't push for exact answers, just a general reason. This means the data collected is incomplete, she said.

The reasons are also sometimes fraudulent, Hopkins said, in part because of embarrassment over the real issue.

Hopkins said other reasons for some departures are relationship issues or a player didn't think he was getting fair playing time or some other issue that is either not measured by the exit interview or that the student did not give to school administrators.