The sky isn’t falling in college admissions. Not yet, anyway.
The threat of the coronavirus and uncertainty about how campuses will operate in the fall had threatened to drive prospective college students to reconsider their options for the coming semester, at least.
But enrollment managers at several small private and public regional colleges have told The Chronicle that they are close to meeting their goals for new first-year students, as well as maintaining strong retention of current students. In addition, news reports on both public and private colleges suggest that the fall headcount looks more promising than it did earlier in the spring — meaning many colleges are not facing a full-scale disaster after all.
That said, the institutions that responded to The Chronicle’s questions about enrollment trends showed a striking range of forecasts, with some colleges badly lagging behind their targets and others coming out ahead.
Administrators credit added flexibility in the admissions process, including extending the traditional deposit deadline of May 1 to June 1 or later. Many colleges have also made it easier for students to request more financial aid, and created new, virtual ways to engage families, promote their campus, and answer the myriad questions about safety.
“Families were hungry for communication,” said Kevin Kropf, executive vice president for enrollment management at Drury University, a small private college in Springfield, Mo., “and students wanted there to be something close to normal for the fall.”
There are still several months until classes start, though, and enrollment teams at many institutions plan to work through the summer to try to ensure that students’ commitments don’t melt away. More than 770 colleges are still accepting applications for the fall semester, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
Many more issues remain well outside the ability and efforts of college officials to control, including the possibility that the pandemic that shut down classes in the spring will intensify just as students return to campus, in August and September.
“This is the end of my 26th year in admissions,” said Christine Bowman, dean of enrollment services at Southwestern University, a small private college in Georgetown, Tex. “This has been the one that has thrown us the most curve balls.”
A Roller Coaster
This less-than-catastrophic outlook for the fall follows months of hand-wringing by college officials and ominous survey results, not to mention an admissions season a year ago that seemed like a harbinger of trouble for some selective colleges.
For this article, The Chronicle contacted seven less-selective private and 12 public regional colleges that had moved their decision day beyond the traditional May 1 deadline. Eleven responded. Enrollment has already become a problem at many such institutions, especially in parts of the country where the population is falling.
But no event in recent history has disrupted campus operations on the scale of the global pandemic. Early projections of the fallout from the coronavirus were, not surprisingly, dire, with estimates of enrollment declines as steep as 20 percent, according to a report from Fitch Ratings.
In some cases, low enrollments have already been blamed for campus job cuts. Earlier this month, Northern Arizona University announced that it would not be renewing the contracts of 100 non-tenured faculty members, according to the Arizona Republic, due to anticipated enrollment shortfalls of 20 percent.
But many institutions appear to be beating the odds, said Emily Wadhwani, director of ratings for the U.S. public-finance division at Fitch Ratings. “I have yet to hear of any of our rated colleges saying that their pipeline is weaker than in previous years,” she said.
The enrollment figures may be better than expected now, but getting to this point was not an easy or comfortable process for admissions offices. Monthly and even weekly data on applications and deposits, which enrollment officials use to gauge their performance, turned into a roller-coaster experience.
Admissions officials realized early in the crisis that their previous experience would not be a good predictor for the current enrollment cycle. “We threw all the models out the window,” said Todd Rinehart, vice chancellor for enrollment at the University of Denver.
The trend in March was about the same as for last March, said Kropf at Drury, but the number of students committing in April was 67 fewer than in the previous year — a big decline for a college that aims to enroll just 320 first-year students. But by the end of May, the number of students who had made deposits was nearly the same as for that month in 2019, he said.
Drury is still 6 percent below its goal, but it continues to reach out to accepted students, Kropf said, and the percentage of current students who plan to return to the university is less than 1 percent less than it was a year ago.
Retention is also strong at the University of Illinois at Chicago, for example — 3 percent higher than in the previous year — even as the number of new students committing for the fall is 5 percent below the institution’s goal, said Kevin Browne, vice provost for academic and enrollment services at the urban research university. Students also registered for 30 percent more credits in summer courses this year than in 2019, Browne said.
At Susquehanna University the percentage of freshmen and sophomores returning in the fall is more than 90 percent — far higher than in previous years, said DJ Menifee, vice president for enrollment services at the private college in Pennsylvania. That means 57 more students enrolled this year than last, he said, and makes up for a shortfall in new deposits, which are 35 below the goal of 619, he said.
“We’re still engaging those who haven’t committed,” he said, “but we are not necessarily needing to get to 619.”
New Flexibility
While it’s been a stressful season for enrollment officials, it has taught them that they can adapt in a crisis.
“I’m telling my team this is an opportunity to re-engineer our recruitment processes from the ground up,” said Faye F. Tydlaska, vice president for enrollment management and marketing at Rollins College, a private college in Winter Park, Fla. “This industry is typically risk-averse,” she said. “This gives us a chance to try new things.”
Rollins initially kept its May 1 deposit deadline, while promising students flexibility in making their decision. But when it became clear the numbers were not good, the college moved the decision date to June 15, Tydlaska said. Deposits are now about 3 percent below Rollins’s goal of 550, she said, but that’s far better than the 14-percent shortfall on May 1.
Admissions officials also point to the success of virtual events that allowed prospective students and their families to meet current students, faculty members, and admissions counselors without traveling.
“What we’ve learned is that you can have real quality engagement and interactions,” said Rinehart at the University of Denver, where two-thirds of the students live more than 500 miles from campus. For example, he said, virtual events allowed admissions staff members or others to answer many more questions with the chat function than are usually answered in a live event on campus.
One question that will remain after this enrollment season is how many of the changes will persist. Will many colleges, for instance, be willing to drop the traditional May 1 deadline for deposits in order to give families more flexibility?
“A lot of that is dependent on supply and demand,” said Robert J. Massa, a longtime enrollment leader. “If you’re from a college with many more applications than spaces, a deadline is still important,” he said. “Deadlines for schools that don’t fill their classes have always been meaningless.”
Lamar University, a public regional institution in Texas, is one place where May 1 has less meaning than it does at selective colleges. “May 1 is still important, but we recruit way beyond that typically,” said Tony Sarda, director of undergraduate and graduate enrollment.
Six weeks after that date, Lamar is still 14 percent short of its fall-enrollment goal, but it is ahead of last year’s pace, he said.
Before classes begin in the fall, the enrollment picture could shift again. In addition to the threat of the coronavirus, colleges worry that international students are not likely to come back in the fall. About a third of college leaders responding to a recent Chronicle survey said they were planning for the possibility of zero enrollment of international students this fall.
Another potential concern is that changes in the rules for college recruiting could encourage some students to place deposits at several colleges while they wait to make a final decision.
At Illinois State University, the evidence for that possibility is a couple of hundred students who have made tuition deposits but not deposits for a dorm room or orientation, said Jana Albrecht, associate vice president for enrollment management.
Sarda, at Lamar, said he and his team feel good about their efforts but “can’t take our feet off the gas.”
“I try to temper my excitement,” Sarda said. “We still have a lot of race left to run.”
