The long-predicted crisis in higher education is upon us.
It’s hitting both public and private institutions. Publics in states like Alaska, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are grappling with consolidations and financial strain, declining revenues, and uncertain futures. Even in New York, which has set up a free-college program for public institutions, administrators fret over a projected drop-off of tens of thousands of students in the years to come.
Private colleges, meanwhile, have seen a wave of closures in states like Massachusetts and Vermont. But leaders of private institutions in other states fear theirs may be next. At the Council of Independent Colleges’ annual conference for presidents, held last month in Florida, the worry and weariness was palpable. Attendees packed rooms with discussions on college finance, mergers, and the declining number of students coming out of high school.
Perhaps, one president wondered aloud, colleges could find a way to get African-American and Hispanic students to apply to and graduate from college at the same rates as Asian-American and white students. Policy makers have promoted that goal for years, but the gap remains.
There is no magic bullet to fix the underlying problem — declining enrollment — that’s driving much of the worry.
The Chronicle’s latest enrollment survey of 292 institutions, conducted with the CIC and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, makes clear that stress, pain, and uncertainty plague the nation’s private colleges and regional universities. Over all, about 60 percent of public and private institutions responding to the survey missed their enrollment goals, although private colleges were more likely to miss their goals by a wider margin. Sixty-seven percent of institutions did not meet their net-revenue goals, with public institutions hurting slightly more.
The survey, which was conducted through email and a website, received responses from 94 public institutions and 198 private colleges. While public institutions had more trouble meeting their net-revenue goals, the private institutions faced more challenges in a number of areas, relative to the publics. Fifty-two percent of private institutions missed both enrollment and net-revenue goals, compared with 49 percent of publics. Public institutions tended to see their prospective students drop away at the enrollment stage.
Private institutions were more active in giving out student aid, often a key factor in attracting students to a college. Forty-six percent of private institutions raised their level of aid, while roughly 30 percent of publics gave more aid last fall. Half of the public institutions gave out the same level of aid as the year before, compared with a third of private colleges.
Responding to Setbacks
While there is no overnight solution, some colleges have spent years laying the groundwork for increasing retention, or attracting more students of color, or being transparent about budget realities — efforts that have allowed those institutions to meet their goals or deal with shortfalls more easily.
The pressures are also starting to dismantle long-established silos on campus, a trend that has pushed colleges “to do things with organizational intent and institutional purpose,” says John T. Lawlor, founder of the marketing-consulting firm Lawlor Advisory. Much of that coordination among campus departments is oriented toward demonstrating the value of the institution.
“Most people are expecting to be down,” he says. “There are very real fiscal challenges for many schools who are located in isolated areas, have low endowments, too high of overhead, and are frozen in time about what to do and how to do it.”
Peter Farrell, a founder of the college-consulting firm Farrell Day, says his business is increasingly working with colleges that want to analyze the results associated with specific efforts in student recruitment — how many students, for example, apply and matriculate after a high-school visit or a college fair, and how those numbers might compare with other institutions. The goal, Farrell says, is to add some predictability and context to the “sawtooth” up-and-down enrollment experience that many colleges are seeing.
“If there’s one trend I’m seeing, it’s the rising level of anxiety pushing people into looking for miracle drugs — you know, the magic pill that’s going to help me transform overnight what’s been otherwise a very difficult job,” Farrell says. The conferences of college associations are jammed with new companies claiming to offer those magic cures, he says.
But the best approach may not be to find innovations, but to execute on the fundamentals that colleges already know: to have a clear mission and identity, to be devoted to improving the student experience, to provide a clear path to life after college. Successful colleges, he says, have employees “who can execute extraordinarily well, who are disciplined, dedicated, and focused, and have the fortitude to persist and drive success consistently.”
As with every year, survey respondents outlined how they might deal with enrollment and revenue shortfalls. Among the more-popular responses: starting new programs to attract students, enhancing the marketing of the institution, and putting more pressure on enrollment management. (The private colleges, in particular, favored starting new programs.)
Cutting back was less popular. Compared with the number of institutions that said they would start new programs, roughly half as many institutions said they would consider eliminating underenrolled programs. Reductions in campus services and layoffs also were less-appealing responses.
Susquehanna University offers an example of how uncertainty can affect an institution. It had a challenging year; the Pennsylvania university missed its enrollment goals by less than 5 percent, but also missed its net-revenue goals by more than 5 percent, even after revising those goals down more than once. Susquehanna also gave out more money in institutional aid and enrolled fewer international students.
Terry Cowdrey, interim vice president for enrollment and student financial services, and Philip Betz, director of admission, note that the enrollment market has just become more unpredictable over the years. The cycle started out well, with deposits coming in at a steady rate, but soon they dropped off. “Just talking to other colleges,” says Betz, “that seemed to be a pretty consistent thing.”
The future appears to be even less predictable. Cowdrey and Betz worry about a recent rule change that allows colleges to continue recruiting students who have committed elsewhere after May 1. The pressure and the unstable enrollment environment are already leading colleges to offer incentives, such as packages and giveaways, to students to get them to commit early. Cowdrey predicts that colleges will keep throwing money at students over the summer, given the intense pressure to recruit in a market with a declining number of high-school graduates.
To bolster yield, Susquehanna tries to make itself more “sticky” by contacting students soon after acceptance to convey welcoming messages, outline campus life, and help the students envision attending the university. “We actually have a sort of catchphrase we use: ‘Build affinity, not anxiety,’” says Cowdrey.
Some institutions, however, aren’t shying away from the anxiety; they’re signaling their trouble early and often to the campus. The University of Northern Iowa, for example, was down last year to fewer than 11,000 students, its lowest enrollment since 1982. The university has grappled with a soft enrollment environment over the past decade, and it’s getting worse.
“We are always sharing our enrollment numbers and our draft budget as early as we can and in several different ways,” says Jim Wohlpart, the university’s provost. That has helped with tough conversations about freezing academic positions, for example.
The Upper Midwest is becoming an increasingly challenging environment for enrollment — and Iowa, a sparsely populated state with more than two dozen private colleges, is particularly competitive. Many colleges in the area are building the kinds of broad, institutional efforts that are commonly seen as ways to bridge demographic gaps: recruiting nontraditional populations of students, and retaining the ones who are already there.
For Iowa Wesleyan University, those efforts are also about demonstrating value. DeWayne P. Frazier, the provost, says the institution is on track to raise its graduation rate to 70 percent from 45 percent. More than half of the university’s students are non-white, representing Iowa’s diversifying population. Frazier says that in an effort to help students feel welcome, Iowa Wesleyan has sought student advisers who are non-white or have spent time in countries the students might relate to.
Factors like those helped the university increase its overall enrollment this year as other colleges saw declines.
Courting New Groups of Students
Augsburg University, in Minneapolis, has spent more than 15 years recruiting a highly diverse student body. The university was once a destination for farmers’ kids and Scandinavian immigrants, and later an alternative to a state college for suburban kids. Augsburg sits in the West Bank neighborhood, in one of the country’s most-diverse ZIP codes, and administrators saw, up close, how Minnesota’s population was shifting.
The university started a “deliberate” and “strategic” effort to court students among the African-American, Hispanic, Hmong, Somali, and other communities surrounding the institution, says Karen Kaivola, the provost. For the past three years, more than half the members of Augsburg’s incoming class have been students of color. That trend helped the university meet its enrollment and revenue goals this year, but Kaivola points out that it has also been good for the educational mission.
“We wanted to enroll an intentionally diverse mix of students in part because we thought that it would offer a richer academic experience for all students,” Kaivola says. The university has worked with organizations like Act Six and College Possible to recruit minority students, and it has added a “chief inclusion officer” to shepherd campus conversations about race and diversity, and to help the university avoid minefields.
Augsburg will soon have company in its efforts. Many institutions in the Upper Midwest are shifting to recruiting non-white students — notably, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, located across the street from Augsburg.
“The University of Minnesota has become really competitive,” says Kaivola, noting that some students come to Augsburg for a year or two, then try to transfer to the state flagship. But she believes that Augsburg has created a niche in the market and a comfortable place for non-white students. “It’s a challenging environment for higher education, but I think we occupy — for now — a special space.”
