Appalachian State University is, as they say, winning. And it’s winning at a game many other colleges are losing these days.
Its campus perches in a high valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, rural, sparsely populated, and located in a county where one resident in five lives in poverty — the kind of setting where many public campuses increasingly struggle with ebbing enrollment. Yet App State’s national profile is on the rise, and so is its enrollment, up to 19,280 in the fall of 2019 from 17,222 in 2010, a 12-percent increase.
Now the university is going for another victory: It hopes to enroll 20,000 students this fall, an increase of nearly 4 percent in a single year. What people call “20 by 2020" isn’t a nerdy administrative benchmark tucked away in some strategic-planning binder. “That’s all people have been talking about” on campus, says Eevie Johnson, a junior.
For the university to hit 20,000 in August, Appalachian State projects that it must enroll about 850 more students in its fall class, which comprised about 4,700 freshmen and transfers this past fall.
That the college can even dream of that kind of bump makes it something of an anomaly. Unfavorable demographics, rising costs, and shifts in the way Americans think about postsecondary education have left many colleges — particularly ones that are heavily tuition dependent — gasping for enrollment and the tuition money it brings in.
Last month, for example, the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater announced that a 4-percent drop in its fall enrollment in 2019 — about 500 fewer students — had prompted the need to cut $12 million from its annual budget over two years. Layoffs and other austerity measures were expected.
But the situations that Whitewater and Appalachian find themselves in are not as divergent as they seem. The collapse of state support across the country has made public universities, especially regional ones, nearly as tuition-driven as their private peers. In North Carolina, the only way to get more state money is to grow. As a teaching-oriented institution, Appalachian isn’t flush with research dollars, and the state legislature sets its tuition rates. Enrollment is “one thing that we do control,” says Sheri N. Everts, the chancellor.
Appalachian has managed to expand its enrollment in part through a combination of lucky breaks and a few baked-in advantages. It is among a group of public institutions in the South — including Auburn and Mississippi State Universities and Virginia Tech — that have parlayed good reputations and nonflagship tuition prices into sometimes startling growth over the past decade.
Growth has had some benefits for Appalachian State: Since 2014, state appropriations have increased by more than $21 million, or about 17 percent.
But growth has its downsides. Departments with popular majors can barely field enough courses to keep current students progressing toward their degrees, much less contemplate absorbing many more. Some buildings and classrooms are bursting at the seams. Boone, a charming town with a thriving tourism-and- resort industry, has also felt the impact, with more traffic, more students crowding its rental market, and more private development meant to capitalize on the student boom.
Yet the college is trying to grow more, and it is doing so in a way that has left many on campus asking questions. How can it admit almost 1,000 additional students in an increasingly competitive environment without sacrificing quality? If they show up in the fall, how can the university and the community accommodate them? Can App State continue to grow while holding on to what made it appealing in the first place?
The roots of Appalachian’s current growth spurt extend back to the fall of 2007, when Corey Lynch, a safety on its football team, blocked a last-second field-goal attempt by the University of Michigan and clinched a 34-32 upset victory for the underdog Mountaineers over the fifth-ranked team in the country. In the course of an afternoon, Appalachian State had gained a national profile.
The university’s long-term growth has been driven by more-fundamental factors. Appalachian State offers students an affordable education at a big state school that feels more like a small, liberal-arts college, amid a jewel-like setting in a rugged region garlanded with ski runs and hiking trails.
The outdoorsy atmosphere was part of the appeal for Michael Weiss, a junior majoring in sustainable development. He moved all the way from Michigan to attend, with extracurricular hiking and rock climbing in mind. But the student-to-faculty ratio, he says, “was a huge determining factor in getting me to come here.”
Many others have come, too. Over the past decade, the university has averaged 1.5-percent enrollment growth per year — an increasingly rare phenomenon. Thanks to shifting demographics, the number of traditional-age high-school students is waning in many parts of the country, and competition for such students has become intense. Public universities in the Northeast and Midwest have been hit especially hard. The 14 institutions of Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education, for example, have lost about 20 percent of their overall enrollment since 2010.
While projections for high-school graduates aren’t as dire in the South, enrollment growth is especially critical in states like North Carolina, where state support is tied to a formula based on credit hours. Expanding enrollment is “the only way to get new money within the UNC system,” says Kevin R. McClure, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. That incentive has led some colleges to tap their existing resources to build programs to attract more students. That creates a cycle, he says, in which “you have to continuously grow enrollment in order to backfill and pay for the needs that you’ve created by growing bigger as an institution.”
Chancellor Everts balks at the idea that increasing enrollment is just an attempt to bring in more state money. “The very reason we exist is to provide access for students to be successful,” she says. “If there are a few more students graduating with an amazing degree from Appalachian, that’s a good thing for North Carolina, the nation, and the world, I’d say.”
But there’s no doubt that 20 by 2020 is an attempt to bring in more money as well. Neither the system administration nor the state is requiring more growth at App State, Everts says. A bigger enrollment will bring in more state dollars, and she hopes that “the General Assembly and the Board of Governors say: We are so proud of Appalachian and how well they do that perhaps they need additional funding.”
Many at the university feel that it deserves more money out of Raleigh. App State retained 88 percent of its freshmen from the fall of 2018 to the fall of 2019, and its six-year-graduation rate is 73 percent — a performance that a lot of public universities would kill to have, says Andrew Koricich, director of higher-ed programs in the leadership- and educational-studies department. Yet the university receives the lowest amount of state support per student of any University of North Carolina institution.
The idea of enrolling 20,000 students by 2020 dates back to at least 2014, when Everts became chancellor, after serving as provost at Illinois State University. She saw a pattern of “slow and steady growth” over the previous years and reasoned that, if it continued through the end of the decade, it would put App State at about 20,000 students in 2020. “That’s just what I inherited in regard to the growth rate,” she says.
If you multiply the fall enrollment numbers each year from 2010 by 1.5 percent, you do get to about 20,000 students in 2020. But actual fall enrollment at Appalachian has fluctuated from year to year, rising nearly 3 percent in the fall of 2017 and dipping by half a percentage point in 2015. In 2018 it rose about 1 percent.
To make 20,000 by the fall of 2020 would still be a stretch: Enrollment will have to grow by almost 4 percent from last year, the largest annual increase over the preceding decade.
The 20 by 2020 goal would be an undeniable milestone for the institution, and a potential card to play in future budget discussions. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a chancellor or a president who said, You know, I really have enough,” Everts says. “I always want more for Appalachian. That’s my job.”
On its face, growth has been good for Appalachian State.
“This spring sociology is doing really great, because all of our classes are almost completely full,” says Cameron D. Lippard, chair of the department. But the idea of even more growth just a few months away frustrates him. He doesn’t have the faculty or the classrooms to offer more seats in the fall. The 20-by-2020 announcement “was an edict from the top down of how we’re going to basically grow numbers without really any resources,” he says.
Other departments are having trouble coming up with enough classes to meet the demand that exists now. Brian W. Raichle, chair of the department of sustainable technology and the built environment, spent the last few days of winter break trying to figure out how to accommodate students on wait lists for spring classes that started in less than a week, even though he and his colleagues had decided that, despite the lists, they “just cannot invent classes at this point,” he says.
When the 20 by 2020 push was presented to the Faculty Senate by the administration in October, he says, most of the discussion focused on how the university planned to enroll the new students. “There was very little discussion about what will happen once they’re here.”
The initial announcement sent some mixed messages. After saying that it wanted to enroll 850 new students, the administration modified its stance. Only about 350 additional students were expected to show up in person, professors were told. The rest would attend virtually; about 400 of the additional students would be recruited for App State’s online courses and about 100 for its graduate programs, some of which are heavily or exclusively taught online.
While we do want to meet 20,000, we do not want to sacrifice quality to do so.
Online programs are far more scalable than face-to-face instruction, but enrolling that many more students in App State Online by this fall is going to be a challenge for Benjamin C. Powell, App State’s interim vice provost for online learning. Although he’s optimistic about the university’s ability to increase online enrollment, he will have only about 35 existing programs to work with — and so little time.
He also knows he needs to lay some groundwork: Professors can’t just start teaching online. They require training and guidance. “The only bottleneck in scaling up is the instruction capacity,” Powell says.
As the student population grows, support resources may continue to be stretched thin. Even now, professors say, they hear from students about long waits to receive counseling; some students give up rather than wait. Lippard, the sociology chair, says 15 students passed through his department this past fall “who couldn’t get mental-health services in September and needed them drastically.” Four of them dropped out, he adds.
J.J. Brown, vice chancellor for student affairs, says reports of long waits for counseling appointments are incorrect. Walk-in students can typically be seen within 24 hours even if they’re not in crisis, he says. Delays in getting appointments often result from students’ trying to schedule time with a particular counselor among the 18 full-time staff members, rather than seeing someone who’s available.
More students will drive the need for more hiring. If 350 additional students do end up coming to campus in the fall, that will mean as many as 50 more students seeking help. “We believe we can navigate that,” he says, by hiring three additional counselors and enlisting graduate students in counseling or psychology to take up some of the load.
One area of the university that has been better prepared is housing. Appalachian is opening new housing for an additional 400 students in August, and Brown estimates that some 1,200 additional beds will be available this fall, thanks to a private-development boom that has seen new apartment buildings, most aimed at the student market, rising all over town.
But there are limits to how much growth Boone, which has a full-time population of about 19,000, can accommodate. The most obvious barriers are physical: Low Appalachian peaks rise on all sides of the town. “We’re in this little bowl surrounded by mountains,” says Rennie Brantz, mayor of Boone. In addition to its transient student population, the Boone area is a popular locale for vacation homes. Both demographics have led to more traffic congestion and have driven up housing costs for residents. The town of Boone employs about 180 people, Brantz notes, and only about a dozen of them can afford to live in Boone itself.
Brantz has been in Boone since 1973, when he took up a post as a professor of history at the university. He has seen Boone’s population and prosperity rise with Appalachian’s. “We’re reaping the benefits and the problems of that significant growth,” he says. While he worries that the town doesn’t really have the infrastructure to handle hundreds more students, he thinks it will find a way. “We’ll adjust if they show up.”
Appalachian State faces some tactical challenges in recruiting an additional 850 students, but a larger hurdle looms beyond those. “I’ve gotten very clear direction from our chancellor that while we do want to meet 20,000, we do not want to sacrifice quality to do so,” says Cindy Barr, associate vice chancellor for enrollment.
Many professors worry that that is exactly what is going to happen — and some think it already has. App State’s acceptance rate for freshmen rose from 63 percent in 2012 to about 70 percent in 2018. Last year it jumped to 77 percent. Barr expects it to be about 76 percent this year. Scott T. Marshall, a professor of geological and environmental sciences, says initial conversations with administrators about 20 by 2020 indicated that the admit rate would go up, but that it would remain “sub-90 percent.”
“That’s the thing that scariest to me,” Marshall says. The student perception of quality is that colleges with lower acceptance rates are prestigious, he adds, and if App State’s rate of admitted students remains higher than it’s been in the past, its reputation will suffer with the very demographic it is most eager to attract.
The idea that App State can recruit an additional 850 students without compromising on standards strikes many professors as laughable. Competition for top students has gotten so intense that “to get 850 additional new students, the only way to go is down in the pool,” says Raichle, the sustainable-technology department chair.
Barr counters that even as Appalachian’s application pool has grown — applications are expected to be about 6 percent higher this year — the quality of the students applying has remained about the same. “I am hoping that we can help our faculty better understand what an admit rate is, and what that means, and how that might tie to perception,” he says.
But many Appalachian State professors already feel that they have to serve too many students, that their resources are stretched too thin, and that some students are less prepared for college-level work than students used to be.
In late December, Dale Wheeler taught his last courses as a professor of chemistry before he retired. Data he’s collected on his introductory-chemistry class offers a window into how App State has changed. He taught it almost every semester, including summers, for 22 years. Chemistry is hard, he says, but the number of students who failed or dropped remained pretty stable, at about 25 percent for every class, even as class sizes expanded from about 40 to more than 60, until about 2014.
In 2015 his classes swelled to nearly 90 students, and the admit rate at the university began climbing past 65 percent. “I’ve watched my drop rates get into the 30-percent range,” he says. “Eventually it got into the 40-percent range.” This past fall, his last semester, the proportion of students who failed or dropped the class reached 52 percent.
Since it’s a prerequisite for so many other courses, chemistry has to remain fairly standardized. “The homework is exactly the same all the way through,” he says. “The pace of the class hasn’t changed. The classroom hasn’t changed. I tell the same jokes on the same days.” He says other STEM colleagues see it, too — the academic ability of the students now coming to App State isn’t the same as it used to be.
Many professors among the 1,000 full-time faculty members expect their current struggles with teaching to get worse if 20 by 2020 succeeds. Appalachian is in the process of hiring 10 new tenure-track faculty members, but doing so can be fraught, Wheeler says. Professors at App State are not paid well compared with their colleagues at peer institutions, and their workloads often preclude teaching special-topic classes or taking research sabbaticals. “We don’t have a good story to tell to new candidates that are coming to campus,” Wheeler says. Ten new professors may help, and they come on top of 43 tenure lines that have been added since 2015, but many departments feel they are barely keeping up as it is.
An institution that thrives on growth might begin to wither from too much of it.
One of the biggest frustrations for many faculty members is that they believe in App State as a place that provides students with good programs, a lot of personal attention, and hands-on learning opportunities — all things imperiled by continued growth. Professors are not only the main academic resources for students, but are also often at the front lines of providing extra support, like tutoring or helping them deal with a death in the family, says Martha McCaughey, a professor of sociology. “If we have that many more students, then we can’t make those individual accommodations.”
Weiss, the sustainable-development major from Michigan, came to App State because he thought he would be getting a lot of personal interaction with professors, but so far, he says, “I haven’t had a great experience.” He doesn’t blame his adviser or the department chair. “There are just too many students to give time to individuals in a really committed way,” he says.
As professors scramble to plan for an unknown but probably much larger number of new students in the fall, their biggest question seems to be, why? Why is 20 by 2020 so important if it may make the university bigger but perhaps not better? “We’re going against what our strength is, and we don’t understand the why or the how,” says Richard D. Rheingans, chair of the sustainable-development department. “I think that part of the frustration of this is, What are we losing?”
Appalachian has the examples of other colleges to learn from. At least one of them decided to scale back its ambitions for enrollment growth once it considered what might be waiting down the road.
Auburn University, in Alabama, has expanded its enrollment by nearly 20 percent since the fall of 2011, to about 30,000 students, but is tapping the brakes on growth for now, says Bobby R. Woodard, senior vice president for student affairs. In the spring of 2019, with another flush fall class already coming in, administrators took stock of the university’s growth and its capacity for more. How much further could their academic resources stretch if they still wanted to get students to graduation in four years? Could their student-support services handle more traffic? How many more people could the town of Auburn, population 64,000, accommodate?
And would planning for growth be prudent as demographics change nationwide? “Not a lot of kids were born in 2008, due to the recession,” Woodard says. “You do the math, and in the mid-’20s, that’s going to impact the number of high-school graduates in the state of Alabama.”
An institution that thrives on growth might begin to wither from too much of it.
Administrators at Auburn opted to try to keep enrollment about where it is for the fall of 2020. The decision was made easier by the fact that Alabama’s support for its public colleges isn’t tied to growth, so there’s no financial incentive to raise enrollment.
If App State grows to 20,000 students or beyond, must it “then always have at least 20,000 students” to maintain its finances? Koricich asks, even as the number of traditional-age students drop, and competition for them everywhere increases. “That’s hard. It’s a gamble.”
Whenever a college considers growth, the subject should involve research and forethought, says Richard A. Hesel, a principal with the Art & Science Group, a company that does consulting work for colleges. “You have to plan for this,” he says. “It can’t be willy-nilly, because then you get caught with your pants down.”
Hesel recommends that any college weighing a strategy of growth consider trying something called scenario planning. The practice imagines what might happen in various situations — say, if enrollment grows but state support drops — and how various responses to them might make matters better or worse.
It’s also important for any college considering a big strategic move to try to have everyone on board. When an initiative is meeting resistance, it’s often because “there isn’t a clear, shared future vision that’s communicated,” says Richard Staisloff, a principal of Rpk Group, a company that advises colleges about their business models. “We end up changing, but we’re not changing toward something, and that’s really essential.”
Staisloff also cautions that growth may not always be a financial boon. Well-planned growth creates enough revenue to allow institutions to reinvest in themselves. “If we grow, and all of those resources are consumed just to accommodate the growth,” he says, “that may not be a sustainable model.”
Whether Appalachian State can enroll 20,000 students by 2020 remains to be seen, but some in Boone are already wondering if the growth will stop there. Brantz, the mayor, says he’s already heard local businesspeople discussing the prospect of 25 by 2025.
On campus, Raichle, chair of the department of sustainable technology and the built environment, says he knows what should happen if enrollment hits 20,000 in six months. But he suspects he knows what will actually happen.
What should happen is that a department chair like him should put his foot down. “Just say, No, we’re done,” he says. “We’re not going to increase the capacity of our classes. We’re going to tell the students to go to the chancellor, go to the dean, and bitch and complain, because maybe that would cause a change.”
That’s what he wants to do. “But that’s not what’s going to happen,” he says. “What’s going to happen is, we’re going to increase the caps in our classes. I’m going to have faculty advising 70 majors. We’re going to try so hard to not drop the quality. We’re going to try to accommodate those students who aren’t prepared. That is what’s going to happen.”
And some people will call that a win.
