There’s a sense of urgency these days in Defiance, Ohio. Defiance College, an institution of 1,000 students halfway between Toledo and Fort Wayne, Ind., hasn’t hit its goals for enrollment and tuition revenue since 2011.
“This was not just a blip, but a trend that has to be addressed,” says Tim Rickabaugh, a professor of exercise science who is filling in as interim provost. In the past year, Defiance has lost its provost and its president, and has embarked on a strategic-planning process, identifying new partnerships and programs that might bring students in — and keep them around for all four years.
Defiance is hardly the only college hoping for a better future. It is one of 144 institutions that missed their goals for both first-year enrollment and net tuition revenue this year, according to the third annual Chronicle survey of small colleges and midsize public institutions.
In cooperation with the Council of Independent Colleges and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, The Chronicle polled 1,066 colleges, of which 455 responded: 308 small private colleges and 147 public institutions.
Three years of responses reveal that many colleges, especially the public ones, are doing fairly well, even slightly better this year, having drawn in enough students and tuition revenue to meet their goals. Still, some face serious challenges.
For cash-strapped small colleges and midsize state institutions, filling classrooms is great, but having enough tuition dollars is vital.
Of the 139 colleges that have shared their results for three straight years, 17 public and 48 private institutions missed their revenue goals at least twice. And seven public and 19 private institutions fell short in all of the past three years. They are concentrated in the Great Plains and around the Great Lakes — many of them, like Defiance, in Ohio.
[[inlineframe url="//datawrapper.dwcdn.net/AYwRh/7/" align="left” size="half-width” height="500"]] [[inlineframe url="//datawrapper.dwcdn.net/3BBMX/3/" align="left” size="half-width” height="200"]] [[inlineframe url="//datawrapper.dwcdn.net/6Xjrj/3/" align="left” size="half-width”]] [[inlineframe url="//datawrapper.dwcdn.net/oS5O4/4/" align="left” size="half-width”]] In all, the numbers indicate that colleges are adjusting to a competitive market. While 34 percent of responding colleges missed both goals this year, that was better than last year, when 39 percent did so, and by wider margins. Among the public colleges, 45 percent said they had enrolled more international and out-of-state students than in the previous year.
More than 70 percent of public colleges and slightly more than 60 percent of private colleges met or exceeded their enrollment and/or revenue goals this year.
Those numbers are encouraging in a year when Sweet Briar College announced that it would shut down, raising anxieties about the viability of small institutions everywhere, says Harold V. Hartley III, senior vice president at the Council of Independent Colleges.
“The narrative is that everyone is like Sweet Briar, and they are on the verge of closing,” he says. “That is just not the case.”
In fact, in an era of volatile enrollment, he’s heard of a number of small colleges — even those in remote areas with dwindling numbers of high-school graduates — that are having their best years.
Reversing a Trend
For some colleges, this year represents a turnaround.
Susquehanna University, in Selinsgrove, Pa., had not hit its goals since 2012. Madeleine Rhyneer, vice president for enrollment and marketing, arrived in early 2014 to try to salvage yet another rough admissions cycle.
In marketing and recruitment, the university had floundered, she says. What’s more, she notes, Susquehanna is in central Pennsylvania. “Nobody is saying, Oh, my gosh, I gotta get me some of that,” says Ms. Rhyneer. “Everybody wants to go to a city, sometimes including me.”
Since Susquehanna was “tanking” in enrollment, she says, people there were willing to discard scattershot strategies and double down on what worked. Data showed that visits to high schools and college fairs were not yielding students who matriculated, so the new vice president cut that travel, spending more to buy names of students who might be a good fit.
The university also honed its marketing efforts, playing up its off-campus study programs and efforts to connect students to careers.
When a college is desperate for students, “it becomes the land of say anything,” says Ms. Rhyneer. That dilutes the message to prospective students and parents. “Really effective marketing, of course, is about being really clear about who you are.”
The new strategies worked for Susquehanna. This year the university exceeded its enrollment goal and met its revenue goal, even after having raised both. The number of first-year students is up 16 percent compared with last year.
Public institutions had fewer challenges, especially in bringing in enough tuition revenue: 46 percent met and 18 percent exceeded those goals for the year. Among those that fell short, respondents cited shrinking state support and tuition caps as obstacles.
Bemidji State University, located in one of the poorest counties in northern Minnesota, missed its goals for both revenue and first-year enrollment, even after lowering them. The Legislature imposed tuition freezes for the previous two years, a tuition cap this year, and another freeze next year.
The university got a slight bump up in state appropriations to counter the effect of the freezes, but state support is based on historical figures, says Bemidji State’s provost, Martin Tadlock, and doesn’t account for the growing costs of contracts, for instance, or of health care and other benefits.
Although the university’s overall enrollment, improved by online and adult-degree-completion programs, has grown since the recession, the share of residential students is declining.
Relative to the growing number of online students, residential students pay more in fees to cover meal plans, residence halls, counseling, technology, athletic facilities, and so on. “We still have to provide the same kinds of services that we have always provided to residential students,” says Mr. Tadlock, but with fewer students to pay for them.
This year Bemidji State will be in the black, but it projects a $2-million deficit on a $72-million budget next year. “That’s not severe, by any means,” the provost says. “But with enrollment being up, and then to face a $2-million budget issue, reflects where institutions like us find ourselves.”
Hope for Next Year
Other colleges face starker challenges, particularly in terms of net tuition revenue.
Of the institutions responding to the survey that have not met their goals for three consecutive years, many are small private colleges, dotted across remote areas of the Rust Belt and the Midwest. Pundits constantly ask: Will these types of places join Sweet Briar, Marian Court College, and others that have announced closures? (Alumni of Sweet Briar have since rallied enough political and financial support to reopen it.)
That most colleges reported hitting their enrollment or revenue targets heartens Rick Staisloff, who consults with colleges on finance and strategy. But significant shares of all respondents — 40 percent of public and 42 percent of private colleges — increased spending on financial aid, and that worries him. So does the fact that more than a third of private colleges this year reported a higher discount rate, the average share of tuition covered by institutional aid. Those are problems, Mr. Staisloff says, given already high discount rates and financial-aid budgets.
But even after a few years of poor enrollment and budget deficits, he says, colleges can turn things around. The first bad year should shake people up and push them to reconsider old standards like the college’s academic portfolio.
“Are we making some of the harder choices about what we offer, to whom, and how, given where student enrollment is and where it is projected to be?” Mr. Staisloff asks. “Are there some things that we should just stop doing?”
After a second down year, a college should develop new strategies and start to act. “If we are not seeing a result by Year 3, that’s a little bit of a red flag,” he says. In those cases, colleges may have the wrong game plan.
There is no telling how many bad years a college can endure, Mr. Staisloff says. That depends on its resources and liabilities — in endowment, fund raising, debt, and so on. “Clearly,” he says, “institutions have proven more resilient than many people imagined.”
‘Are we making some of the harder choices about what we offer, to whom, and how, given where student enrollment is?’
Colleges that missed their goals this year were asked what they might do to adjust. The range of approaches was familiar from previous years: Most are unwilling to cut services or staff. A few say they’ll discontinue underenrolled programs. Most colleges — largely the private ones — say they’ll start new programs, in the hope of attracting students.
But the two preferred strategies, by far, were to put more money into marketing and to improve enrollment management. The responses give credence to enrollment managers who say their jobs are increasingly stressful, with expectations that don’t line up with their colleges’ academic reputations and locations.
Respondents’ comments revealed a mix of fear and hope for the future. One provost said that after an enrollment manager left, the college had “looked under the hood” and “realized that we had little in the way of tested or benchmarked outcomes and little to no institutionalized procedures.” But the experience has been positive overall. “As distressing as that was, it is taking less time to rebuild than we thought it might,” the provost wrote, “and we are already seeing better results in the numbers this year.”
At a small public campus in the South, enrollment was down for a third straight year. In the past, the trend line has gone back up in the fourth year, an administrator said.
“Next year will be very important.” Another respondent shared that anticipation: “We have a lot riding on a turnaround for next year since we cannot sustain the institution at the current enrollment, let alone at a lower enrollment.”
Defiance College is looking for a path forward by trying to bring in more students of different types.
The former president and provost focused too much on traditional, first-year, residential students, says Mr. Rickabaugh, the interim provost. “They neglected to realize that, especially where we are located, you have to create many pipelines for students,” he says. That includes returning adults, students enrolled at community colleges, and transfers from other institutions.
Defiance will also try to improve retention. The college’s six-year graduation rate is now “somewhere in the 30s,” Mr. Rickabaugh says. Only about half of first-year students come back the next year. Trying to attract more serious students should help, he says. “Some institutions focus just on the size of the first-year class. We are going to focus a bit more on quality and let quality lead to size.”
The college is also looking for new ways to market its popular and distinctive majors — in forensic science, forensic accounting, and nursing — and start others that might attract transfer students from local community colleges. Agribusiness may be one such program.
“We need to thoughtfully, strategically explore those types of programs,” Mr. Rickabaugh says, “because we can’t really afford to fail.”
Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.
