Mizzou’s Freshman Class Shrank by a Third Over 2 Years. Here’s How It’s Trying to Turn That Around.

At first glance, the University of Missouri at Columbia looks a lot like most large college campuses: a maze of brick and stone buildings and a grassy quad. An iconic landmark — six 43-foot-tall columns. College food joints and bars with names that roll off the tongue: Sparky’s, Pickleman’s, Booches, the ’Berg.

Two and a half years ago, however, people across the country tuned in to cable news networks and saw a much different Mizzou. As black students protested the tepid response of the university’s leaders to racism, the campus became a hotbed of racial unrest.

Depending on one’s perspective, Mizzou was either an unsafe place for people of color or a bastion of political correctness where campus officials had ceded control to whiny students. Those perceptions took a firm hold and helped touch off a 35-percent decline in freshman enrollment over just two years.

The drop cost the university about $30 million. Mizzou’s new leadership team — anchored by Mun Choi, president of the Missouri system, and Alexander Cartwright, chancellor of the Columbia campus, both of whom started last year — knew they had to act fast.

What happened at Mizzou, though, isn’t just a story about the consequences of protests and a parade of negative headlines. It’s a story about the cost of complacency.

For years, the university had expanded its student body and enjoyed widespread support from state lawmakers, Missourians, and alumni — without much effort. The 2015 protests rattled people, however. Administrators realized that they had taken a lot for granted. Namely, people’s trust in Mizzou.

Over the past four months, The Chronicle has spoken with administrators on several occasions to get a sense of what they were doing to pull off a badly needed turnaround.

Their strategy is focused on increasing enrollment, a challenge for an institution that hasn’t previously had to work hard to recruit students. But it’s focused just as much on repairing the public trust. That’s a tougher task.

Mizzou officials believed that once they did a better job of “telling the Mizzou story” and separating that narrative from the protests, students would come back. That has required walking a fine line: acknowledging what happened and touting what’s been done to respond to the concerns of minority students, while also emphasizing that the situation on campus wasn’t as bad as it appeared in the press.

There are signs that the university’s efforts may be starting to work. As of early June, nearly 4,600 freshmen had paid enrollment deposits at Mizzou for the fall-2018 semester, a 14-percent jump from last year.

That total is still far from the 2015 freshman class of 6,200. Enrollment is a notoriously difficult puzzle to solve, given the mix of factors that play a role in students’ college decisions.

College counselors in Missouri say some parents of high-school students — the students themselves, not so much — have raised concerns about the protests. They also highlight a different, more pressing issue: Mizzou has become a less attractive option for many families because of rising tuition and financial aid that hasn’t kept pace.

A Negative Perception

When Choi and Cartwright came on board last year, reversing the enrollment decline was not just a priority, it was a matter of extreme urgency.

That hadn’t been the case for their predecessors. Mizzou grew so fast from 2000 to 2015 — eventually hitting 35,000 in total enrollment — that many people thought the university would easily top 40,000 students within a few years. Developers hurriedly built up apartment complexes in anticipation. Now many sit unfilled. “Welcome students!” proclaims a banner on one building, a few blocks off campus. “We’ll beat any price!”

“The football team was doing well, the basketball team was doing well, enrollment was going up — it was through the roof,” Choi said. “They really didn’t know why it was going up, but it was going up. And then, boom, 2015.”

During the fall semester of that year, black students forcefully called attention to racism on the campus, and said administrators brushed them off. Tensions swelled until there was an encampment on the quad, a boycott by the football team, and a student who vowed to go on a hunger strike until the Missouri system’s president stepped down.

For a week, the situation played out on national television, ending with the resignations of the flagship’s chancellor and the system’s president: “Mizzou players on strike after racist incidents.” “Professor asks for ‘muscle’ to block journalists.” “Mizzou president resigning over race tensions.”

Less than a year later, Mizzou’s enrollment had shrunk by 2,200 students, including 23 percent fewer freshmen. By the following May, the campus learned it would shrink by another 2,400.

That same month, Cartwright was interviewing for the Mizzou chancellor’s job. Everyone was asking him about enrollment. How are you going to manage this? What’s your plan? Meanwhile, Choi — who had started in March — brought a wide-ranging group to the table: Enrollment management. Communications and marketing. University relations. Mizzou Extension. Finance. Diversity and inclusion. The deans.

The central problem, this group concluded, was a negative perception of the university — one that had spread in the news media but was, in their view, far from reality. That was compounded by the fact that, while Mizzou had always had an enrollment-management team, there hadn’t been a need to think strategically about student recruitment. “We were caught off guard,” Cartwright said.

In a time of rampant misinformation that molds people’s viewpoints, rebuilding trust in any institution is difficult, Cartwright said. The next step was to figure out what exactly the existing narrative about Mizzou was. So university officials hit the road. They asked people, over and over: What do you think about Mizzou?

Some people said Mizzou didn’t represent their values. Others were concerned that the campus wasn’t safe. They thought the protests had included violence and destruction. (They didn’t, Choi stressed.) The rising cost of college was also on people’s minds; they worried that Mizzou was becoming out of reach for them financially.

Choi said he talked with farmers, Rotary Club members, local politicians. He attended meetings of the Missouri Farm Bureau, the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association, the Missouri Soybean Association. “I know where my food comes from now,” he joked.

He got an earful from quite a few people, particularly lawmakers. “For the first several months, it was in some cases being lectured to,” he said. “‘Where is the leadership? Who is running the university? And what are your strategic goals for the university?’ Because they didn’t know.”

Looping in the university’s Extension office, which has a presence in every county, was key. Marshall Stewart came from North Carolina State University to lead the office in 2016.

Missouri’s geographic diversity adds complexity, Stewart said, because there are so many different perspectives to take into account. “If you go to Atchison County, in northwest Missouri, you’re in Nebraska,” he said. “If you go to Pemiscot County, in the southeast, you’re in Mississippi.”

“St. Louis believes it’s more like Chicago and Philadelphia,” he continued. “Kansas City wants to be Denver.”

One theme prevails among most of the people Stewart has talked to: “They for some reason have a deep sense — it’s almost DNA-driven — that they’re supposed to love this place called the University of Missouri.” At the same time, he sensed a disconnect.

In recent years, Mizzou officials hadn’t spent enough time building relationships with ordinary folks around the state, he said. Many of them will never set foot on the campus. But helping them — through research projects, health-care programs, efforts to expand educational opportunity, and the like — is a critical part of a land-grant university’s mission, Stewart said.

When the protests and resulting fallout happened, Missourians felt stung, he said. The institution they saw on TV and in the news was not the one they’d been proud to call their own. But a lot of those people already felt like Mizzou had forgotten about them.

That’s not just a problem in Missouri, Stewart said. “I think public higher ed has lost its way,” he said. “If you don’t remember who your biggest donor is, and your biggest constituent is — it’s not just those who come to the football games and sit in the suite, it’s those people who pay their tax money every year to do things to underwrite this institution. And we’ve got to listen to them.”

He’s spent much of his tenure on the road, visiting more than 100 counties. In the coming months, he plans to visit all 114 university-extension offices across the state.

“We’d been losing ground with Missourians for a while because we had grown so fast, things were so good,” he continued. “And what happens is, you get your eye off the ball. You forget what you were charged to do.”

Better Marketing

As the listening tour continued, administrators started Phase Two: actually getting more students in the door. How? Control the narrative about Mizzou. Encourage people to come to Columbia and set foot on the campus. Let them sit in classes, speak to faculty members and students. And decide for themselves what Mizzou is.

Many of the steps are ones that other universities took years ago: joining the Common Application, making over their brand, targeting messages to specific groups, ramping up promotion on social media. Before the 2017-18 year, Choi said, “there was perhaps a lackadaisical arrogance of how we approached enrollment. It was, ‘This is the flagship, you should come to our flagship,’ instead of demonstrating what the value is of the education we provide.”

Mizzou hired 160over90, a public-relations firm, at a cost of $1.3 million over three years. Informed by the firm’s help, the university spent $1.8 million this academic year on marketing directly related to recruiting and enrolling its fall-2018 class. That amounts to about $230 per student, given the current number of freshmen.

In a Columbia mall, a huge poster next to the food court features student testimonials about why they chose Mizzou and a lengthy list of fast facts: “300+ degree programs.” “No. 6 among colleges & universities for best safety resources.” “Pell-eligible students receive free tuition.”

“Free tuition” means that the university made tuition effectively free for some low-income students by filling the gap not covered by Pell Grants or scholarships and calling it the “land-grant compact.” Officials also urged faculty members to start using more open educational resources in their courses to save students money. They created more-flexible meal-plan options. And they created “black and gold” scholarships for qualified children of Missouri alumni.

Choi also talked with community-college presidents about how to bring in more transfer students. One result was a central resource hub for transfers. Another was an agreement with Moberly Area Community College, a 40-minute drive north of Mizzou. Students initially take classes at both Moberly and Mizzou, but they’re considered part of the university right away and can transfer there easily. About 180 students are now taking part in that program. Over all, deposits for this fall from transfer students are up 12.7 percent.

Given the university’s budget challenges — in the 2017-18 fiscal year, Mizzou had to plug a nearly $20-million hole — the money for marketing, financial aid, and traveling around the state wasn’t just lying around. “Last year, there were decisions made to cut beyond what was necessary,” Cartwright said.

Some of the savings came from layoffs, about 350 total on the Columbia campus. A handful of senior administrative positions were eliminated or combined. The campus also stopped subsidizing administrators’ cellphones, got rid of a fleet of Mizzou cars, and reduced its mileage-reimbursement rate for university travel.

A wide range of people continue to be involved in the recruitment efforts. Alumni have been tagging along with administrators on high-school visits and handwriting personal notes and making phone calls to accepted students in their cities or towns.

Kevin McDonald, chief diversity officer at both the Missouri system and the Columbia campus, said he’s given his cellphone number to many prospective students and families — “parents, godparents, grandparents, cousins,” McDonald said with a laugh.

It helps that his own daughter will be a freshman at Mizzou this fall. Families know he’s not making empty promises. “I just want them to know that if they have questions, they will get answers.”

‘Big Disconnect’

On one campus tour in early April, the protests didn’t come up. A small group of prospective students and parents, bundled up against the biting cold, was mostly content to follow along and listen as Sophia Cygnarowicz, their tour guide, chatted about Mizzou and showed them the library, the residence halls, and the luxurious recreation center — complete with a spa and a lazy river.

Cygnarowicz, who recently graduated, gave campus tours for two and a half years. In the fall of 2016, she got a lot of questions about the protests: “What is the university doing? How is it responding?”

Freedom of speech often came up, too, she said: “A lot of other universities have problems with shutting down students in their speech — does that still happen?” That was based in part on what happened with Melissa Click, the former assistant professor who tried to block a journalist from covering the protests, and was later fired.

Even this spring, people asked about the protests “every once in a while,” Cygnarowicz said.

“My biggest thing is that being a student while it was happening and seeing how the media represented it — definitely a big disconnect,” she said. “You can ask 20 students what their experience was like, and they’ll all talk about it differently, based on how close to the events they were and their background and their knowledge on those topics.”

At this point in the academic year, students who had ranked Mizzou as their top choice had already committed to enrolling. Now administrators needed to convince the last-minute deciders who were on the fence.

Madelyn Ward, the only high-school senior in the tour group, was one of them. Ward, who’s from a suburb of St. Louis, was torn between Mizzou and the University of Alabama.

The protests weren’t playing a role in her decision-making process. “I wasn’t thinking about college back in 2015,” she said. She’s more interested in program offerings — she plans to study nursing — and “the feel” of the campus.

In terms of the choices that individual students are making, cost and fit are the bigger issues, some Missouri college counselors say. The protests haven’t come up as much. “Maybe a few little comments — hey, what’s going on at Mizzou?” said Rob Lundien, a counselor at Park Hill South High School, outside of Kansas City. “But I don’t feel like it ever affected their decisions.”

In 2014, Jeffrey Buckman said his institution, Eureka High School, west of St. Louis, sent about 80 of nearly 500 graduating seniors to Mizzou. In 2016, that number dipped to 60. “Their scholarships haven’t caught up with what other places are giving,” Buckman said. “With the price of Mizzou now closer to $30,000 than $20,000 a year, that’s a hard sell for parents sometimes.”

More of his students are opting for the University of Kansas, he said, because it has increased its scholarship offerings.

A handful of parents have asked questions about the 2015 turmoil, Buckman said. “They’re just concerned about, Does that take away from the academics? Is it taking away from other things? What will it mean for the four-year experience there?”

He assures parents that the leadership crisis and the racist incidents were isolated issues. He also reminds them that they live in a “suburban bubble” and that it might be good for their children to experience a different environment and help lead the charge for change at Mizzou.

Perception comes up, but mostly in the context of prestige, Buckman said. Would a degree from Mizzou be perceived as less valuable than a degree from Washington University in St. Louis? Is attending the latter worth tens of thousands of dollars more in tuition?

Come May, there was good news at Mizzou: The university would welcome several hundred additional freshmen this fall. Choi and Cartwright breathed sighs of relief.

“If we had gone down in enrollment this year, we would not have been able to explain — with new leadership in place, with all of the positive changes that we’ve made — why students are not coming,” Choi said. “This was a very critical, critical year for us.”

Typically, he added, students are making decisions about college as sophomores and juniors: “We’ve actually had to change the minds of people in their senior year.”

Mizzou pulled more students from the rural counties of southwest Missouri in particular, Choi said. And applications among minority students were up, signaling that concerns about their safety at the university have waned. More than 300 African-American freshmen are slated to come in the fall; only 226 enrolled in 2015, when overall enrollment was much higher.

The current class of 4,600 is still fewer freshmen than the 4,800 who enrolled in the fall of 2016, the first year of the precipitous decline, and 26-percent smaller than the 2015 class. The financial reality of smaller undergraduate classes will continue to play out over the next few years.

And Ward, the high-school senior from St. Louis, wasn’t won over. She committed to Alabama. “It was one of those things where I couldn’t really describe it,” she said, “but I just felt at home at Bama.”

Ultimately, many students make college choices based on a gut feeling. Protests or no protests, that’s not something administrators can do much about.

Dan Bauman contributed to this article.

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.