No public flagship has been hollowed out more in the last decade than the University of Montana at Missoula.
On Tuesday the university released the results of its undergraduate census, reporting a headcount of 6,321 for the fall of 2019. Compare that with the count taken at the start of the decade, in 2011, when 10,567 undergraduates enrolled. Indeed, after eight years of back-to-back declines, Montana’s undergraduate class has decreased by more than 40 percent, according to figures released by the university.
A closer look at what’s happened at Montana, and at institutions across the state, reveals that bad news isn’t the only reason the flagship is losing students.
The numbers were first reported on Tuesday by the Montana Kaimin, the university’s student newspaper.
Though the data are less recent than the numbers released this week, disclosures by America’s flagship universities to the U.S. Department of Education over the past decade illustrate just how severe the declines have been at the Montana flagship.
From the fall of 2011 to the fall of 2017, the university shed nearly a third of its undergraduates, according to disclosures made to the Education Department. That 30-plus-percent decline dwarfed those seen at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and the University of Idaho, which had the second- and third-largest enrollment dips, respectively, but posted much smaller losses during the same period.
What’s behind the drop? One possible reason is a sexual-assault scandal.
Montana has faced intense scrutiny from the news media and the government for its handling of sexual-misconduct cases. In 2013, Montana officials agreed to overhaul the university’s policies after a joint investigation by the U.S. Departments of Justice and of Education.
In 2015 the author Jon Krakauer published a book about the scandal, Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, that chronicled the painful experiences of several Montana students who reported sexual assaults. And last year the Education Department imposed a fine against Montana of nearly $1 million for alleged Clery Act violations. The university has appealed that outcome.
Paula Short, a spokeswoman for Montana, acknowledged the challenges the university has faced since the start of the decade but disputed the idea that its struggles could be traced to a single cause. After years of transition within the enrollment and admissions units, Short said Montana had found stability and is prepared to vigorously recruit students, from both inside the state and outside it.
“The president has put together a new team focused on student success, and one that hopes to excite students with the UM story,” Short said.
A closer look at what’s happened at Montana, and at institutions across the state, reveals that bad news isn’t the only reason the flagship is losing students.
Among its home-state brethren, Montana is hardly an outlier when it comes to enrollment attrition. Nearly all of the institutions have substantially smaller enrollments than they did at the start of the decade, and all but two of Montana’s public colleges saw undergraduate losses of at least 10 percent relative to 2011.
Much of the pain those institutions are experiencing, said Peace Bransberger, a senior research analyst at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, can be attributed to a far smaller pool of high-school seniors available to enroll in Montana.
From 2010 to 2016, Bransberger said, the number of 12th-graders in the state declined by 5 percent.
Bransberger said universities and the public should not only engage with topline numbers regarding college-enrollment trends in their state, but also consider less-obvious trends.
“There are increasing minority populations, for example,” Bransberger said. “They have to be an important part of the planning, not just as a strategy for enrollment management but also as part of serving the state-resident population.”
Amid the upheaval, the number of undergrads identifying as white has decreased at Montana, from 86 percent in 2011 to 79 percent in 2017. Within the state, the number of 12th-graders identifying as white declined by 9 percent.
A Tale of Two Universities
As the flagship stumbled, another Montana university has thrived: Montana State.
In 2010 more than 6,400 Montana high-school graduates enrolled as first-time freshmen at universities and colleges across America. By 2016 the number of college-bound residents had dwindled to 5,408. In both years, the number of Montanans choosing to enroll at institutions in their home state hovered around 78 percent.
But in that time, the preferred university to attend in Montana changed significantly.
Montana and Montana State each respectively enrolled around 1,200 recent Montana high-school graduates in 2010. Put another way, Montana had enrolled 20 percent of all recent Montana high-school graduates who chose to attend college in America that year. Ditto for Montana State.
Six years later and with far fewer high-school graduates to compete for, nearly 15 percent of Montanans enrolled as freshmen at the University of Montana. In contrast, the share of recent high-school graduates enrolling at Montana State climbed to 27 percent.
For a long time, Montana seemed to rely heavily on students coming from the state’s high schools “and did very little to recruit them,” said Lee Banville, a professor of journalism. The attitude among university officials seemed to be: “You come to Montana because we are Montana.”
At the same time, Montana State has significantly increased its recruitment of out-of-state undergraduates. In 2010 just over 40 percent of recent American high-school graduates who attended Montana State were from out of state. By 2016, Montana State’s share of that group had increased to nearly 52 percent. All the while, the portion of out-of-state traditional freshman enrollees at Montana remained pretty stable, around 37 percent in both years.
Last year Montana State spent nearly twice as much on marketing as Montana did, according to the Montana Kaimin.
A few years ago, when Tom DeLuca was working at the University of Washington, his son was starting his college search. “We got mailings from MSU one after another — glossy, multipage mailings,” said DeLuca, who’s now dean of the College of Forestry and Conservation at Montana. “We got nothing from UM.”
Then, right before his son’s senior year, he got his first communication from Montana: a plain typed letter. (The Montana State marketing blitz didn’t sway him, though; he ultimately attended Montana.)
Another possible advantage for Montana State: It’s focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics programs, while Montana is a liberal-arts institution. DeLuca believes that, in the aftermath of the 2008 economic recession, politicians and others overemphasized how much better the job prospects were for graduates with STEM degrees. And Montana State probably benefited from that.
There has been a particularly noticeable “flight from the humanities” at Montana, said Richard Drake, a professor of history. The campus feels different now, Drake said, and not just because there are fewer students. Over all, students seem to have less confidence in the value of the liberal arts. “We’ve been in a slump,” he said.
‘Late in the Game’
When Banville, the journalism professor, first came to Montana, in 2009, he remembers enrollment being so high that some students were living in residence-hall lounges because there weren’t enough dorm rooms.
Banville attributed the enrollment decline to, among other things, “a lack of leadership from parts of the university,” which means there hasn’t been a coherent recruitment strategy.
High turnover hasn’t helped. In late 2016, Montana’s president was ousted. In 2017 and 2018 interim officials held many of the university’s top administrative positions. Three different vice presidents have been in charge of enrollment management since the beginning of 2016. This past March the associate vice president for enrollment, who oversaw student recruitment, left after just five months.
On one occasion, DeLuca said, financial-aid letters went out to prospective students three months late. He also recalled a faculty member’s trying out the university’s old online application process and learning just how confusing it was. “It was a mess,” DeLuca said. (The process has since been streamlined.)
While the enrollment office’s new leader seems committed, Banville said, key investments are just now being made. And reversing such a slide takes time. Compared with Montana State and peer institutions, he said, Montana is “just late in the game.”
Journalism faculty members at Montana have been meeting with high-school students on their own, Banville said. “We all realize that our survival depends on this,” he said.
While many of the enrollment problems seem to be more structural, there’s no question that the investigations and scrutiny surrounding sexual misconduct continue to hang over the university. DeLuca recalled recently talking to a university donor about his daughter’s college plans. She said she wanted to study creative writing, which is one of Montana’s academic strengths. But she didn’t even want to look at Montana. She had read Krakauer’s book because it was required at her high school.
DeLuca sees some positive signs, though. He said the university’s current president, Seth Bodnar, has done more to promote the message that Montana’s liberal-arts programs offer the kind of well-rounded education that employers are looking for. He hopes the upticks in freshman and overall retention this fall indicate that a turnaround is beginning.
In terms of potential recruiting opportunities, DeLuca pointed to the 30,000 California high-school students who were not accepted by a California State University campus last year. Montana, he said, “would be a fantastic alternative.”
Dan Bauman is a reporter who investigates and writes about all things data in higher education. Tweet him at @danbauman77 or email him at dan.bauman@chronicle.com. 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.
