Then Enrollment Fell Off a Cliff: How Beloit College Is Trying to Regain Students

“Whipsawed” is how Scott Bierman describes the past five years at Beloit College, where he has been president since 2009, and where the usual target for first-year classes is about 330 students. Starting in 2015, Beloit had two years of extraordinarily large classes — 392 students, then 382 — followed by a class of 323. Then enrollment fell off a cliff. Beloit had 263 first-year students in 2018 and almost the same number this fall.

After the second big class, Bierman says, “The entire conversation on campus was, ‘For God’s sake, don’t let the vice president bring in more than 360 students.’ We were bursting at the seams. We had rented out space in a local apartment building.” The college didn’t buy those big classes with discounts, he adds: “Net tuition revenue per student rose in the first year and had a small decline in the second year.”

But when the numbers fell into the 200s, the college also saw “a significant decline in net tuition revenue per student, so we got a double whammy.”

“We were floored by this, as you might imagine,” he says. Obviously, there would have to be budget cuts to match the decline in revenue: Some faculty and staff positions were cut, and salaries were reduced in a manner that protected anyone making less than $45,000 a year, with the biggest cuts assigned to those making the most. Bierman hopes that the reductions were all but undetectable to students, although Moody’s Investors Service noticed and downgraded the college’s debt, saying that “Beloit’s student market remains highly pressured.”

Bierman says the college now has a budget model “that allows us to be healthy — not quite as healthy as you might want to be, but healthy — at 310 students per year.” And Beloit has used endowment money to pay off some of its loans, he says, because he doesn’t want “a bank dictating to me what programs to cut.”

How will it attract 310-student classes? Bierman says that Beloit, like many other liberal-arts colleges, has failed at describing what it does — to its own students and faculty members, as well as to off-campus audiences. “We have not done a sufficient job of explaining our value proposition. It’s as simple as that,” he says. Now the college needs to double down on demonstrating “the humanity of Beloit College” to prospective students.

The president and others at Beloit know, of course, what’s been happening at other colleges in the Midwest. In fact, Bierman is a good friend and former Carleton College colleague of Nathan D. Grawe, a Carleton economics professor who is the author of Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. “We have been well in tune with a sophisticated view of the demographics,” says Bierman, “way beyond, What’s the aggregate number of high-school graduates?”

And if you look back further than the most recent five years, he says, “you’d see that we were tracking the sector — slow, gradual, incremental troubles bringing in the full class that we were trying to get.”

In his book, Grawe says there is a distinction between small liberal-arts colleges in the top 50 and the rest of the liberal-arts pack. “Within the Midwest, the experience at Carleton and Colorado College is not what the rest of us are experiencing,” says Bierman. “Virtually everybody outside of maybe those two would say it’s increasingly difficult to get a class that is close to or hits the goals that you’ve set.”

Barbara K. Mistick, the new president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, has been visiting institutions around the country, and says she’s hearing about stress even where she didn’t expect it. “There’s a lot of conversation in New England, and then in Minnesota I heard the same thing,” says Mistick, a former president of Wilson College, in Pennsylvania.

Presidents tell her they’re spending more time on admissions and enrollment, more time trying to find the right mix of offerings, more time trying to understand all the variables. “There are a lot more levers in play,” she says. “The patterns that we’ve seen in the past have been disrupted.”

A few institutions are bucking the trend, Mistick notes, but it’s hard to pinpoint why. And she says even colleges showing signs of enrollment success in yields and class sizes are not seeing the revenue gains that will keep them fiscally sound.

At Beloit and many other small liberal-arts colleges, one big change is in competition from public institutions. Beloit has always competed with other members of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest — Lawrence University and Grinnell, Knox, and Macalester Colleges, for example — as well as with liberal-arts colleges on the East and West Coasts. As recently as a decade ago, public colleges were “basically off the radar screen,” Bierman says. But now the Universities of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota are competitors, including Wisconsin’s La Crosse and Whitewater campuses.

This summer, Beloit brought in a new vice president for enrollment management, Leslie Davidson, who had been chief strategy and innovation officer at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. Also new is the provost and dean of the college, Eric Boynton, who will oversee — and integrate — academics and student affairs.

And faculty and staff members have worked with the Board of Trustees to develop a vision statement. “At one level we know the value of a liberal-arts education, the skills that are associated with the liberal-arts education,” Bierman says. “But we are doing a lousy job of helping our students and faculty understand how those connect to our students’ futures. We just sort of assert that they do.”

A series of curricular adjustments flows from that realization. Beloit identified four central learning outcomes and is creating partial-unit courses over students’ first two years that will, among other things, teach them how to think about decisions and how to reflect on those decisions. Bierman describes it like this: “How do I come to understand why I should be taking a course on James Joyce? It’s not just because I like reading James Joyce. Is there a real value that I can articulate to multiple audiences?”

If some of what Beloit is trying sounds like what other small colleges have tried, Bierman’s fine with that. “I love that we are not alone going this direction,” he says. “I love that Agnes Scott College has done a bunch of the things that we are thinking about doing. And I hope a bunch of schools crib from us.”

At the same time, Beloit is also betting on a unique new campus center that repurposes a retired generating station on the Rock River. The building, due to open in January 2020, will have social, dining, and workout spaces, a swimming pool, a suspended running track, and a field house.

“At the end of the day, 3 percent of college students ever seriously consider a liberal-arts college,” says Bierman. “Just imagine: What do the economics of the sector look like at 4 percent? We would have more than undone any of the demographic changes that are coming down the road. It doesn’t seem to me impossible in a 21st-century world for the sector to aspire to have 4 percent of college-bound students thinking about us.”

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.