A tour of the University of the Incarnate Word last summer left a donor puzzled. “I didn’t realize there were so many nuns that wear the full habit,” he remarked to the president of the Roman Catholic institution, in San Antonio, Tex.
The president, Louis J. Agnese Jr., corrected him. “Those weren’t nuns,” he said. “Those were Muslim students, who are a big part of who we are.”
Encouragement of students from other religions has been a major growth strategy for Incarnate Word, where enrollment has gone up every year but one since Mr. Agnese became president three decades ago, reaching 8,745 in the fall of 2014 (see table). Total enrollment at Catholic institutions has stayed the same in the past few years, says Michael Galligan-Stierle, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.
But many of the fastest-growing colleges are relying on interfaith students, as well as global expansion and new programs in the health-care sector. “The field of medical care is growing quickly because it’s a turnover occupation, and there’s a great need for everything from elder care to nurses to physical therapy,” said Mr. Galligan-Stierle.
Incarnate Word has built new schools of pharmacy, optometry, and physical therapy, and a new School of Osteopathic Medicine is slated to open in August next year.
The university now operates a campus in Mexico City and plans to open another in the central Mexican city of Irapuato.
At Benedictine University, in Chicago, President Michael S. Brophy tells a similar story of rapid growth. “We had a financial crisis around 1997, and every year from that point forward added some new program,” says Mr. Brophy, who took office in 2015, following nearly two decades of leadership by William J. Carroll. The university now has programs at three domestic campuses and five international sites, and has about 2,300 undergraduates at its Lisle campus, near Chicago, and 1,500 online students. Especially popular are the master’s in public health and similar applied master’s programs, which have helped overall enrollment at Benedictine grow 95 percent from 2004 to 2014.
In China, the public-health program is taught by Benedictine faculty but housed in existing buildings on the Dalian Medical University campus, in northeastern China, so there are no additional construction costs. Mr. Brophy says the university may expand elsewhere in China, and in Vietnam.
At home, interfaith recruitment has been a boon for Benedictine, too, ever since the university made a concerted effort to reach out to the Chicago Muslim community after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Since then, says Mr. Brophy, popularity has grown through word-of-mouth. The strong undergraduate pre-med program attracts many non-Catholic students; today about 20 percent of undergraduates who state a religious affiliation are Muslim. He says that makes Benedictine the Catholic university with the highest percentage of Muslim students.
The embrace of interfaith students at Catholic universities is encouraged from higher levels in the church. Mr. Galligan-Stierle recently traveled to Rome with other executives from the Catholic colleges’ group and met with the Roman Curia, known informally as the Pope’s cabinet. Its members encouraged him to “open our doors wider by hiring Muslim professors, as well as welcoming Muslim students,” he says. Benedictine already has Muslim professors and added a full-time Muslim adviser this year to counsel students and faculty.
For other Roman Catholic colleges, the way forward was less clear. Tori Murden McClure has led Spalding University in Kentucky since 2010 and is quick to note that the university has dealt with a problem common to Catholic institutions that serve adult undergraduates: For-profits have attracted the same type of students. Nevertheless, Spalding’s enrollment has grown by 36 percent over the recent decade. Ms. McClure hopes that a focus on athletics and a shift in scheduling will appeal to even more students.
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For Spalding, the fork in the road came when “we were thinking about eliminating athletics altogether, which I think might have made it impossible for us to recruit traditional undergraduates,” says Ms. McClure, who is known for rowing solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1999. With the number of adult students declining, Spalding focused instead on expanding athletics to stoke interest from younger students. It hired a full-time athletic director and started the five-year process to move out of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and into NCAA Division III.
The other big change, this one aimed at luring back some of those adults, was the switch to six-week sessions instead of the traditional 13-week semester. Adult students often need to interrupt their education to take care of a family member or work, and it is much easier for them to return after a six-week break than a semester-long break, explains Ms. McClure.
Yet such gains come at the cost of diversity. While Spalding has enrolled high percentages of underrepresented minority and first-generation students, those numbers have fallen in the past few years, with enrollment of black students dropping by a quarter since Ms. McClure took over. “Like many schools, we’ve gotten into the merit-aid game and so have increased the presence of the most affluent students on campus,” she said. “It’s been at the cost of having a robust need-based scholarship pool.”
From 2004 to 2014, enrollment shrank at nearly 40 percent of Catholic colleges, at least a bit, and fell more than 20 percent at 21 institutions. Leaders of those colleges, many of which have traditionally served adults returning to finish undergraduate degrees, blame the recovering economy, at least in part. When jobs are available, adults are more likely to go to work than to college. The College of New Rochelle, in New York State, for example, has seen its nursing program grow 30 percent over the past three years, at the same time that adult enrollment, its largest market, has declined.
At Silver Lake College of the Holy Family, in Wisconsin, state politics have added an extra hurdle. Five years ago, Wisconsin passed legislation that cut public funds for school districts and severely limited collective bargaining. The legislation also required teachers and other public employees to contribute much more for their pensions and health insurance. As a result, many in Wisconsin have been deterred from pursuing teaching careers. Enrollment in undergraduate and graduate teacher-licensure programs at Silver Lake has dropped significantly, contributing to an overall drop in enrollment to 629 in the fall of 2014.
Chris E. Domes, Silver Lake’s president, says the college is trying to “diversify the population of students” to counter that downward trend. In 2009, it built its first on-campus residence hall to attract traditional undergraduates. Silver Lake plans to become a “work college” where all students work 10 hours a week at an on-campus job as a condition of enrollment. The hope, says Mr. Domes, is that the income and work experience will prove attractive to young students. The plan may be working: This fall’s freshman class will be one of the biggest in recent years, with 72 students.
Elsewhere in the Midwest, regional decline has reduced the pool of potential students. At Marygrove College, in Detroit, enrollment fell from 4,610 in the fall of 2004 to 1,774 in the fall of 2013. The drop accelerated after the 2008 recession “hit the city hard,” says President Elizabeth A. Burns, a medical doctor. Now the downtown is reviving, and Marygrove officials hope that building strong community ties will enhance growth.
For recruitment, the college is shifting away from social media. “Some folks in the last administration had more faith in social-media advertising than in traditional advertising,” said Dr. Burns, but that didn’t pan out. The college is returning instead to billboards and radio spots that “aren’t just aimed at students, but also aimed at the parent.”
“We’re very committed,” Dr. Burns says, “to being a pipeline for those diamonds in the rough.”
