"This fall could mark the smallest class of incoming freshmen at the University of Missouri-Columbia in nearly a decade as the school continues to lose students, partly because of last fall’s protests.
The university on Wednesday announced the amount of students paying freshman tuition deposits — a key indicator of coming enrollment — has decreased by 1,470 compared to last year." …
Sounds like opportunity
Could be that the way the leadership handled things, the way African Americans are treated, threats to funding over the protests, AND the protests themselves all played a role - rather than just the handful of protesters that have been singled out. To me the biggest culprits remain the leadership, since they managed to alienate three core groups, young Conservatives, young Liberals, and young African Americans.
@MYOS1634 Agree, it was a massive leadership failure. What makes it worse, is that new leadership will take months to recruit, hire and get into place. All of which needs to be done with enough time to salvage next years enrollment.
Just a thought here, but increasing tuition for out of state students probably won’t help the decline in enrollment.
Why would any school even think that parents want to send their kids to a school where the “inmates seem to be running the asylum?”
I don’t think increasing OOS tuition will solve the problem - the main reason OOS students were interested in going was relatively low costs and ease of getting instate tuition after a year, so if they remove the incentive their only attraction will be the school of journalism and it’s unlikely to suffice for such a shortfall.
@MYOS1634 My point exactly. It’s like a team of managers sitting around saying “revenues are down because no one is buying our product, so let’s increase the price to get those revenues back up.”
The school should take its medicine and find ways to incentivize students to enroll and stay.
Increasing tuition won’t help the enrollment problem, but it’ll at least help the budget shortfall, which they’ve been scrambling to cover. Also, even with an increase in tuition, I believe it would still be much lower than other schools’. Our tuition increase is capped at the CPI, so when we see increases, they’re very low in comparison to other universities. I think this is just something that’ll take time; in a few years people will forget and enrollment levels will return to normal. For now, is there really anything to do to convince people to come? People have their preconceived notions about the campus.
applications were down even before the protests, the biggest decline in enrollment is coming from IL, for a long time, MU’s OOS tuition wasn’t much more than UIUC’s in state tuition, sometimes it was actually cheaper, but UIUC lowered it’s in state tuition and admission requirements taking away many who might have gone to MU a few years ago, places like Uark and Ole Miss offer in state rates to high achieving OOS students, protests are out of the national news cycle, CS1950 15 minutes of national fame are out outside of conservative bloggers who keep beating the dead horse, enrollment will probably fluctuate up and down over the next few years due to competition for a decreasing number of 18 year olds, there’s also the grad student issues with insurance, they and the faculty supported CS1950 to force Wolf and Loftin out
for too long, they’ve been relying on the high paying OOS students to fill the budget