Fall 2020 Enrollment numbers

[dr_codex]

I've certainly seen some examples over the years of someone who didn't care all that much because the fecal matter would hit the fan after a retirement/end of contract/other-known-to-only-a-handful-of-people date.

My favorite was the outgoing guy who "wouldn't make [unpopular decision] because it would not be fair to [new guy]."

Here, New Guy, is a flaming bag of excrement for you on your first day. Have fun!

[spork]

We are currently ~ 10% down from "normal" on deposits, where normal is what would have been sufficient under the old May 1 deadline. Apparently some of our competitors are looking at declines twice that large. All these schools will be trying to recruit bodies over the summer.

The question is not whether we will break even but how large the financial hit is going to be. It looks like the state is going to impose a dorm occupancy rule of either one or two people per room, which means some students will need to be housed in hotels at university expense, so no matter what operational costs will exceed revenue. Financially it probably makes more sense to keep the campus closed, but I suspect administrators fear announcing that fall semester will be online will tank the retention rate and the admissions yield.

[polly_mer]

I've certainly seen some examples over the years of someone who didn't care all that much because the fecal matter would hit the fan after a retirement/end of contract/other-known-to-only-a-handful-of-people date.

My favorite was the outgoing guy who "wouldn't make [unpopular decision] because it would not be fair to [new guy]."

Here, New Guy, is a flaming bag of excrement for you on your first day. Have fun!

Yep!  I remember being the one who had to keep breaking the bad news to the new president.  The new president kept telling me that I must be mistaken because that would have been a big deal with committees, task forces, etc. working for  a year and surely the chair of the board of trustees would have mentioned all those things.

Yes, that's the way an institution that wanted to survive would have approached the problem.  That's not what we've been doing for the last year under the president who wasn't allowed to do anything and the provost who was trying to fix things without letting anyone know how bad the situation was. 

Those two were both gone now and here are the multiple flaming bags of excrement for you, New Guy!

[Anselm]

We are currently ~ 10% down from "normal" on deposits, where normal is what would have been sufficient under the old May 1 deadline. Apparently some of our competitors are looking at declines twice that large. All these schools will be trying to recruit bodies over the summer.

The question is not whether we will break even but how large the financial hit is going to be. It looks like the state is going to impose a dorm occupancy rule of either one or two people per room, which means some students will need to be housed in hotels at university expense, so no matter what operational costs will exceed revenue. Financially it probably makes more sense to keep the campus closed, but I suspect administrators fear announcing that fall semester will be online will tank the retention rate and the admissions yield.

That might not be so bad for the students if they have access to a pool, hot tub and continental breakfast.  Now, I can see a problem if these same schools plan on having football proceed on schedule.  Many towns have no hotel rooms for a 60 mile radius on game weekends.

[Parasaurolophus]

We've just been told to have a plan ready for a 30% drop in enrollment, and to identify sections/jobs to cut.

Happily, it looks like humanities will be experiencing a much smaller drop than that, and even at the top of the payscale we can run a (modest) profit even with a 45% drop in enrollment in each class. And in my department, it looks like we won't need to cut any sections or faculty--in fact, if my colleague who's ill doesn't return for the winter, we'll have to hire someone new to shoulder the extra courseload.


Phew.

[polly_mer]

Happily, it looks like humanities will be experiencing a much smaller drop than that, and even at the top of the payscale we can run a (modest) profit even with a 45% drop in enrollment in each class.

Are you usually subsidizing the institution and they will be in a bad way if your departmental course enrollment drops?

[Parasaurolophus]

Are you usually subsidizing the institution and they will be in a bad way if your departmental course enrollment drops?

I haven't been here long enough to have a good picture of the history (or how the admin sees things), but back-of-the-envelope-wise it looks like for the last few years we generated around $345k per semester in the fall and winter, and another $115k in the summer, assuming all our faculty earn the top rate (we don't!) and counting retirement contributions and the like. That obviously leaves other costs like admin and rooms and stuff, but I dunno how to factor all of those in. So, around $800k over the course of the year. So: that's nothing to sneeze at, but we're a pretty small department and it's a drop in the university bucket.

My key takeaway from today's meeting is that there's an enormous population of students (primarily international) who still need to pass through our department on their way to graduation, but who haven't yet done so. So our enrollment decline is expected to be relatively small (~10%), but we can weather a much larger decline for the time being.

English, however, is a different story because they're a much, much larger department and don't have the same bottleneck.

[dr_codex]

Are you usually subsidizing the institution and they will be in a bad way if your departmental course enrollment drops?

I haven't been here long enough to have a good picture of the history (or how the admin sees things), but back-of-the-envelope-wise it looks like for the last few years we generated around $345k per semester in the fall and winter, and another $115k in the summer, assuming all our faculty earn the top rate (we don't!) and counting retirement contributions and the like. That obviously leaves other costs like admin and rooms and stuff, but I dunno how to factor all of those in. So, around $800k over the course of the year. So: that's nothing to sneeze at, but we're a pretty small department and it's a drop in the university bucket.

My key takeaway from today's meeting is that there's an enormous population of students (primarily international) who still need to pass through our department on their way to graduation, but who haven't yet done so. So our enrollment decline is expected to be relatively small (~10%), but we can weather a much larger decline for the time being.

English, however, is a different story because they're a much, much larger department and don't have the same bottleneck.

There will be a formula for what to add for admin costs, per student. I had to do the math once to find the break-even point for summer courses. It was relatively easy because all students paid the same per credit (not true during the regular year, with all kinds of rates), and all faculty were paid the same flat stipend. You need two pieces of information: "fringe" (the cost of benefits, usually a percentage that fluctuates year to year) and "overhead" (which may have been a number that the person I was dealing with made up on the fly, but which was stated with great confidence). We didn't need to by hyper-accurate since we were only interested in the whole number over the break-even point.

One thing that this exercise brought home to me was how much harder this would be to do for class sizes in regular semesters. You'd only really be able to do it in the aggregate, not by course.

[polly_mer]

One financial problem at Super Dinky was having too many students come in with gen ed requirements already met.  The filled gen ed sections historically helped subsidize courses with expensive equipment, safety-required small caps, and relatively expensive faculty.

I could see this being a similar problem for even more institutions in the fall as perhaps upper-division majors stay on track and new students defer or otherwise skip fall.

[kaysixteen]

I assume that places like SD simply cannot get away with saying that  gen ed classes that entering freshmen (as opposed to transfer students) have taken at their local cc, etc., cannot be used to cover their SD undergrad gen ed reqs, unlike places like dear alma mater, where that is absolutely forbidden, and where there is also even only a very small ability to actually get graduation credits from AP exams (indeed, dear alma mater does not even use 'academic credits' at all, merely requiring students to take 4 classes a semester, times 8 semesters, plus 4 'winter study' January term ones).  I get why places like SD would not want to risk forbidding this, but, like it or not, most gen ed cc-type classes that could be taken and passed adequately by a 17yo are probably not really worth a serious undergrad degree credit consideration either.

[spork]

Spoke to a colleague who works at a major state university campus with 15,000 students. Faculty there are being told that fall enrollment might be down 20-30 percent.

[polly_mer]

I assume that places like SD simply cannot get away with saying that  gen ed classes that entering freshmen (as opposed to transfer students) have taken at their local cc, etc., cannot be used to cover their SD undergrad gen ed reqs, unlike places like dear alma mater, where that is absolutely forbidden, and where there is also even only a very small ability to actually get graduation credits from AP exams (indeed, dear alma mater does not even use 'academic credits' at all, merely requiring students to take 4 classes a semester, times 8 semesters, plus 4 'winter study' January term ones).  I get why places like SD would not want to risk forbidding this, but, like it or not, most gen ed cc-type classes that could be taken and passed adequately by a 17yo are probably not really worth a serious undergrad degree credit consideration either.

Until very recently, SD did indeed have a specialty gen ed so that transfer credit mostly went into electives.  However, a new provost required renovation of gen ed and a new president made transfer scholarships.

The problem then was indeed that SD lost money even with the larger pool because the students who were attracted needed fewer credits.

My local high school has so many dual enrollment students that we don't really do AP classes any more.  Instead, the college-bound students go across the street to the community college and often finish with an associate's degree.  The elite institutions still require four full years at their institution, but students spent their HS years on real study.

[Ruralguy]

We lose a bit of money on this same issue, but the folks coming in with the most credit are usually our better students. We have to be loose with allowing credits or we don't get the the student. Fortunately for us and probably them, most decide to stay 3 or 4 years anyway, even if they have an associates degree. This is so they can play a sport or double major. My advice would be to lean in and try to get more if they are good and stay. But the problem isn't so simple. It's hard for us to get those few good folks with lots of credits, and then when we win the battle, we still lose, because they don't pay for a full 4 years, plus we have to bribe them all with a huge discount.

Bottom line ....it behooves us to attract rich kids who are good enough to not have real huge problems, but aren't so smart that they come in with CC or AP credit.....and don't need and can't qualify for big discounts.

[spork]

We lose a bit of money on this same issue, but the folks coming in with the most credit are usually our better students. We have to be loose with allowing credits or we don't get the the student. Fortunately for us and probably them, most decide to stay 3 or 4 years anyway, even if they have an associates degree. This is so they can play a sport or double major. My advice would be to lean in and try to get more if they are good and stay. But the problem isn't so simple. It's hard for us to get those few good folks with lots of credits, and then when we win the battle, we still lose, because they don't pay for a full 4 years, plus we have to bribe them all with a huge discount.

Bottom line ....it behooves us to attract rich kids who are good enough to not have real huge problems, but aren't so smart that they come in with CC or AP credit.....and don't need and can't qualify for big discounts.

I have been arguing for the bolded section for years to no effect. The CFO is wedded to a business model of forcing all undergrads to complete eight semesters as full-time students and live on campus for as many of those semesters as possible. And now we see the stupidity of putting all your eggs in one basket.

[polly_mer]

Super Dinky had the additional problems of few majors in which doing gen ed elsewhere and finishing at Super Dinky for two years really made sense.

For example, nursing does stack (LPN, RN, BSN), but very few RNs want to go directly into a full-time BSN program.  They got the RN so they could work and eventually go back part-time. Few people transfer in junior year, unless the program closes.

We had many transfer students get poor advising so that instead of having 2+2 or 2+3, the students had 40 credits left still spread over almost four years due to the prerequisites in their major that should have been taken their first year.

Overall, yes, SD had people more likely to graduate who transferred with an associate's degree, but that generally meant more people who discovered that a BS in psychology was possible by taking almost all the required courses senior year (needed to have taken intro prior to senior year) on top of essentially random electives and good enough gen eds.  We had a lot of pre-meds, CJ, pre-nursing, and aspiring social workers who graduated with psychology degrees.

By the time I left, the only degree at SD that even remotely resembled a liberal arts degree was psychology with a third electives, a third gen ed, and a third major courses for a total of 120 credits.