Fall 2020 Enrollment numbers

[polly_mer]

Numbers are in today. Our enrollment is down... 0.8%.

That seems survivable -- though it might be that revenue is down more than that.

I am wondering whether schools that made drastic cuts in faculty pay and benefits because of fears about the future, and which are now doing pretty well, are planning to give that money back to faculty.

Even if enrollment is OK, all the extra expenses, lack of auxiliary revenue, and cuts to state funding means even an institution doing 'pretty well' on the enrollment side will come up overall short.

There's no scenario under which most faculty at most places end up with rollbacks on furloughs and pay cuts. That's ignoring the actual financial situation of which enrollment is only part.

[FishProf]

 Enrollment numbers as of this morning: -6.5% undergraduate, -5.2% graduate.  The largest drop we are seeing is in the number of transfer students we would normally be enrolling now.

I am still getting inquiries about adding to sections.  I suspect an uptick b/w now and the start on Wednesday.

[lightning]

Numbers are in today. Our enrollment is down... 0.8%.

That seems survivable -- though it might be that revenue is down more than that.

I am wondering whether schools that made drastic cuts in faculty pay and benefits because of fears about the future, and which are now doing pretty well, are planning to give that money back to faculty.

Even if enrollment is OK, all the extra expenses, lack of auxiliary revenue, and cuts to state funding means even an institution doing 'pretty well' on the enrollment side will come up overall short.

There's no scenario under which most faculty at most places end up with rollbacks on furloughs and pay cuts. That's ignoring the actual financial situation of which enrollment is only part.

A sobering reality for me is this. I'm at a place that has done relatively well in terms of enrollment and in terms of bringing in extramural funding, even during the Great Recession. Our enrollment is still doing just fine. So what is our reward for doing what we were supposed to be doing for as long as I can remember, at the behest of politicians and administrators?

---Since we were and are doing so well in terms of enrollment, external funding, and finding ways to control costs, we supposedly don't need as much state support that we've been getting. All they needed was an excuse to cut and they got one in COVID-19. We should have just been sucking all this time. Financially, we would have ended up in the exact same place.

[polly_mer]

A sobering reality for me is this. I'm at a place that has done relatively well in terms of enrollment and in terms of bringing in extramural funding, even during the Great Recession. Our enrollment is still doing just fine. So what is our reward for doing what we were supposed to be doing for as long as I can remember, at the behest of politicians and administrators?

---Since we were and are doing so well in terms of enrollment, external funding, and finding ways to control costs, we supposedly don't need as much state support that we've been getting. All they needed was an excuse to cut and they got one in COVID-19. We should have just been sucking all this time. Financially, we would have ended up in the exact same place.

Is the enrollment a high percentage of full pay folks (or international or out of state) or has it changed to be the same enrollment, but with less money coming in per person?  A lot of places will be short this year even with the same number of students because an in-state student pays so much less than international.

Is the enrollment that's constant in overall numbers still divided among the same programs?  Or, are the expensive-to-deliver programs growing while the programs that cost far less to deliver losing enrollment? I watched a provost almost cry when he realized we were losing almost $500/course/nursing student.  Yep, our nursing program was always full to the point that we rejected applicants every year, but English is so much cheaper to deliver and yet we only had about one English major per year.

What kind of external funding? Overhead on research may have already been too little to cover the additional costs of doing research, let alone the additional costs related to anything COVID.  I wish Daniel_von_Flanagan was still here with the soapbox on how frequently externally funded research actually costs the university because it doesn't cover all the costs.

What percentage of your institution's revenue was from auxiliary services?  Just because the faculty individually are doing wonderful things doesn't mean the 20-40% of the overall budget revenue from the auxiliary services is easy to replace when the campus goes virtual or is even just substantially less populated.

Faculty are necessary to run the institution, but faculty alone are insufficient to keep the institution in the black.

[paddington_bear]

From last fall, Paddington U is down 9.2% in enrollment and 10.2% in total semester credit hours. That's not good, is it? (I know it's not good.)

[dr_codex]

Latest numbers: overall enrollment up. Incoming undergraduate fractionally lower (and probably rightly so); transfer and grad both up -- in percentage a lot, in total numbers an appreciable amount.

It turns out that remote recruiting was so successful that it will be adopted permanently. It took a pandemic, but I'll take it.

[lightning]

Numbers are in today. Our enrollment is down... 0.8%.

That seems survivable -- though it might be that revenue is down more than that.

I am wondering whether schools that made drastic cuts in faculty pay and benefits because of fears about the future, and which are now doing pretty well, are planning to give that money back to faculty.

Even if enrollment is OK, all the extra expenses, lack of auxiliary revenue, and cuts to state funding means even an institution doing 'pretty well' on the enrollment side will come up overall short.

There's no scenario under which most faculty at most places end up with rollbacks on furloughs and pay cuts. That's ignoring the actual financial situation of which enrollment is only part.

A sobering reality for me is this. I'm at a place that has done relatively well in terms of enrollment and in terms of bringing in extramural funding, even during the Great Recession. Our enrollment is still doing just fine. So what is our reward for doing what we were supposed to be doing for as long as I can remember, at the behest of politicians and administrators?

---Since we were and are doing so well in terms of enrollment, external funding, and finding ways to control costs, we supposedly don't need as much state support that we've been getting. All they needed was an excuse to cut and they got one in COVID-19. We should have just been sucking all this time. Financially, we would have ended up in the exact same place.

A sobering reality for me is this. I'm at a place that has done relatively well in terms of enrollment and in terms of bringing in extramural funding, even during the Great Recession. Our enrollment is still doing just fine. So what is our reward for doing what we were supposed to be doing for as long as I can remember, at the behest of politicians and administrators?

---Since we were and are doing so well in terms of enrollment, external funding, and finding ways to control costs, we supposedly don't need as much state support that we've been getting. All they needed was an excuse to cut and they got one in COVID-19. We should have just been sucking all this time. Financially, we would have ended up in the exact same place.

Is the enrollment a high percentage of full pay folks (or international or out of state) or has it changed to be the same enrollment, but with less money coming in per person?  A lot of places will be short this year even with the same number of students because an in-state student pays so much less than international.

Is the enrollment that's constant in overall numbers still divided among the same programs?  Or, are the expensive-to-deliver programs growing while the programs that cost far less to deliver losing enrollment? I watched a provost almost cry when he realized we were losing almost $500/course/nursing student.  Yep, our nursing program was always full to the point that we rejected applicants every year, but English is so much cheaper to deliver and yet we only had about one English major per year.

What kind of external funding? Overhead on research may have already been too little to cover the additional costs of doing research, let alone the additional costs related to anything COVID.  I wish Daniel_von_Flanagan was still here with the soapbox on how frequently externally funded research actually costs the university because it doesn't cover all the costs.

What percentage of your institution's revenue was from auxiliary services?  Just because the faculty individually are doing wonderful things doesn't mean the 20-40% of the overall budget revenue from the auxiliary services is easy to replace when the campus goes virtual or is even just substantially less populated.

Faculty are necessary to run the institution, but faculty alone are insufficient to keep the institution in the black.

This is easy. N/A on most everything you mentioned but since you asked: differential tuition/fees for more expensive-to-run programs. No pathetic Super-Dinky types of tuition discounts that boost numbers and lower revenue--that's just plain dumb, and I still can't believe some colleges still do that. Grants from the feds of the military/homeland security/DoD/State Dept. variety in addition to the usual NIH/NSF, and contracts with private companies, all of which are large enough that some of the F/A trickles back down, too .

The cut was in state appropriations. We were completely blindsided, over the summer. Yeah, we're in the red, now. But we were in the black before the state decided to cut out part of our budget, using COVID-19 as cover. They were justifying it, in part, with predicted enrollment declines and lower tax revenues. They were wrong on the model, but the damage is already done. The money is gone. Now we have a bunch of students, whose needs need to be met, and not enough resources to teach them. Fortunately/unfortunately we will use many of the grants that clock in at 7 figures to create soft money positions and infrastructure, which will indirectly make up for the shortfall. But that's exactly why we lost state appropriations--politicians know we find ways to compensate--administrators know that too. And we should just stop it, because what are we really funding here . . . . read on.

As for "auxiliary" expenses that you mention, heh. I've never liked how portions of our "auxiliary" expenses have been outsourced to private companies and separate non-profit entities who are allowed to operate on our campus and even use some of our resources (buildings, incidental manpower like custodial services/security/parking enforcement/police--oh, wait, a lot of that's been outsourced, too--, etc.) to help run their private enterprise on our campuses, like the food court and portions of student housing, and even athletics who supposedly have their own separate budget and their secretive fundraising arms. But over time, I began to see the wisdom in how they are separated out from the academics. But it's weird what happened. Usually when a business outsources, it's not only to save costs, but it's to focus on the core mission of the enterprise and protect it. In the our case, when we began shedding auxiliary costs through outsourcing (and additionally, automation and IT solutions), instead of focusing on teaching and research, we started investing in new mission creep pet projects (centers, buildings, institutes, silicon valley wannabe incubators/tech transfer, shady curricular-private sector partnership programs, assessment innovation programs, civic partnership spaces, collaboration spaces, you name it we did it) that have a tangential relationship to teaching and research. And they all came with the requisite administrivia positions and lines re-assigned for those positions. They certainly sound cool, but I honestly have little idea what value they bring, other than to spin their wheels, make press releases, and hold meetings and events with captive audiences. I would like nothing more than to see a stake driven through the heart of all the bu****it projects that have been created over the last decade, but those are the raison d'etre for the expanded administrivia class of the last decade.

You're right Polly_mer, great faculty teaching and research alone does not make a viable business model for a university. But when an administriva class is created who then create non-academic endeavors that suck at the lifeblood of the academic enterprise, then yeah, you're totally right. But you seriously need to ask the question: why does the administrivia class and their raison d'etre pet projects need to exist in the first place? Or to inject some interduality, what value do these centers, buildings, institutes, silicon valley wannabe incubators/tech transfer, assessment innovation programs, shady curricular-private sector partnership programs, civic partnership spaces, collaboration spaces (and their requisite administrators) bring to your rural Wisconsin citizens?

Name five. I'll wait.

[polly_mer]

What dog do you think I have in this fight?  I'm against most of what UW-Madison does and you want me to defend similar administrative tech stuff for your university? 

OK, but only because I've spent this week on recruiting for my current employer.

1) The family farm has transformed via technology to the point that two people can really make it run.  The collaboration spaces and civic engagement spaces, especially those bring together people from a broad region, allow rapid exchange of ideas to the people who need them. College degree programs don't keep up with technology changes and relying on what  Dad did twenty years ago is the fast way to go broke and often get hit with environmental charges.  Supporting a new community of practice is a much more valuable service than classes that would be recognizable to Grandad.

2) The technology incubators are a way to let new people try out things in the world instead of the classroom.  The industries don't exist yet to hire anyone, but incubators bring together the resources and the hard-working intellects to add to brand-new human knowledge in areas that are rapidly expanding.  The young adults from the dying rural areas can participate in building a future that could save the rural areas by making more choices available through technology.  Yes, that means we may 'lose' a generation of young people as they live elsewhere, but we may gain much more than we lose ten to fifteen years from now when many more jobs can be done from 'anywhere'.

3) The new buildings are more energy efficient, ADA compliant, use newer materials and methods, and are physically safer.  Having more people have access to the meeting places with the power brokers helps everyone.  The rural folks can then send a wider variety of representatives from the community instead of the same people who are always the representatives. Better energy efficiency helps make prices lower for the far flung people who have to invest more heavily in transportation to do anything.  New building methods/materials being tried by people with the money to redo, delay, redo, and retry means the methods become more common and cheaper during the rarer cases of getting to build new in the rural community.

4) Having sufficient people to wrangle the large bureaucracy means the rural communities can get experienced administrators as the good folks opt for a simpler life.  Don't underestimate the value of a great administrator who can promote processes and written consistent policies, especially with office technology.  The modernization in a small place can be very rapid when the lack was knowledge of tools that have become dirt cheap...in large part because of those big bureaucracies elsewhere that have been investing in the office tools for two decades.

5) Assessment innovation programs coupled with the public-private partnerships lets someone else do the expensive trial and error phase.  However, if anything of value comes from the efforts, then the rural folks can join during the expansion phase for much less money and other investment.  The rural areas are dying and need new ideas.  Spreading the cost by having entities that acquire their own funds with some tax money spent is a far better technique than every small rural town doing the experiments on their own with direct, much smaller funding.

6) Big science as done in centers that bring together researchers with various disciplines to work on the big problems together as teams of experts who also mentors some newcomers is how the big problems will be ameliorated.  The single PI atop a pyramid of novices still in training is a terrible model for addressing the important societal problems that are most pressing to the rural folks.  Anyone who cares about actually addressing climate concerns should applaud a center that has many experts and sufficient resources to have regular communication channels to the decision makers.  You don't send the scientists to the government once in a while; you need the glad-handing, relationship builders who can lay the foundation and educate in the necessary terms to be ready with the new funding and laws as necessary.

If one really buys into the idea of the university of serving the people of the state, the most service to the state is outside of the classroom or individual faculty members with their small focused research groups

[Caracal]

If one really buys into the idea of the university of serving the people of the state, the most service to the state is outside of the classroom or individual faculty members with their small focused research groups

You can usually count on Poly to be the enthusiastic promoter of dystopian ideas. Obviously, teaching and learning are unimportant parts of a universities mission and they should mostly focus on throwing money at sketchy partnerships with private companies who are mostly interested in not having to make their own investments.

[Ruralguy]

I don't think Poly is saying that you shouldn't teach students involved with these "incubators" or "centers" some (and maybe a lot of!) writing, engineering/math/coding finance/econ/business and so forth (including potentially the basics if almost any field) . Its more about providing a way for students and faculty a way to more readily interact with business, government, and other disciplines besides one's home discipline.  Poly can speak for herself, but I think this isn't an "either/or" situation though obviously there's always budget triage and a setting of priorities that are related to that triage.

 

[Caracal]

I don't think Poly is saying that you shouldn't teach students involved with these "incubators" or "centers" some (and maybe a lot of!) writing, engineering/math/coding finance/econ/business and so forth (including potentially the basics if almost any field) . Its more about providing a way for students and faculty a way to more readily interact with business, government, and other disciplines besides one's home discipline.  Poly can speak for herself, but I think this isn't an "either/or" situation though obviously there's always budget triage and a setting of priorities that are related to that triage.

Right, there's nothing new about the idea that universities serve the surrounding community in ways that go beyond just training people for jobs. The part that is a problem is the idea that "the most service to the state is outside of the classroom or individual faculty members with their small focused research groups." That's a recipe for exactly what has happened, which is that universities are increasingly becoming hollowed out. It is a recipe for more and more centers and institutes and less and less money to hire faculty and teach students.

[Ruralguy]

A lot of this depends on the school.  For an R1, institutes and centers are used to woo top faculty and their students, post docs, etc.. At a SLAC like mine, these centers tend to be window dressing, but occassionally they can be helpful in attracting faculty and students.
Also, in any setting they can be political nightmares because they involve multiple disciplines, departments and other offices around the college or University.

[Golazo]

We are about flat, slightly up depending on melt. Our transfer enrollment is a bit down, but our freshman class is huge, and if we can retain them it will be very good for our near-term outlook. Our housing is full (we gave everyone single rooms at the double rate) and overflowing into a nearby hotel.

[AmLitHist]

We've finished the first week of classes but people keep coming.  I've been asked to teach another OL class online, second 8 weeks; it's already half-filled.

[spork]

Our semester starts after Labor Day. Right now we've got ~ 10% of students who would normally pay room and board declaring they will be attending remotely. So already we've lost a chunk of auxiliary revenue that is nearly half of our average annual net revenue. Add to that the $1-2 million in one-off costs associated with Covid-19 mitigation measures, and we'll be in deficit despite spending more than usual from the endowment.