The universities in Minnesota are divided into multiple teams. My university is part of the University of Minnesota system, which has 5 campuses — it’s the smaller subsystem, but it’s also older and wealthier, founded before Minnesota had statehood, and it’s a little bit more independent for that reason. The real giant in this state is MnSCU, the Minnesota State College and University system, which is made up of 30 colleges and 7 universities. These campuses were explicitly set up by the state to provide educational opportunities to all of its citizens. Then there are all the private colleges, about which I’ll say no more.
They’re all good institutions, operating in parallel. My oldest son attended a MnSCU college, St Cloud State University (SCSU), the middle child went to school in Wisconsin, and my youngest went to a UM school right here at UMM, so we aren’t snobs about which system is better. Unfortunately, they’re all suffering right now, with painful declines in enrollment. SCSU has been hit hard.
The student headcount at St. Cloud State has dropped from more than 18,000 in 2010 to about 10,000 last fall. But not only are the numbers dropping, the students are changing: Nearly 50% of students are part-time, about 25% are under 18 and enrolled in postsecondary classes, and about 10% are 35 and older.
There are also fewer traditional students — recent high school graduates looking for a four-year degree — than in previous decades because of declining birthrates beginning in the 1990s, changes in perception around the importance of undergraduate degrees, and more education options such as for-profit and online colleges.
Yikes. SCSU is about 10 times the size of UMM, and while we’ve suffered substantial enrollment declines, I think that SCSU has been proportionally hit even harder. Their solution: put major programs on the chopping block.
St. Cloud State University will phase out six majors and cut three dozen jobs in the wake of a looming $18.3 million deficit projected for the upcoming school year, according to leaders at the central Minnesota school.
The majors to be phased out are philosophy, theater, nuclear medicine technology, real estate and insurance at the undergraduate level, as well as marriage and family therapy at the graduate level.
23 faculty and 14 staff are being laid off! I’m feeling the pain from here, a hundred miles away. My U hasn’t done anything quite that drastic, at least not yet, but we have been letting natural attrition of faculty take its course and avoiding some important replacement hires, but that has still caused serious difficulties. We haven’t been firing people or killing majors programs, but when staffing withers away and your department has one professor left, you’ve de facto closed off a major. You’re also going to exhaust that one overworked professor, who is going to be looking for jobs elsewhere.
These are terrifying times in academia. Enrollment dropping, the pandemic was a major strike, and then, of course, Republicans whining about ‘woke’ colleges. One of the things that has made Minnesota a great place to live is an outstanding educational system — let’s not throw that away.
“It is easier to destroy than to create ”
Mr. Spock
I wonder how many administrators are getting laid off? They probably had to hire more to determine which departments to cut. Or maybe they created a new department, “the office of downsizing managment” (that name is too transparent, it would probably be something like “office of efficiency enhancement”).
We aren’t really seeing those college student enrollment declines on the West Coast.
The California University system is so large and spread out that it is hard to make an overall generalization.
In general, enrollment numbers took a hit during the pandemic. They are slowly bouncing back though and the state expects enrollments to grow in the coming years. They even increased the University budgets by 5%.
The California universities have far more applicants than they accept,
“UC has a massive demand and supply imbalance. In other words, we turn away qualified Californians in record numbers.”
In a lot of places, college enrollments are flat, struggling, or in the case of Minnesota, even declining.
I’m sure one main reason why is the amazing price increases for a college degree over the last few decades. It is clear that universities are pricing themselves out of their main market, people who aren’t very wealthy.
When I went to a good state school in the 1970’s, my heavily subsidized tuition was something like $600 a year. I graduated debt free and completely broke. This was common at the time.
It is now $14,000 and they raise it a lot every year. People routinely graduate with tens of thousands in student debt.
They estimate that a 4 year degree will end up costing $120,000!!!
Cthulhu, this shocks me even though it has been something in the making for decades.
There is the crux of it. Add in unwillingness to mortgage an uncertain future, where most jobs were transplanted overseas, you’ve a perfect storm.
Meanwhile, whenever there’s an intergenerational birthrate gap, we close schools. In the mid to late ’70’s, primary schools went up for sale. Then, a decade or so later, new school properties had to be purchased and schools built for the spike in population. Population was never a smooth curve, it spikes and drops as generations reproduce, then a new generation has to do that whole maturing thing before reproducing. That’s true for protozoa, it’s true for colonial organisms, it’s true for complex organisms like mammals.
In 1978, I was in high school and electronics school on my own dime. Mid-year, the electronics school relocated from its Upper Darby digs to Newtown Square, to a closed and sold off elementary school. It was a bit entertaining to see our instructors stooping to use the primary school height blackboards and kluges needed to turn an elementary school into an advanced electronics school. Even more so to have microprocessor engineering technology taught in an old geography classroom (one of our fellow students had attended that school when it still was an elementary school).
So, there’s a dip in enrollment, due to a change in population growth, which somehow surprised everyone, as nobody plots and tracks birthrates. As that last is entirely untrue, that displays a shocking lack of forward looking leadership by all institutions that are now caught flatfooted and utterly unprepared and now dumping staff, programs and even facilities.
Then, when the next mini-boom strikes and it will, lacking some novel plague killing off our young preferentially, the same idiots will look surprised again and scramble to assemble that which they dismantled and moan over the lack of employees. Not that any will notice or care about the moaning, as the moaning over the loss of employee loyalty went ignored after the tenured employees were betrayed previously. Again.
But hey, race ya to the bottom! It’s the American way!
Enrollment is down in Washington State and up in Oregon.
So the West coast is slightly rising in California, down in Washington, up in Oregon.
and
I don’t know much about the U of MN system, but I do know that they are a strong proponent of Open Educational Resources, and offer a leading, comprehensive site to assist adoptees:
https://open.umn.edu/
Their OER library is large and extensive, and a great place to start for any professor looking to adopt OER materials (texts, lab manuals, videos, etc.).
I particularly like this quote: “We work together to benefit everyone in higher education.” Of course, that doesn’t necessarily include the traditional publishers who have no shortage of bad things to say about OER, along with the things they don’t say (the resources are free and generally high quality).
The tl;dr version.
College enrollments have been dropping by 8% over the last few years, partly due to the pandemic.
The drop seems to be slowing down and it may even be over with.
With one year of data, this isn’t at all for sure though.
and
The state college and university systems are on a short list of the institutions most important to the future of the country, along with public schools. Republicans are working hard to undermine both.