Job No. 1: Enrollment management

SDSU president focuses on student recruitment

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BROOKINGS – During the interview that preceded his taking the helm at South Dakota State University two years ago, President Barry Dunn noted that enrollment was already leveling off. Now in the wake of two straight years of enrollment drops, he’s pursuing steps to move those numbers upward. 

“Our big push for the rest of my presidency will be enrollment management,” Dunn told The Brookings Register in an interview on Sept. 24.

In fall 2017, total enrollment at SDSU was 12,527, a drop of 96 (0.7 percent) from 12,613 in fall 2016. This fall the drop was 420 (3.35 percent), from 12,527 in fall 2017 to 12,107 now.

The highwater mark for total enrollment was about 12,800 in 2010; since then there had been a leveling off at about 12,500 for a few years and then the drop of the past two years.

“Losing students is not our business,” Dunn said. “Our business is to educate more young people, not to lose those students.” 

Two groups that heavily impacted that decline were international and transfer students. South Dakota Board of Regents numbers attributed 48 percent of the 2018 total enrollment decline to those groups.

“Some of this is anecdotal. From what we hear from the students’ experience is that the (international) student visas are harder to get,” the president said, in response to a question about the impact of United States immigration policies. “They take longer to get and they’re more expensive. I haven’t validated all of that with immigration; whether it’s true or not, certainly that is everyone’s impression.

“From a 950 (international students) goal, we’re at 750; so we’ve lost several hundred-some students in just basically two years. So it’s serious. We have some ideas on that, to implement capturing some of those students back. So we’re hitting it head-on.

“We’ve got to make sure it happens. International students bring a lot of diversity to our campus, certainly to the Brookings community, which is a very important aspect of a university.”

Accessibility

Looking at the state’s six regental public universities, Dunn noted that enrollment for 2018 was down 925 students across the system.

He said that “everybody in higher education, business and policy in South Dakota should be concerned. That is a story.”

“We want to increase the number of college educated people in the state – to be engineers, pharmacists, nurses, construction management, agriculture,” he added. “All across the state, we’ve dropped. That’s a dramatic drop. The actual goal of the state of South Dakota, the Board of Regents and the Department of Education is to increase the number of graduates in our state. And we’re going the other way.” 

The stated goal is to have 65 percent of the cohort of 25- to 35-year-olds have post-secondary degrees.

A key step that Dunn would like state lawmakers to take during their next session in spring 2019 is to act on Dakota’s Promise, what he described as “a needs-based scholarship that has been proposed over the last several years and never really got any traction. We’re hoping that it could go over this next session. 

“We’re hopeful that the discussion will resolve in a fully-funded and vibrant needs-based scholarship for young people who are Pell-eligible. They come from families of lower incomes.”

“Accessibility is the hallmark of a land grant university and a major point of my presidency,” he explained. “I’m very excited about the opportunity to get a needs-based scholarship. We have a very minor one in South Dakota. For all practical purposes, South Dakota is the only state in the union that doesn’t have a needs-based scholarship.

“Fewer and fewer of our young people attending college are Pell-eligible. One of the drops in our enrollment is certainly due to the cost of education exceeding the ability of some families to help their son or daughter have access to higher ed.”

The president called a needs-based scholarship program “one of many, many tactics or strategies that we’re working on to increase enrollment.”

Another strategy is a change in “the way we’re recruiting young people … personally contacting 70,000 high school seniors within our region.” “Last year that number would have been 20,000 to 25,000,” Dunn said. “We’re doing a much more aggressive one-on-one marketing campaign to seniors. And we’re going to be following that up very quickly with sophomores and juniors.”

Some tech credits don’t transfer well

The Register asked the president if the several two-year technical institutions across the state were impacting enrollment numbers.

“To some degree, we assume so,” he said. “I don’t know that we’ve got hard evidence. Lake Area (Technical Institute, Watertown) did increase in enrollment.

“College and post-secondary education is counter-cyclical with the economy. We reached our high (enrollment) coming out of the greatest recession since the Great Depression, and now we have this very robust economy and we certainly have lost enrollment.

“Lake Area is certainly doing an admirable job in attracting young people into technical fields. The governor (Dennis Daugaard) has been very, very supportive of tech ed as a key to workforce development.”

The Register also asked if some of those two-year students later go on to earn degrees in South Dakota’s colleges and university, in some ways making the two-year schools a “feeder system.”

“To some degree,” Dunn said. “We’ve worked with Lake Area on a program called Opening Doors. Approximately 25 percent of their graduates each year go on to school, which is an important number, and we’re certainly very interested in those people coming to South Dakota State. 

“But those are technical degrees, so many of them don’t transfer very well at all; some of them transfer really well. We’re working very hard to make that transfer as easy as we can.”

“South Dakota does not have a community college system, or junior college system,” the president explained. “So the degrees from a technical school are different than the degrees from a community college; and the degrees from a community college, like Minnesota West Community and Technical College or Iowa Lakes Community College, for example, are much easier to transfer in and into any university. And we recruit from there very heavily.”

On time, under budget

 “It’s a very busy place,” Dunn said, when talk turned to the multiple construction projects underway across the campus.

He noted that over the past 15 years, President Peggy Gordon Miller “began the rebuilding of campus with the Performing Arts Center and the Wellness Center and a remodel of the University Student Union. And President (David) Chicoine certainly took it to a new level.”

“We’ve reached some new highs here,” he added. “The Performing Arts Center, the new Animal Disease Research & Diagnostic Laboratory, Frost practice gym addition, the Wellness Center addition made for a very busy summer on campus.”

Add to those some important underground infrastructure projects still going on, “very disruptive but critically important to the long-term health of our physical plant at the university.”

“Financially those projects are very sound and have come in on time or under budget, so lots of good news on those projects. They really are dramatically changing the face of the campus.

“The Performing Arts Center (expansion) will not only allow us to improve our academic offerings in the arts, but also allow us to have accreditation for those programs.” The president added “two other major aspects” of the PAC.

Secondly, it offers co-curricular activities for students from other degree-seeking programs, who “can enjoy playing in the Pride of the Dakotas (band) singing in the choir or performing in the theater: just invaluable for young people during their college years.”

The third is the community. “Both the Wellness Center and the Performing Arts Center improve our lives in a lot of intangible ways: some of them from a health perspective, some of them from what art and discussion and dance and theater can do for the creative side of all of us.” 

He called it good for the town-and-gown relationship.

Dunn also cited a spinoff of all the on-campus construction: $150 million in jobs, “not only from the construction but the design work, the purchasing of carpets, all of those things. Ninety-four percent of the actual work done on the Animal Disease Research & Diagnostic Laboratory is being done by local subcontractors.

“If you multiply that several times through an economy like Brookings, you can see why our city has increased sales-tax revenue this year. I’m pretty sure some of that was due to all the activity on campus.

“We have just an excellent (town-and-gown) relationship. The other nice thing about it that I’ve certainly found in my two-plus years as president is how everyone in town and on campus is committed to making it better and better.

“That’s really been a very positive experience: to have the city and the county and the campus really interested in each other.”

Contact John Kubal at jkubal@brookingsregister.com.