Chancellor Mark Mone Relays Enrollment “Doomsday” Discussion to University Committee

UWM’s Chancellor Mark Mone talked to the University Committee about frequent “doomsday” discussions among public university leaders over low enrollment and budget problems that he heard at the annual Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities (APLU) conference in San Diego.

“We’re running out of teenagers,” said Mone. “If there’s no admission, then there’s no mission.”

Since 2012, the total number of undergraduate students enrolled at UW-Milwaukee has steadily decreased every year, according to data from UW-Milwaukee’s Office of Assessment and Institutional Research. The chancellor also said that there’s a trend of employers needing skills immediately and unable to dedicate the time required to send their employees to college to receive their 4-year degree.

“There’s a lot of doomsday discussion across the board. One of the common themes in many of the sessions was just how challenging higher ed is,” said Mone, referring to talks given at the APLU conference. “We’re in the situation where we’re simultaneously dealing with some of the challenges of needing to make smart investments of time and resources in enrollment.”

Many of the sessions discussed the underlying causes of low enrollment and retention at public research universities across the nation. The chancellor spoke about how a strong economy leads prospective students to think, “Why should I go to college?”

 “Campuses haven’t changed quickly enough to fill that need,” said Mone. “You see 2-year college enrollments really collapsing across the country.”

Public universities like UW-Milwaukee face significant pressure to keep the cost of higher education in check, which often leads to budget cuts. Even tuition freezes can act like a budget cut as the cost of salaries, utilities and maintenance increase but the amount of designated money to pay for them stays constant. Mone said that budget challenges and a lack of support from the state are creating a dire situation for the university.

That’s why leaders from UW-Milwaukee are attending conferences like the APLU annual meeting, which took place Nov. 10-12 in San Diego. The APLU, an acronym for the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities, annual meeting gathered senior leaders from public research universities, land-grant institutions and state university systems to discuss challenges they face on the federal, state and community levels.

Mone said that it was an opportunity for him to speak with leaders from other public universities to come up with solutions to budget problems and declining rates of graduation and enrollment. But UWM is also exploring possible solutions through committees and meetings of its own. The Chancellor’s Enrollment Management Action Team works on campus-wide enrollment efforts and holds quarterly meetings. The University Committee is also looking at what is working for other universities across the nation.

The meeting started with a report from the Kathleen Dolan, the chairperson of the University Committee and a distinguished professor in UWM’s Political Science Department. She talked about the university’s growing interest in the University Innovation Alliance, a national coalition of public research universities working to develop new strategies to increase graduation rates. There are currently 11 public research universities that are a part of the coalition, but none is in Wisconsin.

“Each of these schools in the alliance have focused on different parts of the process,” said Kathleen Dolan, the chairperson of the University Committee and a distinguished professor in UWM’s political science department. “Purdue university has developed a program to have a three-year competency-based degree to get people through the pipeline faster. Central Florida has worked really hard on focusing on retention.”

The University of Central Florida reported that over 90 percent of students who began classes in 2017 returned to the university for the fall 2018 semester.  Central Florida’s Student Development and Enrollment Services worked with students last year who hadn’t re-registered for classes by offering them assistance for any personal, financial or academic problems preventing them from coming back. The university estimates that there will be a higher graduation rate in the future because of efforts made in retention.

“There was a continuous effort to work with the first-year students and a specific high-intensive initiative between May and September to ensure that all students who could, were registered,” said Maribeth Ehasz, vice president of SDES, in a statement. It’s difficult to determine what new innovations work as many of the experimental systems and programs are happening contemporaneously, according to Dolan. The university will wait and see if these are just quick fixes to a larger issue or long-term solutions.