Valpo Strategic Plan

[vu84v2]

For what it's worth I have it on good authority that there are people on the board strongly opposed to the art sale. But Padilla is pretty set on it and it will be hard to get him to listen and change his mind.

He would have to have the support of a majority of the board. No executive has unilateral authority to override a majority of the board.

[crusadermoe]

You might as well do the sale now.  The PR damage has been done. Pulling back on it just makes you look indecisive and weak.

I also agree with the guy a few posts back that said "shared governance" is a pretty silly concept generally and seems unique to higher education. Ultimately the decisions lie with the board after input at various levels. 

If everyone is in charge, then no one is in charge.

[valpopal]

You might as well do the sale now.  The PR damage has been done.

I can assure you that Padilla is aware PR damage has barely scratched the surface thus far.

[crusadermoe]

Wow.  Guess I am close enough to the action.  I guess someone did say over 1,000 signatures on a protest letter. And you think it is just starting rather than dying down? 

[David81]

You might as well do the sale now.  The PR damage has been done. Pulling back on it just makes you look indecisive and weak.

I also agree with the guy a few posts back that said "shared governance" is a pretty silly concept generally and seems unique to higher education. Ultimately the decisions lie with the board after input at various levels. 

If everyone is in charge, then no one is in charge.

"Shared governance" is not a silly concept, even if it's unique to academe. It usually applies to an active faculty voice in on-the-ground decisions, whereas board deliberations are usually at the bird's eye level. The strongest input is at the point of curriculum, and it becomes less so the further away one gets from core activities of teaching, scholarship, and service. Faculty also often have a non-binding vote at earlier stages of senior administrative hires such as deans of schools and university presidents, with final decisions appropriately reserved for boards.

On matters such as the proposed art sale, faculty may exercise academic freedom to agree, disagree, or remain silent. Those views do not bind the institution, but sometimes they will be influential. They also serve as a canary-in-the-coal mine indicator of faculty morale and weight of opinion. Just like a bad coach can lose his/her players, university presidents and deans can lose their faculty. Neither, of course, is a sustainable situation.

There's also an institutional reason why universities like to tout shared governance in appearance, if not always in substance: It helps to prevent tenured and tenure-track faculty from unionizing, because by Supreme Court precedent, faculty who are given active managerial roles are precluded from unionizing under the National Labor Relations Act. Shared governance can be cited to count as that managerial role.

[vu84v2]

You might as well do the sale now.  The PR damage has been done. Pulling back on it just makes you look indecisive and weak.

I also agree with the guy a few posts back that said "shared governance" is a pretty silly concept generally and seems unique to higher education. Ultimately the decisions lie with the board after input at various levels. 

If everyone is in charge, then no one is in charge.

"Shared governance" is not a silly concept, even if it's unique to academe. It usually applies to an active faculty voice in on-the-ground decisions, whereas board deliberations are usually at the bird's eye level. The strongest input is at the point of curriculum, and it becomes less so the further away one gets from core activities of teaching, scholarship, and service. Faculty also often have a non-binding vote at earlier stages of senior administrative hires such as deans of schools and university presidents, with final decisions appropriately reserved for boards.

On matters such as the proposed art sale, faculty may exercise academic freedom to agree, disagree, or remain silent. Those views do not bind the institution, but sometimes they will be influential. They also serve as a canary-in-the-coal mine indicator of faculty morale and weight of opinion. Just like a bad coach can lose his/her players, university presidents and deans can lose their faculty. Neither, of course, is a sustainable situation.

There's also an institutional reason why universities like to tout shared governance in appearance, if not always in substance: It helps to prevent tenured and tenure-track faculty from unionizing, because by Supreme Court precedent, faculty who are given active managerial roles are precluded from unionizing under the National Labor Relations Act. Shared governance can be cited to count as that managerial role.

I am the person who previously posted about shared governance. I never said it was silly (indeed, it is not and David81 articulates why it is not silly), but I did say that some people within academia have unrealistic expectations of shared governance. These people view shared governance as a form of necessary approval by or veto power for faculty. I remember seeing that Valpo's faculty senate voted against the art sale. This is a non-binding recommendation that the university administration and board is not required to follow.

[David81]

You might as well do the sale now.  The PR damage has been done. Pulling back on it just makes you look indecisive and weak.

I also agree with the guy a few posts back that said "shared governance" is a pretty silly concept generally and seems unique to higher education. Ultimately the decisions lie with the board after input at various levels. 

If everyone is in charge, then no one is in charge.

"Shared governance" is not a silly concept, even if it's unique to academe. It usually applies to an active faculty voice in on-the-ground decisions, whereas board deliberations are usually at the bird's eye level. The strongest input is at the point of curriculum, and it becomes less so the further away one gets from core activities of teaching, scholarship, and service. Faculty also often have a non-binding vote at earlier stages of senior administrative hires such as deans of schools and university presidents, with final decisions appropriately reserved for boards.

On matters such as the proposed art sale, faculty may exercise academic freedom to agree, disagree, or remain silent. Those views do not bind the institution, but sometimes they will be influential. They also serve as a canary-in-the-coal mine indicator of faculty morale and weight of opinion. Just like a bad coach can lose his/her players, university presidents and deans can lose their faculty. Neither, of course, is a sustainable situation.

There's also an institutional reason why universities like to tout shared governance in appearance, if not always in substance: It helps to prevent tenured and tenure-track faculty from unionizing, because by Supreme Court precedent, faculty who are given active managerial roles are precluded from unionizing under the National Labor Relations Act. Shared governance can be cited to count as that managerial role.

I am the person who previously posted about shared governance. I never said it was silly (indeed, it is not and David81 articulates why it is not silly), but I did say that some people within academia have unrealistic expectations of shared governance. These people view shared governance as a form of necessary approval by or veto power for faculty. I remember seeing that Valpo's faculty senate voted against the art sale. This is a non-binding recommendation that the university administration and board is not required to follow.

I should add....heh....shared governance does get silly when faculty act silly. I've seen both wise and silly at my institution. On the wise side, I've witnessed how faculty input can improve results and policies at both the university and college-specific levels.

FWIW, I think that VU faculty input on the art sale has generally been expressed in appropriate ways, apart from whether one agrees or disagrees with the substantive opinions.

[FWalum]

I have asked this question before, but have never received an answer. We have heard about how unethical it would be to sell the art and nothing about the ethics of holding nonproductive assets. This has probably not come up in the past because of the general Pre-Covid (pre-law school demise) stability of the university. We have seen posts saying that the paintings are loaned out and that VU gets some compensation and recognition as the owner of the loaned pieces, but unless they are generating at a minimum of $500,000 per year they would be considered nonproductive or at best under utilized assets. I have seen videos from these special showings and never heard VU mentioned. In one case that I saw the print media actually had our name misspelled as Valpariaso.

Nonprofits should be engaged in mission related investing and the prudent management of institutional funds. If VU was just a museum then what they have done, holding these pieces of art, would be part of their mission and therefore probably prudent. VU is not a museum and having an asset that is most likely extremely under utilized and therefore not viewed as a prudent investment could easily be deemed unethical. For exactly that reason my institution has turned down some donations of items such as artwork. The costs of holding these assets is not trivial. From my very limited experience, I would imagine that insurance on the Brauer Museum collection could be hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Hopefully one of the art endowments covers this cost along with the cost of any special storage areas most museums have for their stored artwork.

Please someone tell me why it is unethical to go against the guidelines of art museum organizations, but not unethical to go against prudent mission relate rules (in some cases laws) for the management of institutional funds, especially if the situation is as dire as some posters think? I truly am looking for conversation not just argument.

[vu84v2]

FWAlum - nothing to add to the conversation from your post, other than it is very articulate and raises very important questions.

[crusadermoe]

I do appreciate the debate. It seems like a fascinating case study in studying university financial crises. I guess I see the word "ethical" as not applying to the board's decision options even though I agree with it. it would be fascinating to know the board's internal dialog and what level of uproar they predicted for the sale.  But we don't know so we can just speculate. That's more fun anyway.   

This media story has legs because of the paintings, a relatable and emotional topic. It puts Prof. Brauer in the role of George Bailey fighting the heartless Mr. Potter.  Or Scarlett O'Hare escaping the mansion trying to cling to her art and possessions.


 

[crusader05]

This situation really has set the two core things a university needs against itself: Mainly it needs enough students and funds to maintain itself and continue to exist at a level that matches financial needs BUT once you exist what type of education do you offer. Valpo has often prided itself on having things that no other university of it's size has (see our great Met program or our solar furnace and now these paintings) but I wonder sometimes if that's something that becomes a large point of pride internally at the expense of what it's costing the overall university. I'd say our met program continues to prove it's worth through the amount of alums it produces out there constantly talking up Valpo but am skeptical on the worth of the paintings in comparison to just having a space with art work and opportunities for students to engage with it. Brauer himself said he never imagined they would end up this much and insurance costs could also be a factor. I think the same thing happened with the law school. Our pride in our well-established, regionally respected law school led to the reality of it's struggles as it's view and role in the larger scope of the field which maybe led to poor decisions to try to juice enrollment which led to a wounded exit vs a dignified step away. (it also might have helped us "sell" the law school like was tried in Tennessee).

One could wonder where Athletics fits into that too. Does Valpo have a tendency to hold onto things for too long? Does it fail to invest earlier and end up somewhere it could have avoided with some earlier action? All actions are often going to be mostly unpopular when it involves stopping a thing that exists. I still have friends who will not even work with the university or donate because their fraternity was closed after they left. I tend to think this is a tough spot for all and even though I fall much more on the "sell the paintings" side I get that its a serious tightrope to walk.

[historyman]

In one case that I saw the print media actually had our name misspelled as Valpariaso.

So now spelling is important!   

[ValpoDiaspora]

This situation really has set the two core things a university needs against itself: Mainly it needs enough students and funds to maintain itself and continue to exist at a level that matches financial needs BUT once you exist what type of education do you offer. Valpo has often prided itself on having things that no other university of it's size has (see our great Met program or our solar furnace and now these paintings) but I wonder sometimes if that's something that becomes a large point of pride internally at the expense of what it's costing the overall university. I'd say our met program continues to prove it's worth through the amount of alums it produces out there constantly talking up Valpo but am skeptical on the worth of the paintings in comparison to just having a space with art work and opportunities for students to engage with it. Brauer himself said he never imagined they would end up this much and insurance costs could also be a factor. I think the same thing happened with the law school. Our pride in our well-established, regionally respected law school led to the reality of it's struggles as it's view and role in the larger scope of the field which maybe led to poor decisions to try to juice enrollment which led to a wounded exit vs a dignified step away. (it also might have helped us "sell" the law school like was tried in Tennessee).

One could wonder where Athletics fits into that too. Does Valpo have a tendency to hold onto things for too long? Does it fail to invest earlier and end up somewhere it could have avoided with some earlier action? All actions are often going to be mostly unpopular when it involves stopping a thing that exists. I still have friends who will not even work with the university or donate because their fraternity was closed after they left. I tend to think this is a tough spot for all and even though I fall much more on the "sell the paintings" side I get that its a serious tightrope to walk.

These are the right questions to ask, but the answer isn't that mysterious. The university did a self-study that showed Valpo puts a notably smaller percentage of its operating budget into the "instruction" category compared to peer institutions. The peer list includes a whole lot of schools that are have lesser names and much smaller endowments than Valpo (Baldwin Wallace? Lipscomb? Misericordia University? Union University? etc.). So if these peer institutions have on average managed to put a greater percentage of budget towards instructional education than Valpo does, that's saying something. Maybe you can under-resource the undergrad core academic programs for a short while to float ancillaries -- enormous administration, debt servicing, very expensive law school, construction, etc. -- but if you do that for too many decades, the heart of it all falls out and the academic reputation will be come a joke among students about "the harvard of walmart" etc.

BTW, in those kinds of longitudinal charts, I am not sure whether the Art Museum is categorized as part of 'instructional' investment or if it is a different kind of overhead expense. I had not thought about the cost of insuring the art, which could be significant.

[crusadermoe]

Lower than MISERY-Cordia?.  What a terrible name for a school.  Where the hell is that?   I think would just skip that degree on my resume.

[David81]

I think the same thing happened with the law school. Our pride in our well-established, regionally respected law school led to the reality of it's struggles as it's view and role in the larger scope of the field which maybe led to poor decisions to try to juice enrollment which led to a wounded exit vs a dignified step away. (it also might have helped us "sell" the law school like was tried in Tennessee).

During the sharp downturn in law school applications and the post-recession legal job market, many schools -- including some fairly prominent ones -- ruthlessly sliced their entering classes and waited it out until application numbers started to recover. By contrast, VU Law tried to work miracles with incoming classes touting median LSATs so low that even the most dedicated teaching faculty (which VU Law was known for) could not overcome the demonstrated correlation between very low LSATs and slim chances of passing the bar exam. Already a small school before this crisis, it could shrink its enrollment only so much while surviving on its own revenue. And the parent university could help only so much, at the risk of starving -- budget-wise -- all the other academic units at the University. As I've said before when discussing the very sad fate of VU Law, it was like a perfect storm of dire exigent circumstances, poor internal decisions, and limited financial resources.

I don't know if this yields any lessons for the current challenges facing Valpo. Unlike VU Law, the academic credentials of incoming undergraduate classes have remained strong. While many on this board have cited the high acceptance rate (almost 90%), often lost in the discussion are the strong credentials of enrolled students: Average GPA 3.7 and average SAT 1175. Many schools would kill to have those numbers. https://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/colleges/Valparaiso-University-admission-requirements) 

It means that VU continues to draw strong applicants, but its application base is a cohort that will have options.

[wh]

As indicated on Niche, Valpo has a ton of impressive to very impressive rankings to work from in attracting new students:

https://www.niche.com/colleges/valparaiso-university/rankings/

One of the more concerning statistics I've come across (somewhere else) is what appears to be a very low yield (% new students to total accepted applicants). There are thousands of accepted applicants, but admissions seems to have a problem "closing the deal."  That tells me that Valpo still manufactures a great product, but maybe the "sales" staff needss a kick in the pants.  Obviously, this is an over simplication, but it makes an important point. Business success starts and ends with a great product (which Valpo has for the most part), supported by people who know how to market and sell it.  So, yes, President Padilla is in a tough spot, but he has an abundance of relative foundational strengths to work from in getting the ship righted. At least, that's how I would look at it if I were in his shoes. I would also be promoting a hopeful message that while Valpo has critical needs that must be immediately addressed, there is every reason to believe we will turn the corner and come out on the other side stronger than ever.

[VULB#62]

WH, you make a very good point:  So ya have a good product. But if you can't sell it, no one will buy it. Given the continual changeover in admissions and recruitment (i.e., in the business world, it's called marketing and sales), it would seem that a couple of things might be in play.

# Perhaps the talent in the office is sub-level (maybe low salaries or something?) and people are let go for performance.

# Perhaps the funding to support performance in comparison to similar schools is below par and the talent is leaving in frustration

# Perhaps somethings else

Regardless, I'm seeing comments about excessive admin salaries in other areas.  Perhaps, visible administrative (overhead) restructuring/reduction could shift expenditure emphases to more strategically valuable areas?  Duh, maybe recruitment/admissions???  Maybe instruction???

Thinking bottom line: A leaner administration managing a reinforced instructional environment would do wonders in supporting the proported mission of the university. It would also lessen the faculty/admin adversarial relationship, and that is always a positive. A truly robust educational offering IMO is the most attractive recruiting tool a university can have. Valpo seems be reducing that rather than expanding it. 

[historyman]

Lower than MISERY-Cordia?.  What a terrible name for a school.  Where the hell is that?   I think would just skip that degree on my resume.

The word Misericordia means, mercy & compassion.

[ValpoDiaspora]

Yes, I guess its accurate to say its 'marketing and sales' in a situation where Valpo is actually trying to get every student.

But keep in mind that Admissions Offices ideally play a different role  --  selecting for students they think will contribute the most (in curiosity, in intelligence, in athletic ability, in teachability, in various areas of intended study, etc) to the university community. At all the other private universities I've known, admissions officers thought of themselves as selection committees, not as salespeople, and they'd even get kind of offended if you suggested that. They thought of themselves as having a role in maintaining academic quality, shaping an interesting student body, and strengthening campus culture.

I get that selectivity is just not possible for Valpo, but it makes me nervous for Valpo that so many in Admin (and so many on this board) seem to have just accepted the reductive marketing logic -- we're 'selling' to whoever will 'buy' -- as though this is something normative to press into even more. But uh... isn't this a big part of the problem of how Valpo got to where it is today? Isn't this desperate selling thing something we ought to be trying to get out of, not stay in? If Valpo is going to ever turn things around, doesn't there have to be a cultural decision at some point to aim up rather than down? How can Valpo ever be a thriving school if everybody just keeps prescribing more of the mass-sales logic?

[VULB#62]

I get that Diaspora and I probably mis-lumped the two. The key is upping the  numbers for the selection piece, right?  Perhaps then, that is where the reallotment of administrative resources should be focused.

[ValpoDiaspora]

I get that Diaspora and I probably mis-lumped the two. The key is upping the  numbers for the selection piece, right?  Perhaps then, that is where the reallotment of administrative resources should be focused.

It's counter-intuitive, but no... I don't think the key is 'upping the numbers.' The only way to improve your blood cholesterol is to quit eating the salty chips in the break room and buy a salad for lunch. At this point, the only way to turn around the selectivity tailspin is probably to use any extra fundraising or operating margin at all (and I understand there really isn't any) to offer scholarships to 'buy better classes' over a 5-15 year horizon. That sounds kind of crude -- but if Valpo is talking about selling Georgia O'Keefe to buy some dorm renovations, then it's no cruder to talk about using resources to buy a renovated direction for the university...

It wasn't always popular, but this is what my undergrad (Washington U. in St. Louis) did to turn things around. They used to be a sort of small regional commuter school accepting everybody who applied and were really on the edge, and then in the 80s-2010s threw every extra penny they had at hiring in faculty from the Ivy Leagues onto nicer teaching loads and in offering full-tuition merit scholarship automatically to all the valedictorians high school student in the region...and now they are now super financially stable, with something crazy like a 13% admit rate. I know that George Mason University did something similar, having previously been a satellite state campus 20 years ago vying for applicants at the bottom of the Virginia system -- but again they used a lucky break with some sports wins and a little breathing room on cashflow to leverage 'up' in hiring some key superstars and offering merit scholarships in those fields to basically buy their way to becoming 'the place to go' in those areas; now GMU is no longer in the backwaters of the VA system, but as a whole is now fundamentally on the other side of the admissions dynamic, where now applicants are more eager to get admitted than the university is eager to 'sell' the school to them. Or on the flip side of having but needing to maintain selectivity ,I was just at Yale Divinity this weekend giving a lecture with some other alumni, and it was kind of interesting to hear that although they are seeing some dropping #s of applicants (typical of MDiv trends across the country right now), still the Dean there is not wavering but insisting on admitting even FEWER students than before during this worrying downturn in applications in order to keep selectivity up... It was weird to see the hallways kind of empty compared to what I remember, but I think the current Dean is probably making the right call, to become all the more concerned about making the right faculty hires and the right student admissions decisions during this dry season in theological education, and to even admit smaller classes than in the past, rather than risk dropping out out of conversation with the other div schools they've historically operated among. In five or ten years, we will be in a different situation again, and the most important thing will be to not have lost the quality student body and quality of classroom discussion when new eras of students begin to apply to Div Schools in stronger numbers again. Or at my current VU, the Dean is really intensively trying to bring faculty salaries up and course loads down, and the university is pushing a lot of money into the merit/need scholarships to have better control in shaping the student body... and it seems to be working. Though the admit rate used to be up in the 50%s, the admit rate been coming down over these last few years... 40%, 30%.. and just this past year admitted 25%, while the yield rate is going up... from the high 10s and low 20s% a couple decades ago to now yielding close to 30% of the admitted students. I know this is all anecdotal and these are all very different institutions from each other, but I am just trying to paint the picture that stable or rising universities do not think in terms of 'juicing enrollment' or  'upping the numbers' or 'selling to whoever will buy' but actually do the opposite to become more reputationally and financially stable. It just drives me up the wall that so much of the talk at Valpo is always about trying to expand enrollment and offer less scholarships to students. That's getting the recipe backwards, no?

Dont' get me wrong, I'm not trying to promote eliteness or exclusivity as the end goal (once stable, the university has an obligation to make education more accessible, not less, and to serve as a vehicle for social mobility!!!!). But I'm just talking strategies for institutional survival, since that is currently what Valpo needs to figure out, and the race-to-the-bottom strategy is clearly not working. 

If Padilla is going to sell the Art, shouldn't he at least put the cash directly towards becoming the school Valpo wants to be, which means paying the faculty & staff salaries and giving the student merit scholarships it takes to get back to a stronger 'draw'? I know it's painful to spend precious dollars on spinach when everybody in the car is grouchy and tired would rather get French fries, but it's really the only way this seems to work over the long haul. Unfortunately, "upping the numbers" to get to selectivity is like saying 'I'm going to eat a ton of fast food this week, so I'll be full and satisfied when I start the salads someday!" Actually you just give yourself a salt addiction and put too much weight on your knees in the meantime, so the turn to healthy behaviors only becomes that much harder down the road....

Sorry if I get too impassioned about the market language stuff. I know I am always worrying here about people thinking about higher ed through the wrong lenses or employing the backwards logics, so  I probably sound like some language freak. But I just really want Valpo to do well. There are so many people all over the country who have done Lilly Fellowships and still think the world of the formation they got at Valpo back in the day! There will be a lot of sadness in my circles if Valpo goes under.

[crusader05]

I think the issue was hit on the head: Valpo is getting applicants that meet it's standards but it's not getting enough of them to commit. They're going to other univeristies, probably of equal or better caliber and the answer is why? If it's not the standards of our academic departments, what is it? You can't decrease your admit raite until you increase your yield rate. And if your standard of academics hasn't significantly fallen it seems that increasing yield remains a top priority. One of the reasons Padilla has indicated for the rush to update the facilities is that it is marked often as a top reason why potential students pick other schools over us. My guess is that aid is another factor and that's why the enrollment drive was important to continue to put scholarships funds into an endowment instead of out of the operating budget.

Valpo has impressive academics and is clearly recruiting kids who can meet those standards based on average GPA and SAT scores. So why aren't they coming? As much as we may hate to say facilities, it really really might be facilities. I think it's fair to assume that if facilities has impacted our ability to recruit athletically, having sub par freshman halls might also do so.

[historyman]

This is what my undergrad (Washington U. in St. Louis) had done, since they used to be a sort of small regional commuter school accepting everybody who applied, and then in the 70s and 80s threw every extra penny they had at hiring in faculty from the Ivy Leagues onto nicer teaching loads and in offering full-tuition merit scholarship automatically to all the valedictorians high school student in the region.

Probably a small point about WUSTL but I had a part time job in the early 80's that included stops at Wash U, Fontbonne, SLU, St Louis College of Pharmacy, Maryville U, Lindenwood U & Webster U among a few others. I believe Wash U's push towards the elite students and Ivy League faculty started way before in the 50's & 60's. They were hiring faculty like William Masters (of the sexy 60's fame) way back then. Wash U was in full blown Ivy League mode by the 70's and 80's.   

[VULB#62]

Diaspora, thanks for the detailed "menu" of options and models.  You got me hungry for change.

So what I am getting out of this piece of the discussion is we have two successful model types out there that Valpo should be addressing almost simultaneously. One, for the lack of a convenient name, let's call it the "institutional model" exemplified by the Yales, Washington Us, and GMUs. The other is the "athletic model" exemplified by Gonzaga (and apparently GMU too) where significant resources were pumped into the one flagship sport that could swiftly bring added relevance to the university as a whole.

I'm not smart enough to know which model should be addressed first, so my gut says find a way do both simultaneously.  And because we are into analogies, my thought is that doing only one is like trying to climb a rope with one arm. You need both to pull hand over hand to reach the top.

[ValpoDiaspora]

You can't decrease your admit raite until you increase your yield rate.

Yeah, thanks, that's a good point, so I do agree the dorm renovations could be key to improving yield. I guess I just heard more from students about their frustration of all the program cuts and faculty turnover during my time there, and not so much about the dorms. I often had sharp students who were frustrated in A&S , so even though I was A&S faculty, would often try to encourage them to apply to CC to get closer to the kind of quality seminar discussions they'd thought they were going to get at Valpo . I myself was on too heavy a load and the regular class caps in the GenEds were too big and the reading comprehension levels way too scattered for me to really be able to do it for them.  You can pull all nighters trying to give essay comments for 100+ students a semester, and work really hard to get beyond recapping the difference between possessive versus plural 's', but still not be able to give the smart ones anywhere close to the personalized attention they'd get  in CC or especially at other private universities. So even if it hurt our own upper-level course enrollments, it was better for the those really intellectual students to try to transfer into CC or elsewhere. But I hear you on the dorms... If students are saying the dorms are what prevents them from signing on to begin with, it's a problem that has to get addressed sooner than later.

But as for which to prioritize, it just seems a more direct mechanism to pay merit & athletic scholarships and directly secure yield, than to build dorms and hope that eventually translates into yield. Can you imagine if Valpo used $10 Million to send full-tuition merit offer letters to every National Merit Scholar in the country? I bet the money could incentivize a nice batch to come, and it would make for some pretty stellar headlines to make everybody perk up at take positive notice of Valpo.

WUSTL really very directly incentivized students to come. They not only offered a wide swath of their own full-tuition merit scholarships but also matched the National Merit money for all four years and let us keep any additional scholarships (Elks Club, Exchange club, whatever) even beyond tuition and fees; so if students had more scholarships that tuition and fees cost, the school would just write us checks for the difference....  truly crazy generous scholarship policies. Again, some observers might think that's a rather blunt/crude/unsavory way to buy better and better classes and they were criticized for it at times. Honestly, now its so competitive, I am not sure I could have gotten in these days at all, probably not. But my point is, the university had a kind of laser focus on doing whatever it took to climb into stronger yield and admit dynamics, and such incentives were successful in securing yield and giving the school some control over what sort of student body they want to cultivate. That  does seem to me a more direct way to improve yield than the construction/renovation strategy of hoping 'if we build it hopefully somebody will come.' That may be necessary and useful to some extent but also seems to involve a lot of causal 'ifs.' Does Valpo have that much time or leeway to pray and hope there is causal follow-through?