Oh I certainly dont think the bachelor degrees are being marketed effectively. That stems all the way back to when the law school was around. If my memory serves me correctly, VU held the law program on a pedestal. The law program was the precious to their Gollum (I will continue to use this analogy, sue me). They flaunted and flaunted the law program, even when their engineering program and their nursing program is about as quality of a program as Purdue and IUs programs respectively. Heck Basketball games used to have an entire pregame presentation about the law program dating as far back as the early 2010s. There in lies the issue with the law school shuttering. When you put this program on a pedestal, people tend to assume that this program is your identity. The general public was under the impression that the program was "ran into thr ground" which I believe there is some truth to. Even if enrollment has never relied on the law school previously, when that program, which VU marketed as its entire identity practically, people will lose faith in the institution regardless of what other good programs you might offer.
I remember a kid in eight grade. Back when VU used to give campus tours to the local middle schools and high schools. During the QnA he said this, "How are we to trust that you can keep the safety of us as students and our degrees, when you cant even keep your law school open". Needless to say, Valpo schools have not been invited back since to my knowledge. The court of public opinion is brutal, and the mismanagement of the law program is a perfect example of how that court can turn against you even when you have historically never relied on it.
FWIW, I would add a reference to enrollment at Concordia Nebraska (my wife's alma mater).
https://www.cune.edu/news/concordia-nebraska-celebrates-fall-2024-undergraduate-enrollment-numbers
Concordia University, Nebraska today announced that the university welcomed 404 new undergraduate students for the fall 2024 semester. Combined with the university’s 818 returning undergraduate students, current undergraduate enrollment is 1,222, which is 99.3 percent of the enrollment goal the university set for this semester.
“When fall 2022 began, we had 1,124 undergraduate students on campus,” said Concordia Nebraska Associate Vice President of Undergraduate Enrollment Aaron Roberts. “To be at 1,222 students for fall 2024 means we’ve grown by nearly 100 undergraduate students in the last two years. The faith so many families and students have put in our faculty and staff is a blessing beyond words.”
The university also serves 448 full-time and part-time adult learners registered for classes as of Aug. 27, 2024.
“What a joy and honor it is to welcome, serve and equip men and women for lives of learning, service and leadership to Christ in the church and world,” said university President Dr. Bernard Bull. “In a time when some colleges are struggling with declining enrollment, we continue to see strong, even growing, interest in Concordia by prospective students and their families. We are humbled and honored to strive to be a Christ-centered higher education alternative. We do not know how long this trend will persist but thank God for the opportunity to support students and families who hold Christian education and faith formation as a central priority when choosing a college.”
I'm catching up on many of the messages, and it is clear that Valpo has suffered deeper declines in enrollment than many of its peers over the least decade. This year's FAFSA debacle should have been no worse for Valpo than it was for Concordia Nebraska or the other peer schools listed on the previous pages (thanks @vuindiana) . This seems to me like it an excuse for a record decline in enrollment. (Why would Concordia Nebraska see an increase even with the FAFSA problem?)
Elsewhere on this board we have identified the turnover in the enrollment and marketing offices - the turnover does not help, yet if those individuals cannot articulate a compelling vision for why a student should come to Valpo, then they should be replaced. The Law School debacle also has been re-hashed in several places on this board.
What this does (again!) is point back to the utter failure of President Heckler's tenure. He pushed forward an ill-conceived expansion agenda to grow to 6,000 in the face of visible, well-known and entirely foreseeable decline in the college-age population. He oversaw and bears responsibility for the steep decline in the traditional Lutheran core of students coming to VU - although part of that demographic decline, those Lutheran students are going elsewhere to places like Concordia. He oversaw the borrowing of millions of dollars for new buildings (some of which were needed) yet did so without a plan to pay them off. He tapped VUs line of credit (secured by the endowment) to balance budgets without a plan to pay it back, leaving no flexibility for future needs. Although there were secular trends impacting all law schools, Heckler was president (and ultimately responsible) during the law school disintegration and black eye to the university.
I give President Padilla a lot of credit for trying to right the ship. In general, it looks to me like he is taking actions to secure the future of the university.
Elsewhere on this board we have identified the turnover in the enrollment and marketing offices - the turnover does not help, yet if those individuals cannot articulate a compelling vision for why a student should come to Valpo, then they should be replaced. The Law School debacle also has been re-hashed in several places on this board.
What this does (again!) is point back to the utter failure of President Heckler's tenure. He pushed forward an ill-conceived expansion agenda to grow to 6,000 in the face of visible, well-known and entirely foreseeable decline in the college-age population. He oversaw and bears responsibility for the steep decline in the traditional Lutheran core of students coming to VU - although part of that demographic decline, those Lutheran students are going elsewhere to places like Concordia. He oversaw the borrowing of millions of dollars for new buildings (some of which were needed) yet did so without a plan to pay them off. He tapped VUs line of credit (secured by the endowment) to balance budgets without a plan to pay it back, leaving no flexibility for future needs. Although there were secular trends impacting all law schools, Heckler was president (and ultimately responsible) during the law school disintegration and black eye to the university.
I give President Padilla a lot of credit for trying to right the ship. In general, it looks to me like he is taking actions to secure the future of the university.
Exact reason why Padilla's plans for future projects and the funding there of has been (mostly) a really good move. More loans is never the option.
Valpo95, I agree with your assessment of the Heckler years, and do think the responsibility ultimately lies with the president/board who had the decision-making power for better or for worse.
That said, I also sometimes wonder if the university's ongoing inability to articulate a compelling vision as a comprehensive university has to do with the structural oddities of A&S and CC at the heart of it all, and the general unwillingness or inability of various generations of Provost to forge these two entities into operating as a coherent force for the university at large.
Whether we like it or not, the comprehensive university really relies on a core curriculum made up of various liberal arts, natural science, and social science disciplines. At most such universities (Valpo included) the College of Arts and Sciences is by far the largest of the colleges, and thus its successes or failures matter a great deal for the other divisions or schools.
Unfortunately, my impression is that the division of A&S and CC is a mostly dysfunctional one that has bifurcated the university's ability to figure out an inspiring yet practical way forward.
On the one hand, CC is really strong on vision and personalized community; the CC deans and faculty have a very lofty vision of Great Books type education, they're given a lot of support to do small seminar type teaching (smaller course loads, smaller course caps, TAs), they really do build fantastic sense of community, and they get special support in terms of the university chairs and other specialty low-teaching load type endowed positions. So they often offer a very inspiring vision of what a Valpo education can be, and they can generally deliver on it. Most the other colleges, like Engineering, are fine with this, since the smart engineering majors who are also in Christ College get a wonderful enhancement and everybody is happy. The problem with it, though, is that CC's conditions are basically artificial and completely disconnected from the harsher dynamics that everybody else has to face. Since they don't house majors at all, they never have to prove their worth in terms of #s of declared majors or minors. Since a lot of their faculty have the cushy endowed positions, they never have to worry about cuts. Since their students are ultimately getting degrees in other colleges, they never have to really worry about whether they're giving their students a career path with a good ROI salary on the other side. There's just a tacit agreement that CC is a special smart zone where people ought to be able to retreat to do their smart thinking.
On the other hand, A&S has long been in the grind of needing to face the enrollment and marketing logic of students, parents, and administrators; so the Dean and faculty tend to operate very much in a world of scarcity, facing ever higher teaching loads and course caps while under greater and greater pressure to justify their programs and positions. In some sense, this accountability is a good thing because it has forced A&S departments (like English) to get very pragmatic and clear about what exactly they can offer students (professional writing/editing tracks, internships, working closely with Admissions on marketing promotionals, etc.) But the problem, however, is that A&S largely lacks any higher vision of what it is all for, or how they might serve the university's larger mission beyond merely trying to survive and prove their worth in terms of metrics and dollars. (For over 20 years, A&S also had a particularly weak dean who lacked any sense of vision and any ability to make a case for the college to other units around campus, let alone to prospective students.) As a whole, the campus seems to basically accept that A&S was the depressing and dumb college, as though it was natural that all the brains and resources should drain out of A&S into CC. After all, Engineering, Nursing, and Business generally keep their smart students while also having them get the enhanced CC experience, while A&S mostly just loses face-time and contact with smart students interested in the humanities and social sciences since they took those in CC instead of the parallel A&S offerings.... a brain drain that leaves the more adjunctified non-honors A&S programs and courses that much duller and less attractive.
Unfortunately, the provosts in the early 2000s never seemed to try much to figure out a viable way forward that would bring together both the 'vision' (of CC) and the 'pragmatism' (of A&S). For instance, the long-time Dean of Christ College and eventual Provost Mark Schwehn was a truly brilliant guy who could really inspire people with his vision for Valpo education, who wrote brilliant stuff about education being for wisdom, and was very encouraging of the various professional school students in CC. The honors college was his baby, and he (and others) made it a truly stellar learning experience for students. But eventually he became Provost of the whole university, and it is not clear to whether he ever seriously considered expanding the CC type experience more widely to be leaven in the larger loaf of bread, whether he ever considered spreading the fertilizer wider. At this point, it almost seems inevitable that CC experience must be exclusive and limited, the upper echelon of a necessarily two-tiered, two-class system. Other provosts afterwards have then inherited this bifurcated structure, so that even if a provost were to come from A&S, they too would have a weirdly lopsided stance from which to try to chart a comprehensive vision.
My point is not that A&S or CC deans can't be good provosts (since in many ways I do think it makes sense to have somebody familiar with the wing of the university that handles the Core curriculum in that role!). But I'm just saying the CC vs A&S bifurcation between visionary elites VS service teaching workhorses is really weird (considering the small and shrinking size of the university) and a generally unhelpful dynamic at the heart of it all (at a time when comprehensive privates need more than ever to give an integrated and coherent account of themselves!). After all, when you meet with a prospective student, which version of the university experience are you really talking about?
Meanwhile, the deans of the professional schools have it clearer in a way because they are not dealing with a a shadow sister-unit.... The Dean of Engineering just has to foster a great engineering school (that both strives for excellence and tries to prepare students for the world, and which needs to be a good experience for ALL students in the division) and then pitch that to the rest of the university and to the world. The Dean of CONHP just needs to build a top-notch Nursing program (serving mission and prepping students for career, and being a good experience for ALL students interested in healthcare) and present that to the rest of the university and the world.
But the CC and A&S units exist in a weird symbiotic/parasitic relationship where one casts vision for the liberal arts (while being supported by the university to help a special subset of honors students think loftily) and the other scrambles to cover the general ed for the university (while being constantly questioned on metrics and told to just spread it a little thinner and do a little less for each student). And their awkward sibling relationship does nothing to help the Provost (regardless of which college he or she may hail from) figure out how to chart an inspiring & compelling yet pragmatic & sustainable way for the comprehensive university as a whole.
Until this weird CC/A&S structural issues is addressed, I don't see much hope for articulating an integrated and mutually enriching relationship between them and the professional schools; and until VU can figure out that, I don't see much hope for enrollment & marketing being able to communicate it to the wider world of prospective families.
CC's conditions are basically artificial and completely disconnected from the harsher dynamics that everybody else has to face. Since they don't house majors at all, they never have to prove their worth in terms of #s of declared majors or minors. Since a lot of their faculty have the cushy endowed positions, they never have to worry about cuts.
VUIndiana, I believe you said on the old board that you were previously a teacher at Valpo? By my count, CC has exactly two endowed chairs out of ten. 20% is not “a lot,” especially given that another 20% is adjunct/visiting. And those endowments are not cherry-picked by administration; they are gifted by donors - and in the case of CC, both from one donor family in particular with a recognizable Valpo name.
You’re right that CC does not house majors. Their humanities major was cut this summer. The minor is still listed on their website.
@rezynezy - I like the idea of getting alums engaged to support the programs, but I have to say that alumni relations at Valpo have been non responsive and lacking, and certainly not a department deserving of a raise or bonus.
@usc4valpo Alumni relations on the academic side are abysmal and need to change. However, I do commend the athletic department for being much more engaging with the alumni network
@kreitzerstl Not sure what you mean.... The various university-level chairs are either in CC or dual appointed between CC and other units where they are shared: Duesenberg Ethics university chair (CC), Duesenberg Art (CC), Eckridge Religion and Healing (CC but leaving?), Jochum Theology university chair (CC and Theology), Markel Reformation university chair (CC and History but currently empty for a few years?) .... So isn't the only one not in CC the Gozon leadership uni chair? (not actually sure where the Gozon sits in terms of academic division in the org.
(There are other people called 'chairs' sometimes at the dept level, but these are the only ones that are the university-level endowed ones).
Anyhow, I'm not trying to bash CC or the donors who've wanted to establish these endowed chairs. I think support of the academics is very much what we DO need on campus, and kudos to anyone willing to give in that way! And it makes sense that these people who get these positions would want to be located or affiliated with the Honors College to teach the smaller seminars etc. As I've said, the Honors College really does deliver a top tier experience for their students.
I'm just saying it's STRUCTURALLY weird and sometimes unhelpful reduplication to have two humanities faculties in two different college divisions, especially given that, with Valpo's enrollment decline, we are the size of a mid-sized high school. At this point we have such a small undergrad entering class, that I wonder if it really make sense to invest so much in the rarefied few while leaving the vast majority of students to have a completely different non-Honors experience? Or can there be done more to make sure that all or at least most students actually get the personalized attention & high quality conversation that Valpo touts? In raw numbers, A&S is still the biggest college, so I just don't think a comprehensive uni can leave its largest division to languish as some kind of second-tier level on life support without it eventually bringing down the reputation and enrollment of all the other colleges too.
