New transfer students is a pretty meaningless statistic. The valid measure on transfer students is net transfer students (incoming - outgoing). If someone is purporting that no decrease in new transfer students is "good news", it would seem they are struggling to create positives.
I understand that FAFSA created a lot of problems for many parties, but a university cannot use factors like that as justification for a 10% decrease in incoming freshmen yoy. It hurts the university's financial regardless and (like any organization) the university has to find ways to overcome negative externalities.
New transfer students is a pretty meaningless statistic. The valid measure on transfer students is net transfer students (incoming - outgoing). If someone is purporting that no decrease in new transfer students is "good news", it would seem they are struggling to create positives.
I understand that FAFSA created a lot of problems for many parties, but a university cannot use factors like that as justification for a 10% decrease in incoming freshmen yoy. It hurts the university's financial regardless and (like any organization) the university has to find ways to overcome negative externalities.
The new transfer number is not "a meaningless statistic." It indicates positive recruitment, which is good and I applaud. Of course, it is a figure that one cites when looking for "positives," thus the "good news" label. The "net transfer" number is a different stat, which one hopes will be good but that will have to be seen; however, common sense suggests odds are better that net transfer is more likely to be positive if the new transfer enrollment is positive than if it is negative.
As for FAFSA: nobody is suggesting it "as justification for a 10% decrease." The comments I reported were "speculation" that the FAFSA disaster was "a contributing factor" that was "among various valid factors."
When I read this quote in context of good news, it still remains confusing yet I think I have an explaination: "...the good news is that there should be no decrease in the number of new transfer students"
What I *think* this is pointing to is a one measure of retention - the number of transfers OUT of VU is the same as it was last year(s). Retention of current students is one of the most important measures for any university, and I would guess that VU was worried that all of the changes announced over the last year could have negatively impacted student retention. (The other key measure is recruiting students who attend.)
VU probably can see which of their current students have registered for classes this fall, which would be earlier and more accurate than seeing which new students (new freshmen and transfers) who are more likely to register later, or who decide at the last minute about their college choice.
Of course, from a revenue perspective, the net student headcount is critical, so net transfer students is key.
The bottom line is revenue and whether it will increase or decrease relative to the prior year. New student enrollment, and its relationship to the number of students who graduated, is key. Discount rate/average tuition paid by students is key. Net transfer is also important - but not just the number of transfer students coming in. When I see a good news/bad new like what was presented above - in which a key stat was the bad news and only part of an important stat was the good news - I don't feel comfortable.
I am, however, confident that administration leaders are looking at (or will shortly see) all of the data...which is more important than me knowing. I am hopeful that people are recognized and rewarded for good performance and not rewarded for poor/below expectations performance.
I feel as if Whittenburg is not the goal. Their decision seemed like a last ditch effort to save a dying school. Valpo is not a dying university quite yet. VU is still just a university on a decline. I trust that Whittenburg's model is not the model being followed and that lessons can be learned from a sister Lutheran institution. The current admin is promising.
Too many Lutheran universities are following the Wittenberg playbook. Even if they say they're not, in too many cases it seems they are basically just doing a worse/thinner/more adjunctified version of what they used to be good at.
In comparison, I saw this article recently about the variety of Catholic trades-type colleges popping up, trying to combine a STEM/trades preparation with a humanities vision for formation: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/institutions/religious-colleges/2024/02/08/new-catholic-colleges-and-trade-schools-emerge. I find this fascinating. If it works, I think they're going to see much more wide-ranging institutional diversity overall. On the one hand, the selective 4 yr Catholic universities (Notre Dame, Boston College, Georgetown, even elite niche liberal arts colleges like College of the Holy Cross etc) aren't going anywhere.... they're going to stay expensive and high-demand among a certain kind of prospective family/student who wants that traditional private residential university experience and the personalized attention and networking opportunities that come with it. But on the other hand, as the wider population (including many Christians/Catholics) becomes suspicious of the high-cost 4 year privates, the more accessible and innovative sorts of Harmel and College of St. J the Worker type trade schools may really grow, serving a truly different population. As the article states, there is demand for a combination of pragmatic career preparation and faith. But it's telling that these are completely new colleges popping up.
In the meantime, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of non-selective mid/low tier four-year religious colleges go under, as the beginning of the article notes is already happening to so many. In that sense, the small generic regional Lutheran and Catholic colleges are in the same boat with the enrollment cliff.
My concern for Lutheran education, including Valpo, is that everybody's too committed to that generic dying middle. We don't seem to have any Lutheran institutions really committed to educating the top competitive edge anymore; but we don't see much of the holistic-trade-university innovation going on either.
In that vein, Wittenberg is depressing since the model just seems to be 'lets just be crappier and crappier."
TOTALLY agree with this part:
The bottom line is revenue and whether it will increase or decrease relative to the prior year. New student enrollment, and its relationship to the number of students who graduated, is key. Discount rate/average tuition paid by students is key. Net transfer is also important - but not just the number of transfer students coming in. When I see a good news/bad new like what was presented above - in which a key stat was the bad news and only part of an important stat was the good news - I don't feel comfortablea.
I'm not really sure what you mean by this part:
I am hopeful that people are recognized and rewarded for good performance and not rewarded for poor/below expectations performance.
If you're talking about canning the Admissions office people or something because of this year's lower enrollment, I don't really see how that would help much. The demographic/reputational issues that VU is facing are so much bigger than what they can do to fix on the marketing side. And we've already been thru so much turnover, it's hard to make the case that the current people are responsible for these trends or that putting in new people could do much to change it either. At some point, isn't there some benefit just to keeping a little bit of continuity in staffing, whether they're the perfect people or not?
On campus I sometimes hear people bash Admissions as if somehow figuring out a better marketing or branding strategy would have made all the difference this last decade. But that seems pretty unfair, considering that more stable/successful universities don't really treat Admissions primarily as 'advertisers,' nor do they put Admissions in the rather impossible position of constantly countering the negative impressions being generated by higher/wider administrative decisions. Rather, in higher ed, Admissions is ideally almost the opposite of 'marketing/advertising,' where their job is to protect the quality of the institution via 'selection' of students who will most enhance the intellectual quality and cross-pollinating diversity of the undergrad experiences.
Given our situation, VU's Admissions Office does have to do more advertising than selecting, but they can only work with whatever actual draw/appeal/experiential reputation dynaic the rest of the university has given them to work with. They can probably put a little lipstick on the pig, but I just suspect that at the end of the day there is only so much 'marketing magic' they can do. So it seems unfair to expect Admissions people to somehow massage all the bad news and doubt into positive numbers.
And even if the Admissions staff are just so-so, maybe there's some institutional benefit in stemming the constant staff turnover and confusion, to give people some chance to catch up and even know who's who around campus? Especially if we do expect Admissions to work mainly as Advertisers, then it's all the more important that there exist substantive connections between them and the colleges/depts/programs they're trying to advertise... But realistically, it takes 1-3 years for admissions staff to really learn the VU program offerings, meet the faculty/program directors, and to implement effective talking points for on-campus or related career-related opporunities that work with interested students for those programs.. But that knowledge cannot be built if the employees on all sides of this keep changing all the time!!!!! At some point, people just give up, if faculty don't think it's worth trying to get to know the new admissions staffer, or if the admissions staffers can never catch up wtih learning the changing program directors.
I don't have any special relationship to Admissions so am not trying to defend them inordinately. But I would just hate to see Padilla go on some campaign to suss out who was a 'good' performer and who was a 'bad' performer, when the sea has been far too choppy to know the difference for several years, and the attempt would probably create more chaos across the university than recovered performance.
What I see with a private school in VUs boat is cost vs quality. Wittenburg costs just shy of 60k to attend pre fin aid. VU actually touches that 60k margin. Its going to be hard to convince students to attend the school with the bad publicity and such a high price tag. I understand finaid and scholarships are available, but what prospective students see when you type "Valpo cost of attendance" in on Google is that high price tag. Valpo desperately needs to get their name back out there as a reputable institution again. The bad publicity from the art sale and from making neccecary cuts to majors is going to sour the pot for a long time.
This is why I believe access college, and transfer in programs are going to be a good return on investment for the school. Access to VU facilities without paying VU prices is a major plus for a school trying to build a local identity again. I do believe VU will be successful in becoming a university for the region rather than just a Lutheran school.
I know this is a long shot, but sports are a great attractor as well. Sports success is "free" publicity for your school. Schools such as Gonzaga capitalized on this and sports are a key factor as to why Gonzaga has almost 4x the amount of students while being 10k more expensive than VU. Its just like how Todd and Paul put it in their end-of-season podcast. Go back and ask some of the 2000s enrollees, they will tell you they saw Bryce Drew hit the shot and were hooked.
Sure, I totally admire Gonzaga's success with the basketball and I wish VU could hit the jackpot in that way too!
But I think we have to keep in mind Gonzaga is also doing a lot of other more bread-and-butter things to bolster or maintain that momentum across the students experience both outside and inside the classroom. My understanding is that at such peer institutions, faculty/staff pay is notably higher than VU'*, they've kept faculty-to-student ratios low (and not just because of falling enrollment), and teaching loads are significantly lower as well, at something closer to a 3-3 or 18 credit per year load.
So it's not just basketball stardom, but they also seem to have invested pretty reliably in the fundamentals of undergrad-serving operations as well.
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*This is hard to gauge of course, but Glassdoor puts Gonzaga average asst. prof salaries at $92K vs Valparaiso $75K; Indeed puts Gonzaga average asst. prof salaries at $69K vs. Valparaiso $54K.
More specific to Valpo's internal studies, this VU doc is publically availabe online, noting VU salary comparisons with peer institutions (usually includes Gonzaga but not in this year span:) .
Obviously, this 2015-2018 data is pretty skewed/outdated because it still included the top-most paid Law Faculty who were often getting $150-200+ K before the closure of the Law School and it is also pre-COVID and before the really big cost of living rises in Indiana these past couple years. Also, it does show that although the CAS/CC faculty are always complaining about low salaries in the $50s and 60Ks, there are faculty on campus who are paid quite well, since Law, Business, and Engineering are getting six figures, and thus do help pull our overall stats much higher!
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/ https://www.valpo.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/ASAC_2018FacultyCompensation2-3.pdf
(publically accessible online)
Anyhow, I'm not trying to make this just about salaries or something, but just tryign to note that there's a lot more than just basketball going on in terms of cultivating a strong university community. Not even included in these kinds of stats are peer institutions' endeavors to help wtih faculty/staff retention, like Santa Clara's housing downpayment assistance programs, where they basically give each employee $120K towards buying a home if they stay long term in akcnowledgement of cost-of-living challenges.
Oh I understand Gonzaga has other factors involved in their success. One other form is that they practically exist on an island in terms of major universities. The only other competition in the University sphere is Eastern Washington in Cheney. Other than Eastern Washington and Gonzaga, one would either have to settle for the various community colleges in Spokane, or travel large distances. VU does not have that luxury, unfortunately. Notre Dame, Purdue, and even Commuter Campuses such as IUN and PNW such the region dry in terms of enrollees that are local for Valpo. Coming from a family of educators, I do understand that VU is deplorable with their pay. I hope this to change if/when the school gets out of the gutter.
My main point is that in 1999, Gonzaga enrolled just as many students as VU did at the time, fast forward to today, and a boom occurred that propelled the Zags to almost 8k in enrollment while VU has dropped to just shy of 3k students.
I also noticed that Gonzaga got in on the CC partnership train early and has seen it pay off in recent years.
Too many Lutheran universities are following the Wittenberg playbook. Even if they say they're not, in too many cases it seems they are basically just doing a worse/thinner/more adjunctified version of what they used to be good at.
In comparison, I saw this article recently about the variety of Catholic trades-type colleges popping up, trying to combine a STEM/trades preparation with a humanities vision for formation: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/institutions/religious-colleges/2024/02/08/new-catholic-colleges-and-trade-schools-emerge. I find this fascinating. If it works, I think they're going to see much more wide-ranging institutional diversity overall. On the one hand, the selective 4 yr Catholic universities (Notre Dame, Boston College, Georgetown, even elite niche liberal arts colleges like College of the Holy Cross etc) aren't going anywhere.... they're going to stay expensive and high-demand among a certain kind of prospective family/student who wants that traditional private residential university experience and the personalized attention and networking opportunities that come with it. But on the other hand, as the wider population (including many Christians/Catholics) becomes suspicious of the high-cost 4 year privates, the more accessible and innovative sorts of Harmel and College of St. J the Worker type trade schools may really grow, serving a truly different population. As the article states, there is demand for a combination of pragmatic career preparation and faith. But it's telling that these are completely new colleges popping up.
In the meantime, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of non-selective mid/low tier four-year religious colleges go under, as the beginning of the article notes is already happening to so many. In that sense, the small generic regional Lutheran and Catholic colleges are in the same boat with the enrollment cliff.
My concern for Lutheran education, including Valpo, is that everybody's too committed to that generic dying middle. We don't seem to have any Lutheran institutions really committed to educating the top competitive edge anymore; but we don't see much of the holistic-trade-university innovation going on either.
In that vein, Wittenberg is depressing since the model just seems to be 'lets just be crappier and crappier."
So much more reason for VU marketing and recruiting to go after the Lutheran demography with much greater intensity.
And I might add: somehow find ways to ethically present/promote Valpo as THE place for current students at Lutheran colleges at-risk to consider transferring to.
VUIndiana - I intentionally framed my comments around "rewarded" and avoided "punished". My point is that organizations sometimes praise and reward when performance fails to meet realistic expectations - rewarding effort and behavior without consideration for performance. For instance, if Valpo set a realistic goal of 600 new students enrolling and ended up with 550, then the head of admissions should not be getting a promotion or substantial (above COL) pay increase. I will add that your comments regarding maintaining continuity are generally spot on, though senior administration needs to always evaluate and not avoid hard decisions.
There are a number of things that I do think Valpo's admissions organization needs to address. First, it needs to recognize that prospective students base their decisions on their planned career and thus weigh the value of the respective College as much or more than the university. From what I see in messaging (and some idiosyncratic conversations with leaders in a few Colleges), Valpo Admissions is focused heavily on Valpo's brand and is not treating the brand and value of each College as a priority. Second, Valpo Admissions for many years has done a poor job of engaging alums with established careers in various areas. I live in Milwaukee and for many years lived in Chicago and Valpo never reached out to me (or, to my knowledge, any other alums with professional careers) to attend and speak at recruitment sessions or interact with prospective students in other ways. They seem to miss the opportunity to leverage resources that can help (and cost little).
Rez - Ah yes, all good points about regional competitions and such.
VU84 - Ah, I see where yo'ure coming from. But unless the staff are in a fundamentally better situation than faculty, I don't think they're getting any merit or COL raises. Are raises on the table for staff? In this current situation, I was assuming the only way to distinguish between good and bad performance would be who gets to keep vs lose their job at current pay rates.
@VU84
And on your larger point, I do agree with what you're saying about needing to involve alumni. I know at my undergrad and grad institution, alumni were pretty involved in serving on selection committees for both college-level scholarships and university-level merit scholarships for prospective freshmen, as well as general admission college fairs and general admission/rejection interviews. Not sure if Valpo does that or not, but as you say it seems Admissions has generally not engaged alumni in recruitment as much as they could have.
From my understanding, VU is attempting to be more cordial with Alumni. However, with the recent survey debacle, I feel as if I do not trust them to this end. However, they NEED alumni support to survive. VU has a very large, very affluent, and very successful base of alumni to work with. I fail to understand why they never thought to use their alumni in the past. Hopefully, they prove me wrong.
