Published by MLive
The drop in enrollment at Michigan’s 15 public universities over the past decade or so would have been enough to empty out Lake Superior State University, Michigan Tech, Northern Michigan University, the University of Michigan’s Flint and Dearborn campuses and Ferris State, as well.
That’s more than 45,000 students, the equivalent of a small city, a 15 percent decline from the enrollment peak in 2011.
The decline is partly a pandemic phenomenon. It’s mostly the product of a shrinking number of 18 to 22-year-olds and a slow decline in the percentage of high school graduates choosing to enroll in college.
It is almost certain to get worse. After 2025, the number of students graduating each year from Michigan high schools is projected to drop steadily for more than a decade.
Barring significant and unlikely shifts in the number of high school graduates enrolling in college or in the ability of the state’s less selective regional universities to draw out-of-state and adult students, those schools are simply going to get smaller.
Their leaders will have to make hard decisions about how to shrink campuses that have been growing for decades. Surrounding communities will feel the economic pinch more than they already have. State leaders will have to decide whether to bolster support for institutions in decline and possibly whether Michigan needs 15 public universities.
The state’s flagship universities might not feel the impact of a shrinking pool of potential students. The University of Michigan added thousands of students over the past decade. Michigan State University and Michigan Tech held enrollments reasonably steady.
But falling enrollment is already part of the reason why Central Michigan University shuttered four residence halls, why Eastern Michigan University sold the building that once housed its business college and handed over its dorms to a private developer in exchange for new buildings.
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It’s also about identity, according to Nanci Tessier, a principal at Art & Science Group, who has worked in college recruitment for more than three decades.
“When the pie is shrinking, in order to do well, you need to really increase your piece of the pie,” she said, “and the institutions that succeed are the ones able to articulate their unique value,” the ones thinking carefully about what kind of academic experience they’re offering to students, the ones that can explain how they’re different from dozens of similar schools.
Doing that is going to matter more in the coming years, she said, because “the competition that you’re seeing is only going to become more intense.”
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On the whole, college still pays off for most people who go. But researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimated that college wasn’t a good investment, at least economically, for many graduates in the bottom 25 percent of the earning scale. And that was back in 2014.
Further significant increases risk pricing some students out of the market, creating the impression that higher education is a risky bet and drawing the ire of elected leaders who care that public universities remain accessible and affordable.
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“It’s really about weathering the next decade or so of weaker demand and coming out the other side,” she said, “hopefully a leaner, meaner, more efficient enterprise.”