University of Iowa Prepares for National Enrollment Decline
- Dec 17, 2019
- 5 min read
Universities across the United States will find it more difficult to maintain current college enrollment due to an anticipated decline of college age students starting in 2025.
The shift was predicted by labor economist and author Nathan Grawe in his book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. Grawe’s research anticipates the number of people aged 18 to 22 will drop 15% or more from 2025-2029, a shift that has never occurred in such a short period of time.
University of Iowa Department of Sociology and Criminology lecturer Dr. Jennifer Haylett researches reproductive technologies, the work between surrogates and intended parents and the act of putting a price on a life. Haylett said having a child is a personal decision shaped by economic and cultural factors and as a result, there have been variations in fertility rates over time.
Haylett said that mothers in the United States have increasing expectations about the amount of time to devote to parenting.
Three University of Iowa undergraduate students talk about their future family plans and why their generation is having less kids than their parents.
“With those increasing expectations, people have fewer children because you can’t give everything to four or five children,” Haylett said.
According to the Pew Research Center, the US birth rate started to decline in 2008 during the recession. The decrease has caused the anticipated decline in college bound students from 2025-2029.
“I think for a lot of women [it’s] hard to imagine being able to work and live up to all these expectations for really intensive parenting and afford a child and you don’t have access to affordable daycare,” Haylett said. “Those issues have existed for a while, but the recession made people realize how precarious their situation was.”
Listen below to hear Haylett talk in depth about factors that have influenced fertility rates in recent years. http://multimedia.jmc.uiowa.edu/bcichon/files/2019/12/HaylettAudioStory.mp3
Dr. David Ryfe, Director of the UI School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is not a stranger to strategic planning for recruitment. Nationally, journalism programs have experienced enrollment declines since the recession and the population decline has exacerbated the issue.
Ryfe said that the population decline has swept through the Northeast in recent years and the next wave will affect the Midwest.
Yet, the decline in college age Iowans will not affect the in-state student population at UI as much as other Iowa schools with higher percentages of in-state students, Ryfe said.
“At Iowa State, 75% to 80% are in state students,” Ryfe said. “Historically, it has been about half and half in-state and out of state at Iowa.”
However, Ryfe said that the demographic shift has created more competition between private and public colleges.
UI lost about 25% of its state appropriations since the great recession, causing the university to rely on undergraduate tuition to make up the difference, Ryfe said.
But UI was not the only university affected by the recession. Private colleges are the most threatened by the economic and demographic gap, Ryfe said.
“In the past, we were not competing with Simpson for students,” Ryfe said. “Now we are and we’re being much more aggressive about recruiting these kids to come to Iowa.”
Matthew Brown, Director of the UI Department of English, is not stressed about the decline in students. The department of English has not experienced an issue with recruiting students lately, especially following the recent addition of the English and Creative Writing major.
Brown said the UI will not be critically affected by the demographic cliff because it is supported by resources as a result of its public university status.
However, Brown is concerned about the demographic shift’s influence on the future of private liberal arts colleges.
“I worry about undercutting the larger ecology of higher ed and the state,” Brown said. “The stereotype of the national press is that the elites have huge endowments and that’s the nature of all private colleges. That’s not any of the Midwest small colleges’ situation.”
UI Director of Admissions Kirk Kluver became aware of the population decline after reading Grawe’s book. He has accepted the reality of the population decline but remains on alert to see how other institutions react.
Kluver said that some institutions may provide financial incentives to attract students.
“[Scholarships and tuition discounts] can be really unsustainable if you’re discounting tuition and rewarding scholarships in a way that puts your institution in a really difficult financial situation where other programs and services for students might need to be cut because the tuition revenue is not there,” Kluver said.
Kluver said the reaction elite schools have to the demographic cliff will set the tone for the rest of the institutions.
“I think institutions that are more selective will probably start admitting more students than they have in the past or they will dip lower with their initial standards,” Kluver said. “As a result, institutions that would have enrolled those students in the past aren’t enrolling them because they’re getting admitted into an institution they wouldn’t have gotten into before.”
The decline in Iowans has caused the UI to focus more on out of state recruitment.
Kluver said Illinois is the number two state in the country to export college students and Iowa has been the number one destination for more than 15 years.
Currently, UI has two regional full-time admissions employees representing the university in the Chicagoland area.
“There’s a lot of people invested in trying to recruit Chicago because reputationally it’s known to have students who will leave the state for college and cast a wide net for a college search,” Kluver said. “Regionals help facilitate national growth and work closely with students and families who are interested in the institution.”
However, researchers anticipate Chicago will have a 20% decline in the number of people aged 18 to 22 available to go to college in the next five years, Ryfe said.
Individual UI schools and departments are focusing their efforts on attracting a wider range of out of state students by cultivating destination programs, areas of study that students will travel to Iowa for specifically.
Ryfe and Kluver consider the health sciences and creative writing programs as some of the current destination programs at the UI.
“A lot of students come because they want to attend Big Ten football games or they love Iowa City as a community or because their parents came here,” Ryfe said. “It seems logical if we create programs that are unique and high status that they will reliably attract students from population centers like Florida, Texas and California.”
Kluver said that the UI will continue to build pipeline programs to increase the number of non-traditional students, but it won’t make enough of an impact to negate the population decrease.
“Even in all of our efforts and initiatives, we’re not going to find the 15% anywhere else,” Kluver said. “The population itself will be smaller.”
Kluver and Brent Gage, associate vice president for enrollment management, created a presentation that covers Grawe’s main points to share with any group on campus interested.
“It’s important information for the whole campus community… to understand the context in the world in which we’re living in the next ten years,” Kluver said.
Since the creation of the presentation a year and a half ago, 35 presentations were given to various groups on and off campus.
Overall, the UI has reacted to the anticipated enrollment decline by adopting what Kluver called a “nimble approach”.
“[We] have our eyes wide open about the reality that’s down the road,” Kluver said. “[We’ll] plan accordingly and be ready to adapt and adjust as we see fit.”
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