By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Missouri Western State University has hired a new Vice President for Enrollment Management in an effort to reverse a decline in enrollment on the St. Joseph campus.
Missouri Western Interim President Elizabeth Kennedy calls it a critical position, which has been vacant for about a year.
“And I think this past fall we saw some of the effects of that,” Kennedy says. “Our enrollment was not where we wanted it to be. We weren’t as down as we thought we would be, but certainly we want to go in the opposite direction.”
Melissa Mace comes to Missouri Western from Maryville University in St. Louis, where she worked in recruitment and admissions. Mace has also worked at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville and Missouri State University in Springfield.
Kennedy says the task of recruitment has gotten tougher for four-year colleges, with many high school students now looking at college pragmatically, more as a way to obtain a good-paying career than as a life enriching experience.
“It’s a different view of higher education, but the bottom line is we all need to have a well-educated citizenry and that’s what we’re doing,” according to Kennedy.
Missouri Western has a total student population of 4,911, down nearly 10% from a year ago. There are 3,530 students seeking undergraduate degrees at Missouri Western with 194 seeking a graduate degree. The university actually has 1,187 non-degree seeking students, mostly dual credit/dual enrollment high school students at the Early College Academy.
Kennedy says all of higher education has suffered enrollment declines.
“We’ve seen this across the nation, we’ve certainly seen it in the state, part COVID related, particularly among the freshmen numbers, because it’s just been a completely unpredictable year,” Kennedy says. “And part also is just the shrinking demographics, particularly when you’re looking at the traditional college-age freshmen.”
Kennedy says 92% of Missouri Western’s enrollment is made up of traditional freshmen.
Interim President Elizabeth Kennedy says the fact that the position of Vice President for Enrollment Management has been vacant for about a year likely added to the enrollment decline.
“As an open access institution in this state, we need to make sure that we have the opportunities, the pathways for a lot more students beyond just the traditional freshmen coming into campus,” Kennedy says. “Given our programs, given our faculty, our staff, what we do at Missouri Western, our focus on student success, the applied learning, the hands-on opportunities, I’m confident that Dr. Mace will be able to get us back on the right path in short order.”