Central Mass. colleges prepare to roll with changing demographics
Tristan Deveney of Clark University: “We try to make sure students are getting experience employers are really looking for.”
Over the next six or seven years, the number of 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States will decline. For colleges and universities, that means a significant challenge, but not an unexpected one.
“We have seen this coming for a long time,” said Evan Lipp, vice president for enrollment management at Worcester's Assumption College. “Campuses that have begun preparing for it three, four, six years ago are the ones that are most prepared for what we are facing currently.”
For private Central Massachusetts colleges, preparing for the trend has involved a mix of savvy marketing strategies, more substantive changes to their programs and efforts to deal with the tough issue of the price tag attached to attaining a college degree.
Despite the faltering demographic situation, Tristan Deveney, associate director of admissions at Clark University in Worcester, said the school saw a huge jump in applications over the past three years, from 4,300 for the class of 2016 to 7,291 for this year's freshman class (class of 2018). He said the school sees a number of factors driving the surge in interest. One is an initiative launched in 2010 known as the Liberal Education and Effective Practice program, or LEEP, which incorporates more real-world and workplace experience into its traditional liberal arts core.
“We try to make sure students are getting experience employers are really looking for,” Deveney said. “We really focused our messaging around that.”
Among the other moves Deveney thinks have helped push applications up are making SAT or ACT tests optional and adding a new scholarship that covers full tuition, plus room and board.
This past February, Assumption also made a big change, partly in an effort to recruit more students. It instituted a four-year tuition freeze for current students and the class of 2019 as part of its Assumption Assurance plan, which also includes a focus on balancing liberal arts education with job preparation. The school says more than 70 percent of its students complete internships before they graduate.
This year, Assumption also added programs in criminology, education and health professions, areas that tend to attract interest from young people, and then marketed them aggressively to prospective students, Lipp said.
Enhancing academic offerings
“I think you need to look at it almost from a business perspective,” he said. “What enhancements can you make to what you're offering?”
For Becker College in Worcester and Leicester, recent enhancements have included more offerings in animal studies, game design, nursing and criminal justice, all points of strength for the school, according to Kevin M.R. Mayne, vice president of enrollment management.
“This niche focus helps shine a spotlight on our strong, distinctive programs to the proper audiences,” Mayne said in an emailed response to questions.
He said the college launched a dozen new academic programs last year, along with a new Center for Global Citizenship. At the same time, Becker has increased its focus on entrepreneurial skills and expanded its Accelerated & Professional Studies program, which is aimed at current professionals, rather than traditional college students.
Becker has also instituted a tuition freeze, and, on the marketing front, the school offers a virtual tour and a 24-hour live chat feature on its website.
“This generation is all about immediate feedback and results, and the virtual tour, live chat and heavy social media presence are our responses to supporting these prospective students,” he said.
If demographic trends are worrisome for the country as a whole, they're even more so in New England, where population growth has been relatively slow for years and will remain that way for years to come. In the South and West, there will be significantly more students graduating from high school in 2022 than there were in 2009, but in the Northeast the number will be lower, according to projections by the Institute of Education Sciences' National Center for Education.
More intensive recruiting
Clark, Assumption and Becker have all responded to this geographical issue by upping their recruitment game in other parts of the country. The schools have chosen target markets based on the prevalence of young adults, but also on factors related to their particular strengths. Clark has recruitment efforts in Chicago and Washington, D.C., as well as the Pacific Northwest, Texas and elsewhere, in search of “academically strong students who are looking for a selective liberal arts college in a small urban area,” Deveney said. Assumption has grown its applicant numbers from California and Florida and is gaining market share in its main stronghold in Massachusetts, Lipp said.
Becker has experienced a particularly strong shift. Three years ago, only 11 percent of its students came from out of state. Now, after a marketing push on the West Coast and in the South, that's up to 53 percent, Mayne said. The school, which only began offering bachelor's degrees in 1991, has come a long way from the locally focused “junior college” it once was.
“People in our own backyard still think of Becker as the way it was 30 or 40 years ago, but Becker is not the same college,” Mayne said.
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