A 7.3% enrollment drop suggests Presentation College is too dependent on athletics:
After record enrollment last fall, Presentation College saw 60 fewer students this year.
Headcount enrollment at the school was 761, said Michael Mattison, vice president of admissions at Presentation. Fall 2016 headcount enrollment was 821, an all-time high.
Since last fall, five head coaches and three vice presidents have left Presentation, which likely factored in to such a large drop — 7 percent, Mattison said. The coaches are directly recruiting students.
“The relationship the coaches build with students is very important,” Mattison said [Katherine Grandstrand, “Presentation Enrollment Drop Blamed on Staff, Coaching Turnover,” Aberdeen American News, 2017.11.05].
If 7.3% of your students bail just because they’ll be playing games for a different coach, then 7.3% of your students are pursuing college education for two wrong reasons. I understand the economic realities that drive Presentation, Dakota Wesleyan, Mount Marty, and other small private colleges to heavily recruit full-time athletic entertainers. But from an academic perspective (i.e., the perspective that every college should prioritize), the loss of students whose focus is a relationship with a specific coach in a specific sport is far more a loss for those students, not the college.
Fortunately, Presentation appears to be focusing on academics to bring enrollment back up:
Presentation announced at the end of October it would be offering two new bachelor’s degrees: human services and health care administration. Students can begin applying now for the spring, though the programs begin in earnest in the 2018 fall semester.
…Presentation will still offer an associates degree in health care administration, but it took the old program and ramped it up into a bachelor’s degree, said Trisha Waldman, associate dean of Health and Natural Science. The program will be offered on campus and online, and students could take both types of classes.
“It is definitely a growing field at the moment, especially with the growth of rural health and being in a rural environment,” Waldman said [Grandstrand, 2017.11.05].
Responding to market forces—ah! There’s a school after Governor Daugaard’s heart. Recruit and train those workers, and encourage them to unwind by playing frisbee golf on the Presentation campus.
From what I hear PC is known for offering good scholarships freshman and sophomore years, and then when your become a junior or senior those scholarships dry up. That may be part of the issue; students are moving on because the can not afford to continue at PC.
And with PC costing more than twice what Northern charges, that scholarship would make a crucial difference. But for students whose only reason for being here is playing a sport, even that transition to Northern into a larger athletic talent pool may not be viable.
Why do we have entire sports leagues run by our private and public colleges, anyway? Why don’t we just expand our minor league teams to employ more high school graduates and let colleges focus on their main mission?
Check out the financials on http://www.guidestar.org for this college. As far back as 2016 things didn’t look so good financially. Losing 60 students really must hurt. Athletics should add to the academic experience, not the other way around. With a costly nursing program to run, if I were a student, I’d be concerned with the institution’s overall financial health and purpose.