BizNews FEATURE
Cindy Gnadinger
Michael Lovell
Mark Mone
Vicki Martin
From smaller campus footprints to changing student demographics, higher ed leaders brace for big changes
Lauren Anderson, staff writer
EVEN BEFORE the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the higher education system, industry leaders had already been bracing for a major challenge on the horizon. Projections indicate the typical college-going population will decrease by 15-20% after 2025 due to declining birthrates, a trend that is in part linked to the Great Recession. “We’re running out of teenagers, I like to say,” Mark Mone, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said during a recent Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce discussion with higher education leaders. Industry leaders were in the process of making plans for the approaching enrollment drop-off when COVID-19 accelerated that timeline by five years. Nationally, freshman enroll12 / BizTimes Milwaukee NOVEMBER 9, 2020
ment at colleges and universities dropped 16% this fall compared to fall 2019, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Marquette University’s freshman enrollment decline was in line with those averages – down 16% from last year, or roughly 350 fewer incoming students. President Michael Lovell said he does not expect those numbers to improve next year. “We were preparing for a 1520% decrease. … Suddenly now it’s upon us this year. We had to go from planning to prepare for 2026 to planning for next year and figure out how we can restructure the university in one year to deal with this demographic shift,” Lovell said on the MMAC webcast. With fewer college-aged students coming in and a grow-
ing number of them opting out of college amid the pandemic, universities and colleges expect to see smaller student bodies in the coming years – a trend that will create a ripple effect across the region’s institutions. For one, Milwaukee-area college leaders said it could mean their campuses have fewer – or at least smaller – buildings, a reversal of the facility expansion trend in recent decades at schools like Marquette and UWM. “We’re going to find a way to decrease our physical footprint,” Lovell said. “We’ve found many people can work from home and don’t need an office here at Marquette. If we have a smaller student body, that means less residence halls and less need for classrooms, particularly as classrooms are changed to an online environment.”
Mone said UWM will need to “right-size” to adapt to the declining demographics. “Less real estate,” Mone said. “What’s wrong with that? The problem is how do we shed that quickly enough to reduce costs?” Five years from now, Milwaukee Area Technical College campuses will have a “much smaller footprint,” said president Vicki Martin. More students will likely be learning off campus, but the college is working to build out its environment to be more engaging for students when they are on site. That will likely look like more clubs, more sports and a greater presence of four-year college representatives and employers on campus, she said. “... When students are on campus, it will be much more of a college environment with a lot of different activities happening,” Martin said. “The look of the college will be different. We’re working on that right now to change our appearance.”
Credentials and badges Colleges and universities will also need to find new revenue sources to make up the gap, Mone said. There could be a potential revenue opportunity for higher education as employers seek to upskill workers for the pandemic economy and the post-pandemic economy. Martin said she expects a growing trend of adults “going to work to earn a degree.” Increasingly, employers are going to look for their employees to translate their work experiences into credentials or badges that acknowledge the worker has attained a specific skill. Those could look like a digital coding badge or a “critical thinking” credential, backed by a higher education institution. “It’s just in time learning,” Martin said. “That’s what people are interested in.” Building out a system of badges and credentials that meet the
