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By  Brianna Hatch,  Wyatt Myskow,  and  Isha Trivedi August 15, 2022

The sectorwide drop in undergraduate enrollment over the past decade isn’t happening on every campus. But for some — particularly small private institutions, public regionals, and community colleges — the declines have often been acute. Here’s how three such institutions have felt the effects of sliding enrollment, the choices they’ve made in the past, and how they’re hoping to halt the downward trend.

Betting on Sprint Football

Like many small private colleges, Fontbonne University has had to adapt to survive.

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The sectorwide drop in undergraduate enrollment over the past decade isn’t happening on every campus. But for some — particularly small private institutions, public regionals, and community colleges — the declines have often been acute. Here’s how three such institutions have felt the effects of sliding enrollment, the choices they’ve made in the past, and how they’re hoping to halt the downward trend.

Betting on Sprint Football

Like many small private colleges, Fontbonne University has had to adapt to survive.

A Roman Catholic institution of 955 undergraduate and graduate students in Clayton, Mo., which borders St. Louis, Fontbonne was once a women’s college. That changed in the 1960s.

More recently, as Fontbonne has faced enrollment declines, it has tried other tactics. Cutting staff. Adding academic programs. Acquiring (then selling) land. It has even started an unusual football program.

The pandemic had a sobering effect on student numbers: In 2021, Fontbonne’s freshman-class size dropped 35 percent, and overall enrollment fell by 14 percent. Quinton Clay, vice president for enrollment management, marketing, and communications, said that the inability to recruit students in person played a significant role. An on-campus visit “is one of the strongest drawing cards for students and families to choose this institution,” he said.

But Fontbonne’s challenges are not new: From 2006 to 2016, undergraduate enrollment dropped by more than 45 percent, with the number of Black students declining by nearly 75 percent for part of the same period. Fontbonne, like other small colleges, is not at the “robust endowment end of the spectrum,” Clay pointed out, so it relies on tuition for much of its revenue. (The university’s endowment stood at $16.8 million, according to its 2021 financial statement.) For at least the past two years, Fontbonne’s core operations failed to generate positive revenue; it relied on pandemic-related government relief funds to finish its 2021 fiscal year in the black.

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