Will Wichita State’s nearly $2 million recruitment investment boost enrollment?

A plan to increase enrollment at Wichita State has cost the university nearly $2 million over the past two years.

The result so far: 399 new students.

According to university documents and projections, WSU will spend more than $4,900 per additional freshman and transfer student recruited for last fall and this fall.

That’s more than the cost of in-state tuition and fees for one semester and more than four times the average scholarship WSU gave to incoming freshmen last fall.

Since taking over as WSU president in 2012, John Bardo has repeatedly stressed increased headcount as a goal and has said he wants to reach 22,000 students.

With dwindling state funding, one of the ways universities can raise more money is through more students who pay tuition and fees. To do that, the university hired an out-of-state marketing firm.

Bardo refused requests by The Eagle for an interview about enrollment and recruitment practices.

The university felt it needed to expand its recruiting efforts, said Tony Vizzini, provost and senior vice president.

“Doing what we were doing was going to get us the results that we’ve already had,” he said. And if you look at … declining demographics in state, it’s not a wise business practice to depend solely upon the way things were being done.”

The number of students has hovered around 15,000 for several years, and so far, projections for this fall continue to be about the same, with less than a 1 percent increase in new students.

The big question now is whether WSU’s nearly $2 million investment will pay off – and when.

Payoff ‘will be in millions’

In an interview in 2013, Bardo said he hoped to quickly increase enrollment by more than 7,000 students to get to 22,000 by recruiting from regions across the country.

“The plan is to spend hundreds of thousands,” Bardo said at the time, predicting “the payoff will be in millions” in additional revenue from increased enrollment.

So in the fall of 2013, WSU spent more than $800,000 to hire Royall & Co., a Virginia-based marketing firm, which says on its website that it has worked with more than 200 colleges.

In total, the university has paid about $1.6 million for the company’s services and related postage, according to information provided by the university through an open records request. It’s paid another $324,000 for lists of student names from other groups that collect the data, such as ACT and the College Board.

In September 2014, after the first full year of using Royall, enrollment went up by 276 freshmen and transfer students, which meant the university spent $2,950 to recruit each of the new students. That’s nearly three times the amount of the average scholarship it gave to incoming freshmen.

As of last week, the university estimated it will get an additional 123 freshmen and transfer students this fall, after spending about $970,000 more with Royall in the past year. That comes to more than $7,000 per new recruit.

University officials say they can’t separate the number of new enrollees generated by the university’s 30 full-time admissions staff from those enrollments generated by Royall & Co.

“It’s a team effort,” Vizzini said. “Royall is part of our recruitment team. To look at this team and say, ‘You’ve done this person and this person and this person’ – it’s just not manageable.”

WSU used to track leads generated by Royall and admissions staff but stopped sometime in 2014 because it was difficult, said David Wright, associate vice president for academic affairs and chief data officer.

A June 2014 internal e-mail from registrar Gina Crabtree, obtained by The Eagle, indicates that Wichita State was tracking the sources of leads for new enrollment at that time. In her e-mail, copied to Bardo, she wrote that WSU-created leads for new enrollment far outpaced the Royall leads and that Royall generated “only 8.6% of all admits and only 1% of enrolled students.”

“That is not to diminish the value of their efforts, as they have opened up markets we have not aggressively pursued before, but to give some perspective,” she wrote.

While actual enrollment figures aren’t moving much at Wichita State, the number of students admitted and the number of applications have gone up, Vizzini said.

Applications from prospective freshmen nearly doubled from 2013 to 2014 to more than 6,700.

However, applications always outpace enrollment. The College Board, a nonprofit group that oversees the SAT college entrance exam, encourages students to apply to five to eight colleges.

Even though university officials say they can’t determine how successful Royall is, they want to give the experiment three to five years. Wichita State is entering its third year of work with the company.

It will take that long, Vizzini said, before “you can really assess the true impact and whether it met our expectations of increasing the number, the quality, the diversity of our student population.”

Part of the reason for that is that Royall tries to recruit thousands of high school students down to the sophomore level over several years.

“Royall works on several years of depth,” Vizzini said. “We don’t call a student who is graduating from high school, ‘Do you want to come to Wichita State?’ It’s too late. You have to deal with sophomores, freshmen to get that message out there. So their work is in the pipeline already. So it’s also the future students that are being primed for when they graduate.”

The university plans to continue its contract with Royall, Vizzini said, but at a reduced cost this year. From September 2014 to June 2015, it paid the company $86,343 a month, according to the contract that ended June 30.

The Eagle requested a copy of the most current contract with Royall & Co. The university did not provide a copy before publication.

Generating enrollment

After classes started last August, enrollment at WSU was below 15,000, so the university pursued a last-minute effort to enroll more students.

On Aug. 28, Bardo called a meeting telling staff they needed to generate enrollment ahead of the 20th day of classes on Sept. 15, which is the day Kansas universities officially tally headcount.

But with few ways to bring in more degree-seeking students to campus, WSU looked to other means: Retired people. Corporate employees. Teachers looking for continuing education credits.

The result was a Late Registration Initiative, which added another 431 nontraditional students to the rolls through on-campus and online courses, according to WSU documents.

The largest course, which had 159 students, was held online for NetApp employees and called “Essential Skills for Effective Leaders.”

NetApp had several other courses, including “Human Factors” and “Strategic Negotiations,” with 38 students each, according to documents. There was also an “Enterprise Storage Essentials Class,” which had 108 students enrolled, according to a news release from Wichita State last fall.

The numbers of students who actually paid for courses is unclear. University officials did not provide the number of the students in the Late Registration Initiative courses who paid for the course and application fee.

But according to university documents, more than half of the 431 students had their application fee and tuition covered by WSU’s National Institute for Aviation Research as “sponsored outreach.” University officials did not answer questions about the NIAR-sponsored funds or where they came from.

Documents also show that 27 residents of Larksfield Place, a retirement community, received senior citizen tuition waivers for attending a “World Music” class at the senior living residence.

A resident at Larksfield Place, Susan Howell, said the “World Music” course there in the fall of 2014 was taught by John Goering. WSU asked them to enroll, Howell said.

Vizzini said these students were counted as part of fall 2014 enrollment.

“They told us we are on record as WSU students,” Howell said.

Enrolling was something new, Howell said, because in Kansas, residents age 60 or older can audit (sit and listen in on university classes) for free. Auditor students are not counted as “enrolled,” though. Howell said she and other residents at Larksfield Place have audited classes in the past. They were glad to enroll for this one, she said.

For the Larksfield students, there was no difference between this “enrolled” class and the audited classes she and others have taken in the past: There were no tests, no grades. “No pressure,” Howell said. “It’s not like any of us are training for a job.”

There was also no charge. WSU told them they’d learn for free, Howell said.

“The class was great,” she said. “Some of the people in the class can’t drive, can’t go to the campus, but there’s nothing wrong with their minds. So they brought the class to us. I hope they bring more.”

Wichita State is planning two more courses with Larksfield Place for this upcoming school year, university officials said: “Downton Abbey” and “Biblical Archeology.”

“Last fall, that was an opportunity for us to experiment with what things would work,” Vizzini said. “We found some things that work and we found some things that didn’t work in terms of having more of a presence in our community. And we keep experimenting because that’s our nature.

“We realized there were opportunities we were missing and we asked, ‘in what ways can we better serve the community?’”

After already pursuing the late registration initiatives in 2014, Bardo approached the Kansas Board of Regents in June for approval.

He proposed professional development courses with varying, “market-based” tuition rates. He told the regents that the university has experimented with short courses aimed at nontraditional students and working adults.

“This has real implications for enrollment,” he told the regents. “We’re talking as many as 400 to 500 people that could be affected by this.”

The regents deferred the discussion to a later date.

Moving the needle

The admissions staff follows up with prospective students who have applied to Wichita State and hosts recruitment activities at college fairs, on-campus events and visits to high schools, said Bobby Gandu, director of undergraduate admissions.

In fall 2014, admissions staff was given a goal by Bardo to enroll 1,400 freshmen, which was met.

“It was an aspirational goal, there’s no doubt about that,” Gandu said.

Like most public universities, WSU isn’t a selective school. More than 90 percent of students who apply to WSU are admitted, Gandu said.

But not all of the admitted students actually enroll. In 2014, 36.4 percent of admitted freshmen enrolled.

And university officials say the mix of students who come to WSU is changing. Last fall, 242 fewer undergraduate students from Sedgwick County attended Wichita State – a decline of about 3.3 percent. That number has dropped nearly 5 percent since 2000, according to WSU data.

The greatest increase in undergraduate students has come from northeast Kansas, with a 27 percent increase in enrollment from 2000 to 2014.

Part of it is a bodies problem, particularly when competing with other in-state research institutions, Vizzini says.

“Kansas demographics are dropping down at this stage in the game,” he said. “You can go up against KU and K-State, but the fact is that if you’re just going up for Kansas residents, there is a very fixed amount of bodies and the opportunities there are finite.”

WSU is focusing more of its recruitment efforts on out-of-state students, particularly those to the south along the I-35 corridor. Out-of-state residents and international students pay more in tuition, which means they can help offset more costs for the university, which is a good business decision, Vizzini said.

“We wish to diversify our student body,” he said. “We wish to be less dependent upon in-state residents to make up our population at Wichita State. We want to have more of an out-of-state presence. Not at the cost of the in-state, but in addition to as we grow our overall numbers of students here. So that there are opportunities in other demographics outside of south-central Kansas.”

So far, the increase in applications isn’t translating to significant increases in overall enrollment – not close to the 22,000 goal.

“The question is how soon do you hit 22,000? I don’t have an answer for that,” Vizzini said.

Last year’s headcount was 15,003. The university is now projecting 15,126 for this fall.

“The 123 (student increase) that we’re forecasting now is less than a 1 percent overall growth,” Vizzini said. “That’s going to take us a long time to get to 22,000 at that growth (rate), but we’re building the foundation.”

This story was originally published July 25, 2015 at 5:48 PM with the headline "Will Wichita State’s nearly $2 million recruitment investment boost enrollment?."