In this episode of KSMU's monthly series, Engaging the Community, Michele Skalicky talks with Missouri State University President Dr. Richard "Biff" Williams about enrollment numbers.
Skalicky: Census numbers for the fall 2026 semester are out, and they show a slight dip in overall enrollment across all campuses for Missouri State University. What specifically do the overall numbers tell us?
Williams: Well, it tells us that we are following the same enrollment cliff that everybody else is in other communities. But we look at everything specifically. As you know, we have a strategic plan goal to get to 30,000 students by 2030. And so, we're being very deliberate in the processes that we're doing. What we're seeing is we're starting to see the upticks in areas where we want to — the degree seeking. Those are gradually, this has been a 13-year nosedive, so we are gradually planing off. So I think the numbers look fairly positive. Where we look at the most is the international. If you look at international graduate and undergraduate, that was an 8% decrease. And so a lot of that a decrease in enrollment is due to that. And those are things that we can't always make up for because of getting visas and different things.
Skalicky: And you had some wins, and there was an increase in numbers for certain colleges within the university. What areas are seeing growth right now?
Williams: So the McQueary College of Health and Human Services is now our largest college. So they had about a 4.7% increase this year. And then the College of Ed also had about a 2.3% growth. They are still the leading — we're still the leading school that are educating educators.
Skalicky: What surprised you about the recently released numbers? Anything? What were you expecting versus what the numbers actually showed?
Williams: So it was a little different this year because our dual credit didn't really allow us to accurately report that because the Springfield Public Schools, where a lot of our dual enrollment is, is they started a week later, and so we still have those numbers. For example, we had another 100 students enrolled last week, and so it was surprising that we didn't have those numbers. But we also know that we have a lot of things in our plan to kind of ameliorate some of this enrollment cliff, and the good thing is we have those things in place.
Skalicky: Was there anything that really didn't surprise you? In other words, what drop in certain student populations did you anticipate? I know you said international students because of what's going on with different rules that are having an impact.
Williams: It was really the international students. Last year, we were trying to predict something that's unpredictable. And so we were looking at graduate enrollments of anywhere from 3% drop to 18% drop. And we were working very hard this last summer to figure out how can we ameliorate that? How can we really calculate that? But with international students and those visas, it's just so difficult.
Skalicky: Missouri State has seen growth in the last two years. Why do you think numbers were flat to down a little bit this semester?
Williams: I think we changed our emphasis. Before it was always on headcount, so we put a lot of emphasis on this dual credit students in high schools. But as I mentioned before, our strategic plan, we really want to focus on degree seeking, those degree seekers increase that. So a lot of our efforts, you'll see from our enrollment changes, we hired our inaugural vice president for enrollment management. We started buying out-of-state names, which is really important. We haven't done that in the history of our school. We started attending all the college fairs, and so a lot of our time and resources was less towards the head count or the headline and more to how do we get students here that are pursuing a degree that are going to be enrolled full time?
Skalicky: So do you anticipate then the efforts that have been made the last several months to reach out, to start to impact those numbers in the future, in the near future?
Williams: Absolutely. We knew when we brought in Doctor Medley and had the strategic enrollment plans and put together, we knew it takes 18 months to really bring in that class. And so we're approaching a year now, so it's going to be anywhere from 18 to 24 months to bring that that group in. And we also have playbooks that the Strategic Enrollment Management group put together, playbooks where, if you're a faculty member and you want to know how you can influence retention and admission, there's a playbook for you to see. And they are going all across our campus right now with these playbooks to share. This is how you can help with retention students. This is how you can help recruit students to Missouri State University.
Skalicky: How is retention looking like now?
Williams: So retention went up this year. We have we are very proud of that. That's something that we have some very aggressive goals to improve upon. But this year that went up.
Skalicky: You talked about the approaches to recruitment that you've made in recent years, and I talked to Dawn Medley about that last time. Will that approach change based on what you know about the numbers this time? I know you said it can take a while for those efforts to have an impact. And are you looking at universities that saw growth to get some ideas for what you might do going forward?
Williams: Yeah, it's going to be a lot of nimbleness as we go through because everything's changing. It's much more competitive because of the enrollment — or the demographic cliff. I think it's important for us to see what works and what doesn't work. Right now, these are so new. We do know on our scholarship changes where we were, you know, students come in and they have a bad semester. They immediately don't get the scholarship. We extended that where they'd have a plan to improve upon. And that saves 250 students to stay in college. So we know those things are working. Again, it's just very premature. But we will stay nimble. We'll look at what's positive. And there's good ideas. I mean retention and enrollment is the entire campus's responsibility. And so if there's a staff member or a faculty member that has some ideas of what we could do to improve that, it's all our responsibility. And I think — I keep reminding people that we're here to serve our community. And the way we serve our community is by educating the populace so that they can be better citizens.
Skalicky: How confident are you that you'll meet your goal of 30,000 students by 2030?
Williams: I'm very confident. I've done this at other universities where the first two years (are) hard because again, you're putting those practices, you're changing things and it takes about 18 months, but then you'll start seeing that uptick. And I've been really impressed with those that are in the strategic enrollment management plan and those that are over the strategic goals, how hard they're working. And the intellect that they're putting into the decisions that they're making is quite impressive.
