What happened to St. Cloud State University?

ST. CLOUD — When Colby Christensen told her friends and family she was going to St. Cloud State University, some scrunched their noses. Some told her it wasn’t safe. Some balked at the city’s reputation as unwelcoming as it grappled with growing diversity.

“St. Cloud has this stigma around it where people questioned why I was going here, which sometimes made it harder to be excited to come here,” said Christensen, a 2020 Litchfield High School graduate.

But the 22-year-old, who now works at Willmar Middle School after graduating from SCSU with bachelor’s and master’s degrees, stuck to her guns.

“St. Cloud State was close to home,” she said. “It’s also an affordable school and they had a good social work program, which I came into college knowing that’s what I wanted to do.”

But fewer students are making that choice. St. Cloud State, once Minnesota State’s flagship regional campus, has seen a striking drop in enrollment over the past 15 years.

All seven universities in the system saw enrollment declines during that period, which leaders attribute to trends felt nationwide: declining birth rates, changes in perception about the importance of undergraduate degrees, and more options, such as online colleges.

But St. Cloud’s drop is by far the steepest of the system’s universities. In 2010, SCSU enrolled the equivalent of about 15,100 full-year students. That fell by more than half to enrolling the equivalent of 7,300 students last fall.

Moorhead’s campus saw the next steepest decline with a drop of 38% during that time. Meanwhile, Minnesota State University, Mankato — now the largest university in the system — saw just a 6% drop.

So what happened at St. Cloud State? New and former school leaders, educational experts from across the state, students and neighbors weigh in on the many missteps in the last decade — and their bets on whether drastic programming cuts announced this year will finally lead to stability.

Not only are there fewer students, but who those students are has drastically changed over the past decade. Now, nearly half of students are part-time, about 25% are younger than 18 and enrolled in postsecondary classes, and about 10% are 35 and older. That means there are fewer traditional students and even fewer students on campus.

In the last 15 years, the university also made bold decisions as it tried to shed its party-school image. Chief among them was cutting the football team and ending homecoming, though it resurrected a version of homecoming a few years ago.

For Christensen, COVID-19 disrupted her college experience by forcing classes online. But even without the pandemic, her experience was different from what her parents and older siblings shared about their time at college.

“There were definitely a lot of things I felt I missed out on going to St. Cloud State,” she said.

In the past two decades, residents of the neighborhood adjacent to campus also started campaigning for the city to create ordinances to reduce underage drinking and clean up student rental housing.

“We were gently accused of creating a problem because we made it less fun for kids to be in the neighborhood,” said Mary Mathews, a longtime resident and advocate for homeowners near campus.

At MSU Mankato — which has seen the most stable enrollment of the system’s universities — administrators credit stable leadership, robust athletics, a focus on in-demand programs and strong community support for its success.

“I’ve worked at a bunch of universities in the South and the East and all over that part of the country. I’ve never worked in a university where the community and the university have been more tightly connected,” said David Jones, who’s served as vice president of student affairs and enrollment management at MSUM since 2011.

The so-called enrollment cliff shouldn’t have taken leadership by surprise, according to Jason Woods, vice president for strategic enrollment management — a position that’s only been in place at SCSU since 2019.

“If you look at St. Cloud State’s history, you can see year over year, there were conversations about cuts, conversations about budgets,” he said. But St. Cloud State just cut around the edges.

In recent years, leadership has said the steady enrollment decline was not met with a similar reduction in staffing levels, which led to this spring’s announcement of cuts to about 90 programs and 54 faculty as part of a five-year plan to put SCSU on solid financial footing by 2028.

Other missteps include big projects that didn’t pay off, including a high-end $30 million apartment building that had low occupancy and cost the university millions in subsidies before being sold.

The building opened in 2010 during the tenure of SCSU President Earl Potter III, who took on several large projects before he died in a car crash in 2016. Potter, who previously had been provost at Southern Oregon University, was one in a series of leaders who came to SCSU as an outsider, though that’s not atypical for regional universities.

“One of the failures of the system was importing your administration,” said Rep. Gene Pelowski, a longtime DFL legislator who chaired the House’s higher education committee last session. “It got to the point where [they] were literally stacking the administration with people who had not been in Minnesota.

“Administrators usually want some big project they can put on their résumé and once it was on there, they could leave,” he added. “Well, what about the campus?”

Pelowski, who also chaired the higher education committee a decade ago, blames legislators and the Minnesota State system for a lack of oversight on “campuses that were seeming to be in free fall.”

“The Legislature has been so addicted to introducing bills and hearing bills, it’s lost sight of its primary function — oversight on budgets,” Pelowski said.

But after using his role to shine a light on the striking drop in enrollment and subsequent budget issues, Pelowski also questions the system office: “Why does it take a chair of a committee to tell the system how to review its budgets? Wasn’t there oversight?”

Bill Maki, vice chancellor at Minnesota State, said financial health indicators are shared with the system’s board each year but noted university presidents are responsible for how they run their campuses. Maki also said the system has been meeting with SCSU quarterly for the past several years to monitor the budget and enrollment.

Larry Lee, who served as vice president for finance at SCSU for two years until he left in July, said the pandemic exacerbated the university’s budget problems. He said the university lost about $6 million during the 2019-2020 fiscal year.

“Then COVID hit and those losses were covered up with [relief] funding,” Lee said. “And then when we came out of COVID and that [relief] funding ended, that structural deficit that was $6 million in 2019 had become that $24 million.”

Minnesota State Chancellor Scott Olson told the state system board in May he feels SCSU’s recent cuts will help balance the budget “to put the university on a sustainable path.”

At the helm now is interim Larry Dietz, an experienced administrator who is hoping to help stabilize enrollment — and he’s optimistic about the school’s future, as long as it can live within its means.

“Even with the decline, we’re still that second-largest university in the Minnesota State [system],” he said. “A lot of folks think we’re about ready to close our doors, and that is so far from any kind of reality.”

Fall enrollment numbers won’t be finalized for a few weeks but already there’s an increased vibrancy on campus, officials say.

About 1,100 students are living on campus this year — about 10% more than last year, according to Kevin McDonnell, residential life director at SCSU.

“I think we are getting out of the pandemic phase,” he said. “We can already tell it feels like normalcy has come back.”

About 80% of SCSU students are from Minnesota and about 12% are international. Of the home-grown students, about half come from central Minnesota and about a third come from the Twin Cities.

One incoming freshmen is Felisha Anthony of McGregor, a small city in north-central Minnesota. After graduating with fewer than two dozen classmates, she’s looking forward to experiencing campus life while she studies psychology.

“I’m excited to find a whole new life basically,” Anthony said in mid-August while moving into her dorm.

Another freshman, Calvin Amundson-Geisel, chose SCSU for its broadcasting program. He was born in Bloomington but spent the last decade living in southeast Asia. He considered schools across the country but chose SCSU because it was close to relatives.

“As a dad, I was a bit worried about them collapsing programming,” his father, Mick Amundson-Geisel, chimed in while unpacking clothes in his son’s dorm.

But he agreed with his son’s choice. And, he noted, “The price was right, too.”

Staff writer Liz Navratil contributed to this story.