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‘Cliff’ hampers SUNY, official says

Kathryn Kendall, SUNY Fredonia’s vice president of enrollment management and services, speaks at the university’s first Brown Bag Lunch of the 2024-25 school year. P-J photo by M.J. Stafford

SUNY Fredonia’s first Brown Bag Lunch of the 2024-25 school year featured its vice president for enrollment management speaking about some of the population challenges faced by universities.

Kathryn Kendall took a casual approach, stepping away from the podium to speak. “I was asked to do it and I said, ‘Sure, what the hell,'” she said of the Brown Bag Lunch series, which invites the community to hear lunchtime speakers on various topics. (The food on offer was pizza and pastries.)

Kendall showed a picture of her three dogs fighting over a toy chicken. “That’s a symbol of how everyone is fighting for enrollment,” she said.

She said population shifts are deeply impacting higher education enrollment. Falling birth rates and high school graduation rates also have an impact, as do aftereffects of the shutdowns caused by COVID-19 in 2020-21.

Kendall referenced the term “the cliff” in referring to U.S. birth rates. She said they have been steadily trending down since 2007. That means that “there will be less U.S. citizens graduating in high schools throughout the U.S.”

For New York state, a prominent higher education commission has predicted a 14% drop in high school graduates between 2019 and 2037, Kendall said.

“If we’re all fighting for that chicken in the yard … how are we going to maintain market share?” she asked.

COVID-19 led to a three-year drop in enrollment across all sectors of higher education. That includes “feeder schools” to larger universities, such as community colleges. “If their enrollment tanks, our transfer student pool tanks,” Kendall said.

“Some students just went MIA” during COVID and some did return to school but are lagging “quite a few things they’ve lost in skill set development.” Due to that, “the students sitting in front of you may not be as prepared as the student five to 10 years ago,” and colleges must look at how to deal with that.

Kendall went on to say that about 69% of all college undergraduates attend school within 50 miles of home. “We would like students to come here from New York City… but that’s across the state,” she said.

Kendall said that colleges that recruit heavily from low-yield regions will simply continue down a negative track.

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