TEN YEARS AGO, enrollment at Northern Michigan University was close to 10,000 students.
Today, it’s at 7750. And dropping.
“We’ll continue to decline for the next five to seven years,” NMU president Fritz Erickson concedes. “We should stabilize our enrollment somewhere around 7000 students, maybe as low as 6500, just based on demographic changes.”
Yikes. A university shrinking before our very eyes.
But what’s Erickson mean by these “demographic changes”? It’s simple. The Upper Peninsula and lower Michigan are producing fewer and fewer high school graduates every year.
Ten percent less in the last seven years, and probably 20% fewer in the next ten years. That means fewer potential college students for NMU and other state colleges.
The other Michigan schools are also showing stagnant enrollment, although Michigan Tech, with its emphasis on science and engineering and also an enhanced national reputation, is an exception. It’s actually growing.
NMU is trying to fight the trend by bringing in more out-of-state students–they’re now about 20% of the student body–but the overall numbers are still stubbornly declining.
That means less staff will be needed in the future–it’s now below 1200, not a promising prospect for a town where the local university is a major economic driver.
So is it hopeless? Not quite, if Erickson has his way.
“If you look at institutions like Northern that are successful,” he tells you, “you’ll see between a quarter and a third of their enrollment is off campus or online or a combination of both. Our history with those programs is about one percent. Very small.”
Only one measly percent? How the hell did that happen? Was someone asleep at the switch when the tech revolution was taking place?
No need to point fingers. Better to look ahead.
Erickson hopes to increase online and off campus enrollment up to 25% of the student body in the next several years.
That’s ambitious but a couple of new and innovative programs may lead the way.
One is Northern Promise, which enlists high school students in full credit NMU courses. Seven U.P. high schools offer such courses now, and others downstate have expressed interest.
The other program is the Education Access Network which is setting up high speed wireless for most of Marquette County and eventually the entire U.P. Its goal is to offer not only internet access but NMU courses to UP schools, businesses, and residents.
That would be a huge step toward bridging the digital divide between urban and rural residents, and NMU would be in the forefront of the movement.
Another opportunity for growth is NMU’s Jacobetti Complex, with its emphasis on non-academic courses and degrees.
“We are about opportunities, and different people need different educational opportunities,” Erickson says. “Not everybody needs a four year degree.”
And the fact is, courses in construction management, welding and cosmetology offered at Jacobetti may lead directly to well-paying jobs these days while some baccalaureate degrees do not.
It’s all about supply and demand in the job market.
Which leads us to the demand by students to come to NMU. How can Northern increase its attractiveness to students who might not be impressed by its remote location, its cold climate and its less-than-selective acceptance criteria.
The average ACT score for incoming NMU freshman is 22-23. By contrast, U of M freshmen are at 30, Michigan State is at 26, and Michigan Tech is 25-26.
Well, first of all, NMU is not Ivy League and has no such pretensions. It is a state university offering a broad curriculum to a wide spectrum of students, most of them from Michigan.
And it does generally offer good instruction from its professors, better than at some higher rated institutions, and the professor-to-student relationships are more rewarding than at other colleges.
The academic programs are also improving–the STEM curriculum, the psychology department which will be opening an autism center next year, the art and design courses, the increasing focus on entrepreneurship and the digital media.
Still, even with that progress, you get the sense that NMU is not fully taking advantage of its greatest asset: its location. Marquette. The Upper Peninsula. The hills, the forest. The Lake.
“You talk to students, and the natural environment is a big part of the reason they come here,” Erickson says. “They come here because you can ride your bike, kayak, and swim. It’s the environment that unifies us as a campus community but we’ve never really gone out and said that.”
But it’ll require more than just changing NMU’s marketing or branding strategy. It’s a matter of specializing in courses and degrees that are particularly relevant to Marquette.
Like environmental studies, hydrology, geology, wilderness studies, outdoor recreation, sports therapy.
Emphasis on those types of degrees in a place like Marquette could garner a national reputation for NMU.
To be fair, the administration and professors are working at it, but there’s a ways to go and there are always conflicting demands. Do this. Try that. Cut back on this program. Do more with less money. Be careful.
“If we had one problem I’d like to solve,” Erickson says, “I’d like to stop the resistance to taking risks. We have been risk-averse. It’s time to stop that.”
Sounds good, and the university has been taking risks in the last few years.
The digital programs–Northern Promise and Education Access Network–are clear examples.
For another, there’s the public-private partnership to get new dorms built on campus. NMU is the first university in Michigan to try this, for better or worse.
Then there’s the transferring of management of the book store to Barnes & Noble. It had to be done, Erickson says, because Amazon was killing book sales at the store.
Invent at NMU, a program designed to encourage and help inventors, is another initiative, and it’s drawn widespread praise. It likely will work much more closely with Marquette’s new Smartzone in the years ahead. Together, the two could be a powerful lure for young entrepreneurs.
Erickson’s also talking about forging a closer relationship with the National Guard. NMU may well take over the the Armory which is adjacent to the campus while guardsmen would do their training on campus.
And Erickson would like to establish an NMU presence downtown. A building, a storefront, a program. Something to tie the university and the town closer together.
As for the neighboring hospital which will be vacant within a couple of years, there’s been no dialogue yet between Duke LifePoint and NMU about the university taking ownership of the Neldberg Building. Is Erickson interested? Maybe, but likely in a partnership of some sort.
That’s a big building that would cost plenty to renovate for university use.
And seriously, what sense would that make when you have a shrinking university and declining state revenues?
These are trying times for all institutions of higher learning. The competition for students, professors and dollars is fierce.
Northern Michigan University has some difficult choices to make in the years ahead, and those choices could determine whether it remains a middling institution (recently ranked by one group as 12th best in the state) with a dwindling enrollment, or a dynamic, innovative university that’s forging a new and exciting identity for itself.
You got news? Email briancabell@gmail.com.