(relaxed music) (camera beeps) (dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) - "Eye on Education," I'm Fred Martino.

SIU Carbondale has been seeing some growth in enrollment in recent years but universities across the country are competing for students at a challenging time.

The number of students graduating from high school is about to decline, the so-called enrollment cliff.

How is SIU preparing and what initiatives are already underway?

Wendell Williams is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management at SIU and we are thrilled to have him with us.

Wendell, it is good to have you here today.

- Thank you so much, Fred.

It's good to be with you today too.

You mentioned the enrollment cliff.

- Yes.

- You know, we were talking a little bit earlier and I let you know I was from Arkansas and Thelma and Louise- - Yeah.

- Were from Arkansas as well.

The movie was based out of there.

- Yeah.

- And you know, at the end of the movie, they thought the best way to solve their situation was just to drive off the cliff.

- Yes, no, we don't do that.

- Well in higher education, driving off that enrollment cliff is not an option.

What's causing this cliff is about 2008 when the economic downturn hit the nation and the rest of the world with the housing bubble and the housing crisis, well shortly after that, not a lot of children were born for obvious reasons and if you think about 17 or 18 years after that point around '24 or '25, it's expected that the birthrate will decrease the number of high school graduates, especially here in Illinois by about 15,000 students or about 15% and with the migration that we've had from North to South, Illinois lost a congressional seat in the last census and so about 30,000 fewer people and the majority of those people were here in Southern Illinois who went South.

The area that I moved from in Texas, Montgomery, Texas right north of Houston is growing at about 30,000 people per month.

So it is just an amazing shift in the migration trends due to economics and employment which is causing this enrollment cliff that a lot of institutions are worried about.

- Yeah, and you really see that.

I moved here almost three years ago from the Southwest and there's a lot of growth, a lot of construction.

Not the case in Illinois.

So the challenge is even larger but as you point out, that enrollment cliff is a national issue.

You're competing with schools all over the country for students and I know one thing that SIU has done which is very powerful is it's expanded scholarship availability.

So I wanted to keep that right at the top of this show for people who tune in.

Tell us about the expanded eligibility for someone who is watching and how it is working in terms of attracting students.

- You know, the top 10, top 15% of the students in any high school is gonna be actively recruited by everyone.

- Yeah.

- The top tier universities, the regional universities, everyone.

It's that middle group of students from 15% down to the 50th percentile, 75th percentile, those students are not recruited and scholarship opportunities are given first choice to those top 10, 15% of the students and any great enrollment manager will know that in order to grow, you got to grow where the population is and so we made a conscious effort to remove some of the barriers that existed for students, especially here in Southern Illinois in rural counties, first generation students, students of color.

We've made conscious efforts to remove some of those barriers.

For example, we've eliminated the SAT test.

Really can a test that you take in four hours really tell what you have learned over the last four years?

We've eliminated some of the scholarships that would only start at a 3.5 and we've moved our scholarship opportunities down to our admission standards of a 2.75.

This opened the doors to tons of students.

We've changed the way we do our Chancellor's Scholarships.

It's more of a support scholarship.

We love our local schools and our local schools love us.

So we put in place policies and procedures that when a local school sends us 13 or more students, we give them a full ride scholarship opportunity.

They know their students better than we do, so those local schools gives us the names of two or three of their students that have decided to attend SIU and we want them to offer those scholarships to give us those names.

We send it before our committee, our committee selects the students that they have recommended who are coming to SIU so that they can be awarded that full ride scholarship.

For those students who are not awarded, we give those names to our Financial Aid Office to see if they can offer as close to a full ride scholarship as possible and then for the rest of those students who are 3.8 or better, we send those names to our Deans who have tons of Foundation Scholarships to award those scholarships to students.

So any student who applies to us, instead of having them to go through and fill out the scholarship application, we actually download their biographical and demographical information into our Scholarship Portal and they can just go into their portal and see all of our 800 scholarships, of those 800 scholarships that they are actually eligible for.

- That's great and of course, many folks who are watching may have heard that the family income eligibility for some scholarships is much higher than it used to be, right?

- Yes.

So we have always had a Last Dollar Scholarship.

Students' Pell opportunities, some students whose Pell Grant funds, whose MAP funds may not cover the full scholarship, we've had a Last Dollar Scholarship which we call our Saluki Commitment, our Saluki Commitment and it covered the remaining tuition amount.

So tuition and fees for students who used to be below $63,500, their tuition and fees were covered.

Well as we reviewed the operational guidelines and what the new rules would allow, we were able to raise that dollar amount up to $103,000.

- So a big difference.

- Yes.

So families whose combined income and assets are below $50,000 but combined income is less than $103,000, those Illinois residents, they will get their full tuition and fees covered by SIU.

- Very important to know and especially as in recent years, some folks have seen an increase in pay.

- Yeah.

- So they may not have been at that 103 before but maybe they are now.

- Right, the beauty of that is that as your income rises, the amount of Pell funds and MAP funds decreases which creates a bigger gap or so, we now cover that gap.

- Cover it, okay.

I know SIU is also working with community colleges to expand SIU enrollment.

You have a lot of partnerships that have been announced.

Tell us about this.

- I was fascinated by how few community college students that not only SIU but the rest of the universities in Illinois enroll.

In Texas where I came from, there were total conscious efforts to create seamless pathways for students who start at the community college and then want to continue their education at the university.

But that was not so popular here.

In my interview, I mentioned the fact that within a 100-mile radius of SIU, there are 25,000 students who were an associates of arts or an associate of science, which means that they were interested in continuing their education but we were only enrolling about 1,000 students.

My question was why?

And it's because we didn't have things in place.

We had barriers like the scholarships for those students would only start at a 3.0.

We moved those scholarship opportunities down to a 2.0.

Other barriers existed that you had to have 27 hours before you would transfer here.

We moved those transfer opportunities down to 12 hours.

- Yeah.

- Because a lot of students and a lot of parents of students want to get that first semester at the community college to make sure that the students are interested and can progress at the college level.

- Right.

- And then they want to move out and on- - Sure.

- As quickly as possible.

- And I bet also there were barriers perhaps where students had credit in community college and wanted to make sure it would transfer to count towards their bachelor's degree if they were coming to SIU.

- So we also put an initiative in to address that called the Saluki Step Ahead Program and with the Saluki Step Ahead Program, we have signed agreements with just about every community college in the State of Illinois.

We are actually listed in the Governor's Plan for Transfer, our institution is because of this agreement and what that agreement does is that it says that if you will start at the community college and get your associate's degree from there, we map out the first two years of courses that you have to take that we know will transfer here into about 12 or 13 different programs, very popular programs.

If you complete those at the two-year college, then when you transfer here, we offer you a $4,000 per year scholarship.

- How about that?

- Now but the beauty of that is that it's completely online, so those students around the state are able to stay at their home location, continue their jobs, continue to be with their families and finish their degree from SIU.

That's why there were only two institutions in the State of Illinois that grew last year and we were one of them.

- That is fantastic to hear and important to know that stuff, important that that information is out there for students.

I will never forget, as someone who had already had a bachelor's degree, already had one master's degree, when I was much younger, I was asked "Well, why aren't you getting another master's degree in another state?

You know, some of the credits for your first master's will transfer over, you only have to take X number of classes and you get another master's."

I didn't know that.

- Right.

- No one told me that.

- Right.

- And so I did get a second master's degree and didn't have to take nearly as many courses as I took for the first master's degree.

- So consequently, the institution that I came from, Lone Star College where we had about 90,000 students, 60,000 of those students were transfer-eligible, they decided that they wanted to be a participant of the Saluki Step Ahead program.

So we signed an agreement with them and with Dallas College and we now have active recruiters recruiting those students from those two community colleges to enroll from a distance here.

We had one of our donors so excited about the Saluki Step Ahead Program, the first year, they donated a million dollars to start it and it was so successful that they donated another million dollars to continue the program.

- Wow, that's amazing.

- And so we're hoping that they continue to be excited and continue to make those donations.

- Absolutely, yes.

Along these lines of getting more students interested, tell us what SIU is doing to encourage more non-traditional students to attend college.

Maybe students that attended high school a good number of years ago.

- Well, not only high school but there are a number of students who attended here a good number of years ago that did not finish.

- Did not finish their degree, okay.

- So what we did is that we put this program in place called Project 90 to reach out to those students.

Students who had completed 90 hours or better but did not finish their degree, we reached out to them and our Online Department reached out to those students and said "Look, if you're interested, we maybe can help you finish your degree."

We've got a ton of responses back from over 300 interested parties and we have graduated probably three or four of those students in the last couple of years or so since doing that.

So with the job market and the technology constantly changing, a little learning is a dangerous thing.

So many people, especially non-traditional people are deciding to come back and retool, refine and get a step ahead of their competition.

- And it's always worth it.

Education is the gift that keeps on giving.

I can't say that enough.

There are some disturbing surveys that have been done in recent years where there are many people who don't realize the value of higher education and really important to talk about when you work in this field.

- I was so excited when our oldest graduate this year was in their 80s I believe.

(Fred laughs) I believe it was 70s or 80s.

- Yeah?

- Our oldest grad.

I was so excited to see that person walk across the stage because it let us know that they are hearing this message.

- Right.

- If you want to try something new, if you realize that your skillset is dated and limited, that you need to improve on your technology ability, we're a great place to do that.

- That's right and higher education, what I always say is it teaches you how to learn.

- [Wendell] That's right.

- In addition to what you're learning, it's how to learn.

- As the philosopher's say, "A little learning is a dangerous thing.

Drink deeply or taste not for the Pierian Spring, for shallow droughts intoxicate the brain but drinking deeply sobers us again."

- That sounds better.

(laughs) How does the expansion of online classes or hybrid classes where there's some online, some in person, how does that help with your enrollment efforts?

- COVID did an interesting thing to the mindset of many people is that they realized that a lot of things can be done at the same time in different formats and different ways and-or from home and a lot of students are choosing to take online classes.

We have students who live in the dorms taking 12 hours there, taking an online course from us.

Sometimes those courses will meet one day a week online and one day a week face-to-face.

So educational opportunity is changing to meet the needs of the students rather than having the students to meet the needs of the institution.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Let's talk about international student recruitment.

There's something here that we have that we don't want to keep a secret.

This institution has a very rich history of international students and it's very important that people understand the incredible diversity that we have on campus.

- Exactly, the world is getting smaller and it is our responsibility to help the citizens of the United States understand how small this world really is.

We have over 80 countries represented.

We have almost 800 students who are international students.

It makes the campus rich, it gives us opportunities to interact with people and cultures and food and experiences that we'd never had before.

- Yeah.

- International education is a difficult endeavor right now because of the political climates, because of all the things that's changing.

We're seeing the ability, we have tons of interest from international students but their ability to go to their consulates and go to their embassies and get the visas to get out of their countries, we will issue the I-20s but them being able to leave their countries and come here is increasingly difficult.

But we are expanding our opportunities into other countries, into India, into Africa, into some of the European countries.

We're expanding those opportunities.

We hadn't forgot about Canada, which is a nearby neighbor.

- Yeah, that's right.

- As well as Mexico as well and so we're expanding those opportunities to explore with that and we're sending some of our delegations to those countries to see how we can do better partnerships.

- It's a rich history and currently an amazing opportunity for students as well who are from the United States to come to SIU and to have an exposure to this diverse student body and the incredible things that they get from going to school with students from all over the world.

Right on this show recently, I had a young man from Italy who was graduating with a master's in music and he did a performance for us.

- Wow.

- And to talk to him about his experience and how he chose SIU, it was great.

- And the international students that we get here are so friendly.

They're so interested in learning about us but they're also interested in sharing their cultures with us.

- [Fred] Yes.

- I get a chance to go home and tell my wife almost once a week that I got a chance to visit another country without having to spend any money.

- That's right and we have an International Student Center where people from the community get to meet students there.

That's where I met the young man from Italy who was on this show 'cause I went to an event there and met students from all over the world and was just so impressed by that.

- I love the fact that once a week, they have an opportunity through coffee and donuts for you to come and sometimes people from the community will sponsor the coffee and the donuts or the pizza and they get a chance to interact with our international students.

The international students love it.

I mean, what college student doesn't want a free meal?

They love the opportunity but they love the opportunity to interact even more so.

- Yeah, we have about seven minutes left.

How important is Southern Illinois to SIU's enrollment?

And tell us more about what you're doing to attract local high school graduates.

I know that, for instance, students who live within a certain radius of SIU, if finances require this, they can live at home.

Tell us about that provision and other things that you're doing.

We know the Takeover Tours.

- Yes.

The Takeover Tours are huge.

This past month or so, I put 893 miles on my vehicle visiting all the local high schools in the surrounding area.

We didn't get a chance to visit them all.

The ones that we didn't visit this year, we'll focus and target for next year.

But we had a huge event, we got a lot of interest.

One thing that we did differently this year is that we sent out to the local Principals and Superintendents the opportunity to provide us the demographic information of their students, name, address information and so we sent an email to those students and we said "Look, if you have a two-point," they gave us the names of all the students with a 2.75.

We sent the email saying "You've been pre-admitted and since you've been pre-admitted, all you need to do, you have three choices.

If you're not interested in SIU, just check this box."

And we put them on a waiting list and we wait for them to reach out to us.

"If you're interested but not decided or not, check this box."

We then begin to send them information to see if we can help to get them more interested.

"But if you've already decided, check this box."

We move them through the enrollment process at that point with scholarship opportunities, with financial aid opportunities.

- Get it locked down.

- They get it locked down soon and early and for those students who check that box and once they get registered, we put this campaign in place called Put a Lid On It.

- There you go.

- With the lid that you're seeing, it's sorta like star athletes who do that signing ceremony- - Yeah, right?

- And they put their lid on it.

Well we have our students, they are our stars.

We have them put the lid on it and you can see inside of the box itself, there's a scan code.

- Yeah.

- With the scan code, they scan into there, they take their photos and on our website right now, you see hundreds and hopefully by the start of the semester, thousands of students with their lids on saying that they're committed to SIU.

- And everyone knows they're a Saluki.

They've got that right on the hat.

- That's right.

- For folks who hadn't heard.

You were the first, see, you're making me younger.

That was the first time I heard the term "lid."

(laughs) - Well, in honor of that.

- So now I know.

- In honor of you sharing our story with the rest of your viewing audience.

- Okay, I get a lid?

- I'd like to present a lid to you.

- I get a lid, okay, well that's good.

- I gave you a new lid too.

- I like it.

Thank you very much and I get a good box too, as they all do so the lid doesn't get crushed.

What else would you like?

We have only about three minutes left.

What else would you like to add for someone watching at home about the effort to attract more students to SIU?

- Dorothy had to go all the way to Oz to realize there is no place like home.

We realize that there is no place like Southern Illinois, 50, 60% of our students come from Southern Illinois.

- More than half.

- Exactly.

So what we have to do is take care of home.

There is no place like home.

So we want all of our students to recognize that they have a top tier institution in their backyard and to take advantage of it.

It's more affordable.

You get a chance to go home and get that home-cooked meal whenever you want to.

Some of the people in Northern Illinois, they say this is the farthest where you can be away from home without being out of state and we love that.

The area, the climate, it's just a great place to be.

I've worked in higher education for almost 40 years now and this is the best place that I've ever worked and I love it and it is a great spot to be and it's great to be a Saluki.

I actually cut myself and I actually bleed maroon.

I do know that.

(Fred laughs) - You know, I recently had two young women sitting where you are on this set who were graduating from SIU and one of the things that one of the young women said who had won a scholarship, by the way, from the SIU Women's Center, was how much they enjoyed the beauty of this campus.

- Yes.

- And I mention that because for people who are maybe watching who haven't on a weekend when you don't need a parking pass come out and just parked near Campus Lake and taken that walk around the paved trail around the lake.

- Yes.

- What a gift that is.

I mean, it is just gorgeous.

- Someone challenged me and said "What's so special about SIU?"

It's the scenery, it's the beauty, it's the people.

It's the welcome feel that you have but more than that, it's a place where you can find yourself.

- Yes, yes, that is true and in so many different ways.

Talk about the diversity, the show I just mentioned, one of the young women was studying fashion merchandising.

The other young woman wanted to be an airline pilot.

- Right.

- Incredible.

- Think about that.

- Incredible.

- At the same place.

- At the same place.

- Or become a doctor or a lawyer.

- That's right.

- Think about that.

At the same place.

- We do, we have a law school.

- Yes.

- We don't wanna forget that and the SIU School of Medicine up in Springfield, we've featured them on this program many times.

- Great.

- So Wendell, it has been delightful having you with us.

- Such a pleasure.

- And thank you for the lid.

- Absolutely.

- Modernized my language too.

(laughs) - All right.

- Wendell Williams, he is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management at SIU.

That's "Eye on Education."

For everyone at WSIU, I'm Fred Martino, have a great week.

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