For the fifth time in six years, Lincoln University's enrollment this fall was lower than the previous year. The decline occurred even though LU spent more than a half-million dollars in the last three years on efforts to boost enrollment.
LU officials reported Sept. 22 the 2017 total enrollment was 2,622 students - a 4 percent decrease from the official census reported a year earlier.
"I think part of it is that the (high school) graduates are down in this state - they're predicting lower graduates," Jerome Offord, LU's dean of Student Affairs, said. "If you look at our freshman class, we've had a challenge because of that in the state of Missouri."
Statistics reported by the state's Higher Education Department show the number of high school graduates enrolling in either a two- or four-year Missouri college - in the same year they left high school - generally rose from 2004-10, reaching a high level of 23,948 students in 2010.
But since then, three of the six years showed declines from the previous year, and the number of high school graduates going to college in 2016 - the most recent year available in the Higher Education Department stats - was 21,833, up slightly from 2015 but down 2,115 from that 2010 level.
Lincoln generally has faced declining enrollment since hitting a recent peak of 3,388 students in 2011 - with one minor increase of 74 students in 2014.
The 2017 number is down 116 students from a year ago - 22.5 percent below the 2011 level and nearly 16 percent under the 3,109-student official enrollment in fall 2008, the start of the 10-year period used in this article.
Lincoln had lots of company in this fall's enrollment numbers, with nine of the state's other four-year campuses also showing declines from 2016.
At Harris-Stowe State University in St. Louis and Missouri Southern State University in Joplin, the drops were minimal.
Harris-Stowe was down 28 students, for a 2017 enrollment of 1,442, down from 1,470 last year. Missouri Southern's enrollment fell 23 students, to 6,174 from last year's 6,197.
But for the first nine years of the 2008-17 decade, total enrollment among all 13 Missouri public university campuses generally rose.
Only four schools - Lincoln, Harris-Stowe, Missouri Western and Northwest Missouri State - had fewer students than in fall 2008, while nine of the 13 four-year schools, including all four University of Missouri System campuses, generally saw growth in the total number of students during the period covered in this article.
Even the Columbia campus, which had 4,554 fewer students in fall 2017 than two years earlier - a nearly 13 percent drop - still had more students this year than in fall 2008.
Lincoln's enrollment record was 4,101 students in 1991.
Lincoln's current enrollment slide began in fall 2012 - the year former President Carolyn Mahoney retired - and continued through last fall, with one exception of a 74-student increase in fall 2014.
Both Mahoney and her successor, Kevin Rome - who left Lincoln at the end of June to take over as president of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee - said regularly they wanted to grow LU to about 5,000 or 6,000 students a year.
Lincoln spent $504,681 over the last few years, trying to recruit more students.
In June 2013 - the month Rome began serving as Lincoln's 19th president - LU officials paid $179,100 for a one-time purchase, plus a $33,000 annual renewal fee for a software program aimed at improving student recruiting. That software allowed Lincoln to take applications online for the first time.
When LU's curators approved the contract with the Ellucian Company LP on June 26, 2013, Offord - then the interim provost - told the News Tribune: "We just moved Lincoln University into the 21st century when it comes to the official admissions and enrollment process."
At the time, he predicted the possibility that, based on the experience of other schools that had made a similar change, enrollment should increase by 10 percent in the first year and 15 percent in the second year.
Five months later, LU intensified its recruitment efforts.
In November 2013, five months after buying the new software, LU curators awarded a one-year contract to Royall and Company of Richmond, Virginia, to help with student recruitment while the school worked on a request-for-proposals to focus on increasing enrollment, Rome told the board in November 2013.
Rome told the News Tribune after that meeting the goal was to recruit future students in areas Lincoln wasn't reaching.
"They have the infrastructure that we just don't have - the technical expertise and the enrollment management expertise - and they help you attract students to apply to the campus," Rome explained in November 2013. "And then it's on us to bring the students here."
That worked in the first year, Offord said.
"We did see our enrollment up (in 2014)," he said, "and we attribute that to our Royall contract and the marketing they helped us with."
The fall 2014 enrollment climbed by 74 students, a 2.43 percent increase. But the fall 2015 enrollment fell by 172 students, or 5.52 percent.
Royall's first contract, for $138,050, was followed by a second one for $141,000.
Both contracts had additional costs for postage and the creation of lists of potential students.
Royall's second contract promised "the development, deployment, management and analysis of a comprehensive communications program that will contact up to 45,000 newly available high school seniors whose achievements, characteristics and prior actions make them desirable candidates for admissions and enrollment as freshmen by Lincoln University."
The program also promised to "encourage these students to submit an application for admission to Lincoln University."
Statistics provided by LU show, for fall 2014, Royall's work under the first contract generated 222 applications.
But a second report in January 2015 - still early in the applications process for many high school seniors - didn't show any Royall-generated applications yet for that fall.
The school didn't make a similar report for the 2015-16 school year, interim counsel Judith Anne Willis said this summer.
In 2016, LU changed course in its contracted recruitment efforts.
Following a new RFP, LU chose Ruffalo Noel Levitz LLC, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for recruiting services, with a $225,631 contract.
But its focus was different, Willis said: "Ruffalo wasn't recruiting for applicants for the current season. They were building a brand/relationship with (high school) juniors in hopes of them applying in 2018."
Because of Lincoln's current budget constraints, that contract was canceled in May, and Willis said LU now isn't using any outside contractor for recruiting.
Offord said people shouldn't reject the outside contractor program because it didn't have immediate results. He said their work has laid the ground for better results in the future.
"I wouldn't say it's a waste of our return on investment," he explained. "I look at it as - even if students didn't come to Lincoln, they were made aware of our brand as a standard, if nothing else. And any business, any marketing, any theory will tell you that once you expand your brand, it takes a little while for customers to grab a hold of that brand and support it."
The contractors helped Lincoln get "introduced to new markets that we were not previously in or couldn't reach with our recruiting staff," which should boost enrollment in coming years, he said.
At the Fall Faculty-Staff Institute in August - where LU employees prepare for the beginning of the new school year - Offord said, "One of the things I've learned in my career is that in order to be innovative, you must be willing to take the risk to try things, and sometimes trying means that you're going to fail. And failure is a key to (future) success."
At the Oct. 26 Faculty Senate meeting, history professor Bruce Scoville noted his work on a budget committee showed Lincoln needs to develop a student recruitment plan.
"We don't seem to have a plan in place as to what we're doing and how we're trying to do it," Scoville explained. "We don't have enough recruiters - we have three for the entire country."
Marvin Teer, president of LU's Board of Curators and a 1985 Lincoln graduate, told the News Tribune using the search firms helped get Lincoln's name to new places - and he hopes that will pay off in the future.
"So many things play into a student's not coming to a particular school," he said, noting he often eats in the cafeteria when visiting the LU campus. "I can tell you that for the first time in a long time, as I sit with students at the table at Lincoln, I'm not just seeing a Midwest preponderance. I'm seeing students from California and North Carolina and into the Ohios and from Denver and Florida - it's spaces and places that we haven't really seen students as part of our normal applicant pool."
And that's a good thing, Teer said, "because again, you're advancing your brand - not just regionally but nationally."
Still, he added, it's time for Lincoln to increase its recruiting efforts in Mid-Missouri and around the country.
Offord acknowledged some alumni want to see a greater emphasis on recruiting and bringing minority students to a historically black university campus.
"Most of the students who attend orientation and come to Lincoln - specifically our African-American students - say they chose Lincoln because it's an HBCU and for the HBCU experience," he said, noting LU has many more white students than black students often expect.
"We educate them and let them know that the HBCU experience is going to be different at every HBCU, and Lincoln has a very unique experience," Offord said. "We are trying to hold on to that while also offering diversity."
Offord attended Lincoln from 1989-93, graduating with an agriculture degree - at a time when there were many more white students than black.
It was a time when then-President Wendell Rayburn said Lincoln was more diverse than the workplaces students were going to find after college - so it was a good place to learn how to get along with others.
Offord agreed.
"We do talk to them (prospective students) about that, and express that Lincoln is a small cosmos of what the world is like in reality," he said. "So we encourage our students to make sure that we all connect, and they connect, and get to know people - and that this is an experience for their life."