Calvin University is launching football and hockey to reverse an 800-student enrollment drop since 2015. The upfront costs are huge, but competing with established programs means offering scholarships Calvin can't afford. Enrollment might tick up, but the money probably won't follow.
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Welcome to a video version of This Week in College Viability. Hi, my name is Gary Stocker. This episode has to do with Calvin University in Michigan and football, and I saw this article posted today on my, in on my Google Alerts, and it noted that Calvin University in Michigan is adding football and some other sports including hockey and some volleyball, I think, for men's programs, in an effort to increase enrollment. And of course, here at College Viability, when we see stories about enrollment, we always start to look at the data. So let's do that, and let's go to the parent version, the 2022 version of the Parent College Viability app, and let's look at Calvin University. And 9 or 10 other private colleges in Michigan. And let's go back and just chat for a second that, you know, there's nothing illogical about wanting to add sports to add enrollment and tuition revenue-producing students. Every college does that to some degree. The challenging part is the only guaranteed components of adding any sport are the upfront costs. For making the fields, for hiring the coaches, for doing the recruiting, for paying referees, for the travel, for the food, and countless other expenses that go with starting any kind of program, whether it's sports or majors or courses, anything. There's always for sure guaranteed upfront cost. The challenging part is that there is rarely the guarantee of net revenue. Coming from those programs. And we see that in many, many cases, and the literature is full of references to that. But let's look at the College Viability App, and this is the 6-year changes summary screen. And we can see at the top of the list, with an enrollment decrease of almost 800 students over the course of the last 6 reported years— and you can see that number up there— from 2015 to 2020, uh, and their tuition and fee revenue is down a little over $9 million. Total expenses is also down. So they knew they were having troubles, they cut expenses. The endowment is up a little bit, up $67 million, nothing bad about that at all. And the admissions yield is down. So, you know, admissions yield, if you've ever listened to me before, has to do with popularity, and it's down at Calvin University. But let's look at the other colleges there. 5 of the 10 colleges I think that I have listed have had decreasing enrollment. And if you look at Rochester University and Olivet College, they've essentially had flat enrollment over the reporting period. So again, the challenge is, can you profitably add any kind of new sport, major, course, anything to colleges and expect to be profitable? The challenging part with this, or the biggest challenge associated with this, is it's reasonable to expect that other colleges already with football programs will, A, attract the better athletes because they're more established, will be in a position to offer scholarships, also known as tuition discounts or unfunded scholarships, to athletes that play the sports that now Calvin University wants to add. And that will put pressure on Calvin to be able to bring in— how can I put it any other way— profitable students to play football, wrestling, lacrosse, whatever sports they're bringing in. It's just not a realistic scenario. Possible for sure, realistic not so much. So when we look at these kind of programs, the challenge is to be profitable. And, and while it's a logical approach, it is very, very likely to be unsuccessful. And I would venture a purely educated speculative guess on my part, albeit with some experience, that Calvin University's recovery from decreases in enrollments may show some positive gain, but the issue in terms of revenue net revenue, probably not going to show much improvement at all. We'll talk again next time on This Week in College Viability.
