Antioch College Closing?

College’s inconsistent supportstymied admissions process

By Diane Chiddister

Those who worked for the Antioch College admissions office over the past five to 10 years don’t agree on everything, but they do agree on this: admissions jobs at Antioch are demanding and everyone worked very hard.

Past employees also agree that Antioch College admissions professionals faced a host of challenges, including inadequate resources (some of the time), a revolving door of administrators, a deteriorating college physical plant that made the college a hard sell, a lack of appreciation from faculty and the university board and, in recent years, mixed messages as to whether the counselors should recruit as many students as possible or a smaller number of higher-performing and more mainstream students.

With one exception, the eight past admissions employees interviewed for this article — three of whom requested that their comments be off the record — also believed that Antioch College did not have to shut down, with several saying a turnaround was in the works as late as this year.

“Things were on the up-tick,” said Admissions Counselor Christian “Skooter” Skotte, an Antioch alum who worked at the office five years before he left in February 2007. “It could have been turned around.”

Former Dean of Admissions Michael Thorpe, who worked at Antioch from 2003 to 2006, agreed that the college was working its way out of the slump.

“I believe it could have worked,” Thorpe said in an interview last week. “I know we could have built that enrollment.”

Things were looking up
When the Antioch University Board of Trustees announced June 12 that the college would shut down in 2008, with the intention of reopening four years later, the low enrollment was cited as the main factor in the school’s declining revenues. At its lowest point, in the fall 2005, the college had only 63 new students. That number more than doubled in 2006 to 135 and the projection for fall 2007 was about 130 new students.

But in 2007 prospects seemed to be looking up for future enrollment for several reasons, according to admissions employees. First, the confusion around the college’s board-mandated sudden curriculum change, which rocked the college two years ago, had dissipated, and the new curriculum was taking hold. According to one former counselor, many high school students seemed excited by it.

Also, College President Steve Lawry had made a commitment to beefing up the resources for recruitment, according to Skotte, and that support improved performance in the office, since the office had historically been underfunded compared to peer institutions. According to Jeff McLaughlin, a consultant who served as interim dean of admissions after Thorpe left, the college in 2006–2007 had adequate resources for recruitment.

“It had a large admissions staff for the number of new students it hoped to enroll and an equivalent budget,” McLaughlin wrote in an e-mail. “It is important to note that the foundational costs of running an admissions office (developing a Web site, viewbooks and the like) are roughly the same for a small place or a very large place, so Antioch was always going to have to spend more on a per capita basis than larger schools.”

Some admissions employees also felt that the new Dean Jennifer Rhyner, hired in February of this year, brought valuable experience and dedication to the job.

According to Sascha Francis, who took Skotte’s place when he left in February 2007 and had worked in the office several years before, “details of the recruitment cycle were attended to better than they ever had been before.”

Mixed message from the top
However, the admissions office was also affected by factors that may have kept enrollment from being as high as it could have been. For example, several employees spoke of their amazement when Lawry addressed the admissions staff last year and requested that they recruit only students without mental health problems. Some staff members told him that, if prospective students didn’t offer that information, they had no way of knowing, and besides, many young people have mental health issues, they said.

“A large percentage of the college-age population in general” has some mental health concerns, Skotte said.

Lawry’s emphasis on weeding out potentially problematic students, and on seeking high-achieving students, seemed to imply that the counselors should focus on quality more than quantity, Skotte said.

“That conversation made us all think that the numbers weren’t as important as getting the right student,” he said. “We shifted our focus from getting numbers to getting a specific type of class.”

So this year the admissions staff thought they were doing what they were supposed to do, Skotte said, and had expected to recruit about 130 new students. They were stunned to find out that the college would close because it hadn’t met the board’s stated goal of 180 students, a goal that Rhyner had told Lawry wasn’t doable, according to Skotte, who said there was no indication from administrators that the 130 enrollment figure was a problem or would lead to the closing of the college.

Rhyner did not respond to repeated requests for an interview for this article.

Recruitment efforts for 2007 were also affected when the college let go of key employees during a budget-cutting move in February. Included among those let go was a senior associate admissions director who was instrumental in sending out recruitment materials, which resulted in counselors having fewer materials to work with and prospective students hearing less from Antioch.

But regardless of the obstacles, those who worked in the admissions office felt they had done their job well this year. And they believed they had performed exceptionally well the previous year, when they more than doubled the 2005 new student low of about 60 to 135 new students in 2006. Doubling a class size in one year is unheard of in college admissions circles, Skotte said, but they did it.

“The Antioch fall class of 2006 really was record-setting in many ways,” Thorpe wrote in an e-mail, stating that in January of 2006 Antioch had more inquiries from prospective students than Earlham College, according to an admission report from the Great Lakes Colleges Association.

But the board wasn’t satisfied with the numbers, which didn’t meet their projected enrollment goals, goals which had been determined by consultants without consultation with the admissions staff.

“They took an overly simplistic attitude that, ‘There must be 300 students out there in the country that should be at Antioch’,” Thorpe wrote. “While the premise of this was correct, they were incapable of embracing the action necessary to make it happen: invest in an admission office and hold the course. Success in admission doesn’t happen overnight.”

Bouncing back
Several admissions employees linked the low enrollment in 2005 to two factors. First, the confusion surrounding the sudden curriculum change and secondly, budget cuts in 2004 that seriously hampered the admissions office operating budget.

Many people have attributed the deep drop in the fall 2005 enrollment to the college’s curriculum change, which had been mandated by the board the previous year. While the board originally gave the faculty two years to redesign their curriculum into multidisciplinary learning communities, it later sped up the process to only one year. Consequently, during the prime recruiting spring season of 2005, the admissions office had almost no information on the new curriculum that would roll out the following fall, and that lack of information seriously hampered recruitment.

“The program was being built as we spoke about it,” Skotte said. “Every time we told someone something, it would change.”

While many link the drop in enrollment to the curriculum change, Thorpe points the finger at budget cuts in the admissions office the previous year. In winter of 2004 the university’s Budget Stabilization Committee, headed by now-University Chancellor Toni Murdock, cut the admissions office budget by about one third, according to Thorpe. That budget cut led to the office losing three out of 10 employees, according to Thorpe, and the number of admissions counselors, who travel the country to speak to new students, shrank from five to two.

Murdock did not respond to a request, through Antioch University spokesperson Mary Lou LaPierre, to respond to questions about the budget cuts. La Pierre stated that the ultimate effect of the budget cuts was a $20,000 reduction in the admissions operating budget.

The combination of budget cuts and a confusing new curriculum was a recipe for disaster, several said, and the astonishing thing isn’t that only 63 students showed up in fall 2005 but that any students showed up at all.

“It goes to show that Antioch can do everything possible to shoot itself in the foot and 60 students will still come,” Skotte said.

The debacle of 2005 was especially heart-breaking, according to several admissions employees, because it followed several years of slow but steady growth for the college. Many interviewed for this article credited former Admissions Dean Michael Murphy, who worked at Antioch from 2000 to 2003, with bringing a new level of professionalism to the admissions office.

Murphy and then-College President Bob Devine convinced the board of trustees that more money was needed to attract more students, and Murphy had his staff reach out to students earlier in their high school career. The new approach resulted in a significant increase in interest, with the number of inquiries from prospective students leaping from 6,758 in 2000 to 11,119 in 2001, according to admissions figures provided by a former employee.

Murphy and Devine were a productive team that worked together well, Thorpe said.

However, in 2003 Murphy took a new job in Ireland and, after interim leadership, Thorpe came on the job. That leadership change was only one of many, and several admissions employees stated that, in a field in which they needed a three to five year plan to build success, they were “always reinventing the wheel” and starting over again.

“After serving three years as dean of admission and financial aid, I set a record as the longest seated dean in 30 years, and therein lies Antioch’s woes,” Thorpe wrote in a letter to the editor in the News.

Thorpe wanted to bring stability to Antioch, he said, and to stop that revolving door of admissions administrators. But he left his position after three years because when he requested a multi-year contract for job security, he was refused.

“It broke my heart to leave,” he said.

One former admissions official stated that Antioch’s closing was a good thing, since the employee felt the campus culture had become inhumane. But other past employees disagreed, and believe the college holds a unique and valuable place in American higher education.

“I think Antioch could grow its enrollment by sustained investment in recruitment and competitive financial aid,” Murphy wrote from London in an e-mail. “Antioch students are personally and intellectually courageous, and there is a population of young people who would thrive on its tri-partite educational model. There is a market for Antioch, and it can compete for students. I believe it is a great place.”

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com