Freshmen began moving into dorms at Rhodes College early Friday, disembarking with boxes, bins and duffel bags from a single-file line of their parents’ cars threading through campus from University Street.

Classes begin Wednesday, Aug. 22, for Rhodes’ 2,000 students, including the freshman class of 480, the most diverse in the college’s history.

Rhodes is intentional about diversity, buying lists of academically focused students from specific pockets of the nation so it is representative geographically and doing the same to find students of color, first-generation students and those who are eligible for Pell Grants as it works to build a student body reflective of the United States’ demographics.

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“Once you have purchased these names, the big question is, well, what are you going to do with it,” said Gil Villanueva, vice president for enrollment at Rhodes. “How are you going to put yourself in sufficient position to be attractive to these students? Because, believe me, all the top schools in the country are doing the same thing.”

This season, Rhodes had its second-highest number of applications, down slightly from two years ago when it set the record, a sign that what it is selling is valuable, he said.

Christian Brothers University also is reporting more diversity in its freshmen class, with 32% of the 220 registered by midweek identifying as Hispanic. The next largest group, 23.5%, are nonresidents without green cards, a Dreamer audience CBU courts with help from Don Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post.

As the college year starts, thousands of students are returning to the city, the largest at the University of Memphis, where classes begin Aug. 28. It is still accepting registrations and refused to comment on whether or not it is meeting projections.

LeMoyne-Owen College also did not comment.

Undergraduate enrollment at the U of M had fallen about 11% between 2016 and last fall when it reported 14,366 students.

The board raised tuition and fees this summer a combined 2.86% to cover the loss of income from fee-driven enterprises, which includes housing.

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Besides the demographic trend of fewer students enrolling, wages shot up during the COVID-19 pandemic and stayed up, incentivizing many students to go to work, says David Blobaum, co-founder of Summit Prep, a college-admittance test preparation company in New Jersey.

“Their alternative of just getting a job immediately looks more attractive,” he said.

While the nation is growing more diverse, a large segment of racial and ethnics minorities are more economically disadvantaged, Blobaum says.

“In general, they dropped out of the pipeline for college more than their affluent peers,” Blobaum said.

That is especially true at Southwest Tennessee Community College, where enrollment fell 30% from about 10,000 students in 2019 and has stayed flat.

Administrators now are hoping for a 2% to 3% increase in numbers beyond the 7,000-student enrollment they saw last year and are expecting to get some of it from the growing number of high school students taking college courses.

“Spring over spring, we had a 36% increase. And this year, we’re looking at roughly a 35% to 40% increase, roughly 1,500 students who are dual-enrolled,” said Luke Jones, vice president of student affairs at SWTCC.

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Full-time classes begin Monday at SWTCC. It registered 300 students last weekend and is holding a last-minute registration Saturday, Aug. 19, hoping for the same.

“We have a historically late-registering student body; we’re doing everything we can to push those numbers,” Jones said.

In poorer parts of the country, including Tennessee, people applied to colleges in even smaller numbers this year, leaving colleges with a fourth straight year of low numbers of students in dorms and other services with fixed-rate costs.

Rhodes, which requires freshmen and sophomores to live on campus, has full dorms. CBU and U of M have openings, cutting into revenue administrators count on to run the campus.

CBU is digging in to increase enrollment

In 2018, CBU’s freshmen class hit a high of 391 students, nearly 60% larger than this year’s class. The campus has historically had about 2,000 students, including graduate students.

“We’ll probably be at 1,700 to 1,750 this year. We still have a ways to go to get to 2,000,” said Dave Archer, CBU’s president.

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“We’re not back to where we were before COVID,” he said. “I think many universities are in the same situation.”

To boost numbers, CBU is recruiting – and getting – more international students in engineering graduate programs. It is also focusing on transfer students. That population alone is up 88% for fall, a significant chunk of it coming to CBU’s nursing programs.

Last year, CBU hired an assistant director in the transfer admissions office to help quickly assess which courses would transfer, often within hours of the initial inquiry.

“I think what we’re seeing is that students are electing to take advantage of what I believe is a highly-intimate transformational experience,” said Erin Craig, vice president for enrollment management at CBU. “I think sometimes students need to go elsewhere to realize, ‘Hey, I have a friend at CBU,’ or this big school that I’m in is just not as good of a fit as I thought.”

The campus is also offering four new programs starting this fall, including a master’s program in clinical mental-health counseling.

“We’re not back to where we were before COVID. I think many universities are in the same situation.”

Dave Archer
President of Christian Brothers University

“It’s one of our most intensive master’s degrees, a 60-hour degree. A lot of that is the clinical portion,” said Lydia Rosencrants, interim vice president for academics at CBU.

Other additions are bachelor’s programs in construction management, robotics and mechatronics engineering and autonomous systems engineering (drones).

“A Lasallian education has always been a practical education. We at CBU take very seriously the idea that we are preparing students for successful careers,” Rosencrants said. “But we also realized that education is a significant investment, especially for a number of our underserved populations. And it’s very important to us that when they leave us, they’re ready for the career they are entering.”

Rhodes no longer requires a college entrance exam for applicants, but 63.5% of the class provided test scores this year.

“If you submit good scores, they have the benefit of increasing your admissions chances,” Blobaum said, “and also, the benefit of increasing your chances for merit aid or scholarships.”

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He expects large colleges and state universities will switch from test-optional, a posture they took during the COVID-19 pandemic, to test-preferred because GPA itself, he said, is no longer a reliable measure.

“Eighty percent of students going to college have an A average,” Blobaum said, pointing to a wholesale rise in grade inflation reflected in research done by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California Los Angeles.

In 1966, only 21.8% of freshmen going to four-year universities had straight A’s.

The trajectory began changing in the 1990s. ACT scores, according to HERI, have fallen from 20.6 in 1990 to 19.8 in 2022.

“As getting into college became more important, grades became more important,” Blobaum said. “So there was this implicit pressure on teachers to give higher grades so you weren’t depriving kids of the chance.

“The private schools and wealthy public high schools see more grade inflation than anywhere else. In those demographics, if a kid gets a C, he basically can’t get into a good college. The pressure is on students, but ironically, even more so, the pressure is on teachers not to give bad grades because the kid’s parents are going to come in and be very upset.”

Crime adds a layer of anxiety

The cost of attending Rhodes this year is about $67,000, including with housing and meal plans. Tuition alone rose from $52,000 in 2022 to $54,082 this year.

Cost makes Rhodes susceptible to public perception about Memphis, a reality Villanueva became well-acquainted with last fall when Eliza Fletcher was kidnapped and killed, quickly followed by Ezekial Kelly’s daylong shooting rampage.

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“I spent the next five weeks on the phone,” Villanueva said. “We talk about the additional measures we’ve taken. It’s a gated campus. We’ve added security. We have 24-hour surveillance, all those things. But the reality is, if you come to Rhodes, you better take advantage of Memphis; it’s your laboratory, right?”

In the move-in line Friday, every parent in a group of seven or eight had some worries about rising crime in the city, but not overly so.

Lisa Singerman — dropping off her son, Zeke — just happened to see a list rating Memphis the most dangerous city in the nation.

“I’m OK. We’re from Houston. It’s not like there’s not crime there, too,” she said.

Ramona Derrick Tolliver from Pontotoc, Mississippi, has lived around the world, including in Nigeria. Their freshman daughter, Claudiah, has strict instructions to send photos of any people she leaves campus with — plus their car tags.

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“We want to know who she is with and what time she will be home. We have talked a great deal about this and about being aware,” said Derrick Tolliver, a special agent with the Diplomatic Security Service for the U.S. State Department.

Gopi Jawabnavis, a senior programmer at FedEx Corp., has instructed his son not to leave campus after 7 p.m.

“We’re worried,” Jawabnavis said. “We’re giving him a car for the first week, and then, we are going to take it. At least, that’s what we are saying now.”