@whvalpo No doubt that he is a great addition to the Valpo community. Thanks for posting this.
We say it is tough everywhere. But fall 2025 data drove home the point that our new leader will face very strong in-state school results. Most major ones grew vs. last year in first year students despite a decrease in international students and fewer college enrolled HS graduates.
In an article about Indiana's public university enrollment growth, IU, Purdue, Ball State, and Indiana State all grew solidly despite a decrease of 14% in international students. The announcements also come on the heels of new state data showing that just 51.7% of Indiana high school graduates in 2023 went directly to college, continuing a years-long dip.
The announcements also come on the heels of new state data showing that just 51.7% of Indiana high school graduates in 2023 went directly to college, continuing a years-long dip.
Why would we need young people? or young people to go to college? Don't you know the plan is to turn the midwest into a data centers for AI? We need save water for the server farms: https://www.axios.com/2025/04/16/midwest-data-center-growth-energy-usage
Good grief. This energy devouring AI data gobbling is pretty scary and never ending. When I read this stuff, I get really nostalgic for a simpler time when search engines and smart phones were not at our finger tips.
In my VU day we had Smith-Corona typewriters and boom boxes. That was high tech. Now we are dinosaurs in a strange land.
As someone in tech. The AI boom is very reminiscent of the .com bubble. The AI market is going to crash as it is simply not a good investment. AI has already shown itself to be attempting to train on its own information. Which has led to growing concerns of the future of the AI market sphere. Investors are not seeing a return on their investment. Don't get me wrong, I use AI in programming, but I will never have it write a program for me. It is an assistant first and foremost. I will use it to format code blocks to be cleaner, and to help with debugging, but never to do the job for me
Daughter in year 3... 1 in lank, 1 in alumni, now living the dream in beacon. Loving it. Great school. Just need to turn this corner!
This is not a happy metric, but I was looking at the uni's enrollment data and just wanted to note that VU's undergrad enrollment (for the first time, I think) fell under 2,000 this Spring 2026:
1,943 total undergraduates
(1884 full time)
(59 part time)
That's down from a total of 2,071 in Fall 2025 (though some attrition from Fall to Spring always happens with both some seniors graduating early and net transfers out)
And it's also down YOY from the total of 2,030 full- and part-time undergrads last Spring in 2025.
The drops continue to be in:
CAS (849 in 2025 to 769 in 2026)
COE (326 in 2026 to 310 in 2026)
Overall, people seem happier since Padilla's left, but its going to take major energy to pull out of this numerical slide. Sub 2K sounds pretty small to most applicants.
Probably worth noting that those numbers are the result of a failing and outgoing admissions VP, who has been replaced. Eager to see what numbers the new enrollment boss can put up.
A few comments here:
-VUIndiana lists continued drops in CAS and COE. The College of Business has seen some modest growth in the last two years (their new Dean seems to be a good catalyst for this).
-COE drop is consistent with what many other Colleges are experiencing, which is sort of a mystery to me. I know one part of it is that high school students nearing graduation are less capable and confident in quantitative work than 5+ years ago.
-As I noted in another post, the University has a renewed effort to engage alumni in student recruiting. Letter-writing, calls, attending recruiting events near your home, etc. The person hired to run this seems to be doing a really good job, so I encourage alums here with some available time to contact her (there was an email sent to alums about this, but I am glad to contact here to get her permission to post her email if needed).
