@David81, yeah, I think that makes sense... though if I were to quibble, maybe it's just that it seems a little overly optimistic about 'values'?
It's not that students are somehow value-less and then come seeking values as some kind of clearly positive tradition. At this point, most students DO have values - but it shows up in strange ways, like in the assumption that it's more fair to turn a blind eye to one's own or one's peers' cheating than to 'snitch,' that it's more moral to do what's efficient (lift work from peers, or have chatgpt do it) than to do things the inefficient way oneself, and it's more responsible to make a lot of money for oneself than do something with lesser ROI. If the university wants to teach 'values,' it is to some extent a de-learning of values as much as it is a learning of new ones.
So I'm just kind of dim on generic 'values' talk, since there are plenty of values out there (shaped by Amazon, political headlines, credit card companies, football advertisements, and everything else under the sun) but they're not necessarily worth the endorsement of the university.
@vuindiana I'm not suggesting that the students to whom I refer are out there in droves....in fact, I don't think that has ever been that way. But as someone who teaches students of that age group + 5-10 years (i.e., law school), I know they exist, and they span the social and political and (where applicable) religious spectrum.
Furthermore, as a smaller school, VU doesn't have to attract the lion's share of that cohort; it "merely" has to attract more of them than it has been doing. (Hence, we're back to how VU's messaging affects its recruiting.)
Here, too, is where the next VU president possibly comes into the picture. Can this person's vision for the university excite prospective students about enrolling? It's asking a lot of a university president to be a draw at the retail level, especially considering that their time probably would not be well spent doing individual outreach to accepted students. But it would be quite a thing for a new VU president to have the personal qualities that excite people about being a part of something larger than themselves.
Don't know if this is any indication of chapel life for the general student population, but there is a picture on Facebook from the chapel showing chapel staff who are graduating. They total 16. It's not just a couple of pastors wandering around.
@vu72 Chapel involvement definitely increased this year. As examples, Celebrate, the Wednesday night (10 pm) service, grew from an average of 50-60 students per week at the beginning of the year to over 100 attending the last one, right before finals. Candlelight, the Sunday night (9 pm) service, also almost doubled in attendance this year.
@sp37 Excellent! I'm all for anything that gets students actually out and about and doing community on campus!
I think John Nunes would be a great new President. Former Valpo professor, man of color, led multi-million dollars organization as well as being a President of a Lutheran college and a sports fan! His son JJ was a star DB at Valpo a few years ago.
This past weekend, John Nunes was elevated from "interim" president at Cal Lutheran and appointed to permanent status by a unanimous vote of the Board of Regents. I have been a friend of John since we had adjacent offices on campus, and I couldn't be more pleased for him, Monique, JJ, and the rest of the Nunes family.
Trump throws America's $44billion education business into chaos by halting ALL student visas
A new development to keep an eye on. Selfishly, Im hopeful this doesn’t negatively impact enrollment at Valpo or other wh family alma maters.
Trump throws America's $44billion education business into chaos by halting ALL student visas
A new development to keep an eye on. Selfishly, Im hopeful this doesn’t negatively impact enrollment at Valpo or other wh family alma maters.
Unfortunately, this is just the latest of many executive orders and pronouncements from the current Administration that are already wreaking havoc with international student enrollments at colleges and universities of all shapes and sizes. In some cases, they are creating fear and apprehension towards coming to the U.S. to study. In others, like this order, they are creating hedgerows if not downright barriers for those who still wish to study here.
The ripple effects have already started to manifest by way of revised (downward) enrollment projections and attendant budget cuts for Academic Year 2025-26. In some cases they are prompting crisis-level concerns at the many schools that have been trying to recover from their pandemic enrollment hits.
Yes, it seems like taking a sledgehammer to a nail. How many international students study at Valpo on a Visa?
You can prioritize VISA removal for the radical violent and disruptive students without hitting the whole $1.2 million population.
Valpo needs to not only be concerned about the direct impact of stopping new international visa requests for students - as well as the unwelcoming message the current US administration is sending to all international students - but also needs to be concerned about the indirect impact. If international student enrollment drops across all universities, many schools will try to make up for it by accepting domestic students that they otherwise declined or put on a wait list. Three of the top 20 US universities in total international student enrollment are major midwestern universities (Illinois, Purdue, Wisconsin) and all three are unlikely to just sit and take a revenue cut. Bottom line, for this reason and for others, in the short term (and longer) Valpo needs to make sure they continue to sell their value proposition to new students even if they have made deposits.
@realist77 It would affect some undergrad students, and a LOT of masters students (mostly computer sci, stats, engineering) at Valpo.
Though I get what you're saying about a targeted approach to visa removal, I'm not sure that it's that easy or that we should actually be comfortable with the methods used. Earlier this Spring, DOGE/ICE was doing a more targeted visa and detainment approach, but it's not like they are doing careful research or anything on whose status to revoke. They rely on super sketchy doxxing hit-list sites like Canary Mission -- so the masked ICE teams (and fake ICE wannabe vigilantes) were going after international scholars listed on these places without any due process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_Mission
These types of far-right hit list sites have compiled profiles of allegedly anti-Zionist or anti-semitic professionals (medical doctors, faculty, university students) with narrative-write ups and (either real or AI generated) social media screenshots of them. Lord protect you if somebody dislikes you and creates a profile on you!!! These sites are anonymously run and there's no way to know who's creating the content and no way for you to correct it if something there is wrong or fabricated.
In a sense, yesterday's total ban/pause on International student visas is perhaps a less creepy and problematic way for State Department/ICE to proceed? But (as David says) it will likely push a lot of schools into further crisis if this Fall's crop of international students can't come. And a lot of worried institutions are far more stable than VU is. Honestly, I don't expect VU to survive the next four years. We are currently witnessing a pretty amazingly comprehensive assault on universities (loss of financial aide, international students, grant funding, brain drain to other countries, etc.) and it will probably succeed at killing a huge swath of US higher ed. I just don't see dinky schools like Valpo standing much of a chance when the situation was already so dire before this Spring.
Also, though I know we were citing possibly hopeful deposit/enrollment trajectories, I actually put very little stock in Valpo's deposit numbers, since the deposit is only $200.
That's basically just the cost of a family's grocery cart these days, so I find it kind of ridiculous that we act as though this is any kind of serious commitment or barrier to keeping options open. Plenty of families just put down the $200 and are prepared to eat that loss if they just need more time to decide or if their kid gets into a better school.
Sorry I digressed into national policy. Let's hope VU's international students are able to stay for the next year and onward.
On enrollment (title of this thread,) we haven't seen any more public year-over-year comparisons of leading indicators for several weeks. May 31 seems like a natural touch point. If they have good comparisons on May 31, they should blast out any good news next week to counter the news of the VU bond rating downgrade.
Even if a melt of deposits-to-enrollment happens later, any publicizing of true year-over-year numbers at any point in time is fair game.
I mean, I do think it's directly related to enrollment and its not just about potential incoming students. If even already current international students went home for the summer, most can't get back into the country to resume the next semester without renewing their visa -- so that's an immediate retention and operating budget issue. I can't imagine Valpo would still bank their tuition in a situation where they can't continue their studies.
A few points:
-Valparaiso's College of Engineering programs are only undergraduate (this is indeed a strength of the College of Engineering).
-VUIndiana: I see your points regarding the seemingly minimal impact of the deposit, yet I have seen data at my university that indicates how the small deposit is associated with a strong psychological commitment. Nonetheless, any university needs to 'keep selling' all the way to first tuition payment (even more so if there is a greater danger of major state schools trying to poach students who made a deposit).
