Going from 490 new Freshmen in 2024 (which was poor performance) to 413 in 2025 is awful. Why is Padilla in the position for another day?
I don't know if this is true, but (adding on to VUIndiana's comments) if Valpo was hiring consultants then it is likely that those consultants never came back and said that there were major issues with the adminitration and some of its people - because the administration was paying them.
Some additional commentary regarding VUIndiana's comments about the College of Engineering. i am sure that the administration's failures have not helped the College of Engineering, but there is also an exogenous factor regarding engineering and some of the other STEM fields that is causing engineering enrollment at many schools to decline. High school and middle school students had poor math education for multiple years during and following COVID. As students tend to study what they think they are good at (or, restated, avoid studying what they are not good at), they avoid studying engineering because of the huge math requirements (direct math courses and within engineering courses). Despite my university's overall enrollment being solid, this is a big problem in our College of Engineering.
@vuindiana - decent detailed analysis. The university being so slow in getting new effective leadership is painful. I guess it’s an academic thing, but I think objectively Valpo is in serious state of survival. Steinbrecher needs more than prayers to fix this but perhaps a more proactive strategy would benefit.
Also, why not pay off Padilla’s salary, who has to be only a cancer in the current state, delegate an interim and move on? Why should this even be debatable?
@usc4valpo Not sure why you're saying this is an 'academic thing' ... The faculty voted No Confidence almost a year ago and wanted Padilla gone ASAP. It's the Board (mostly non-academics like business CEOs, and some media professionals, a few lawyers, etc) who issued their idiotic statement of full support for him and then have sat on their hands this past 10 months as the enrollment continues its habit of year-over-year enrollment drops.
@vu84v2 This is a very good point about the exogenous factors affecting Engineering. Indeed, any discipline with tough fundamental math/reading/writing skills is struggling these days for students since they are looking for an easy path to the paycheck! Still, my understanding is the national rates of undergrads going into Engineering have mostly just flattened out or only seen a slight decline, nothing close to Valpo's nearly 40% decline in enrollment.
Whether knowingly or unknowingly. Valpo has, and still upholds, Lutheran/Christian Values. To claim that VU shouldnt appeal to all and should be closed off as a place of select few members would have resulted in the school closing sooner. and is directly contrary to both Lutheran and Christian values of acceptance and togetherness. Jesus communed with those who did not agree with him and those who held different beliefs than him. That much is indisputable.
The problems facing VU would still have happened regardless. However the damage control measures and corrective actions have proven to be unsuccessful or there have been a lack of these measures taken entirely
Sorry, but no. These vague insinuations about how the open- or closemindedness of the Lutheranism has affected the university's decline seem speculative. And this is the kind of hand-waving passive-speak that the administration itself has liked to use a lot... Things have happened. Measures have not worked. Stuff has proven to be unsuccessful.
As somebody who has attended a lot of VU administrator talks and townhalls, I'm afraid the truth of it all is a lot more straightforward: if you get enough stupid people running an organization, they will run it into the ground.
In brief, 1) The Board and VU Administrators let a lot of folk fail upwards into leadership for years, cultivating a culture of mediocrity and a fundamental fear of faculty and students among the administration. 2) As they began to face a shifting landscape of dynamics outside their control (rankings culture, internet dynamics of enrollment, demographic declines in the Midwest, falling numbers of Lutherans), they then turned to various business consultants hoping somebody with an MBA could tell them what to do, and became resentful of any faculty or students who dared to express concern. 3) As more and more of these corporate consultants were either hired as top administrators and/or strategic planning gurus, fewer and fewer of them had any understanding of what a school is or why students might want to come to a four-year residential private university. 4) With no regard for Valpo's historic strengths, they recycled the most trite stereotypes about ROI and jumped on all the same bandwagons as other mid/low tier schools, but often half a decade slow onto the bandwagon, which meant a lot of money spent on failed endeavors. 5) As the university began to sink, they panicked and began to cut programs and people with sort of half-baked assumptions about what was valuable or not valuable, and no understanding of how hits to the reputation might damage enrollment. 6) As Valpo's reputation and enrollment began to spiral and faculty and students started jumping ship, a lot of these 'higher ed professional' admins also began to jump ship, creating a turnover spiral and more opportunity for the Board to hire into top roles yet different stupid people who had even less institutional memory. 7) As the collapse of the historic core of the university began to undermine the attractability of the school as a whole, even some of the historically strong professional schools began to see serious problems in their retention of faculty and students and especially in their enrollments.
Only the above can explain how the Engineering School's total enrollment has fallen from 515 in yr 2015 to only 313 this yr 2025, a drop of -39.22%! And this is when the Engineering School is a genuinely excellent academic program, has benefitted from all the public push and rhetoric for STEM, generally passes most laymen's sense of what's a 'practical' major, etc... Sadly, it turns out that not even a strong professional school is immune to a central administration determined to kill enrollment.
So though the recruitment strategy may well involve some discussion of and what sort of prospective-student Lutherans would see that institutional identity as a draw, the failure of the university actually has little to do with Lutheranism or religion at all, since stupidity is a religion-neutral causal factor.
@vuindiana, thanks for the analysis. To me, Engineering is basically following the larger trend at VU. Looking at the numbers, the total undergraduate enrollment is down from 3183 in 2015 to 2071 in 2025, which is a decline of 34.9%. Comparing -39.22% to -34.9%, Engineering is net 22 students worse than the average, so not that different. Said another way, the big headline is the decline in total students, not in COE.
When you have a generational leader like OP Kretzman retiring with lots of advance notice, you want to have him stick around to ensure that the positive culture he created is continued in transition to the next leader.
But, would a well-run business allow an out of favor, lame duck chief exec to hang around for half a year while it’s looking for his replacement? No. First step: appoint an interim that is in line with that company’s vision going forward. Pretty simple if you ask me.
@vuindiana provides a spot on, and sobering, analysis of what has gone wrong at Valpo over the past 15 years.
We have to hit a home run with the next President. And we have to bring in talented people. That costs money and I fear that Valpo isn’t up for that.
Im also worried that we’re farming out the President search to yet another consulting firm. Could we have not kept this in-house? I worry we’re going to try and be too clever by half in this hiring and end up with another dud.
@mj08 I see your points about farming out the President search to a consulting firm and I also have some mixed feelings about doing this. The big issue, which is completely different than hiring a consultant to work on strategic planning, is that Valpo needs its search to be national and to target the best candidates across the country. You don't get this by posting ads. Further, regardless of how good the search committee is, its members are very unlikely to have the necessary national contacts to complete a high quality search (which is obviously needed). Valpo is a small school and, whether we like it or not, the consulting firm is necessary in this case.
I looked for a glimmer of hope in the census. But instead I found this stunning number. Combining the four UG colleges, we enrolled 682 seniors and 432 freshman this fall. If we enroll another 432 freshman next year, we incur a incur a net loss of 250 students in fall 2026.
Candidates for president will know they will inherit this devastating fall 2026 and its impact in the news and faculty morale. Also pertaining to candidates and financial outlook, did we get our bond issues done in July? It was delayed at least two weeks and I can't find any issuance news.
Valparaiso Industry Revenue Taxable Valparaiso University Project
@realist77 , there actually are two bond issues:
Series 2025A aggregate principal of $14.5M coupon is 6.25% (tax-free to the bondholder)
Series 2025B aggregate principal of $35.8M coupon is 9.5% (taxable to the bondholder)
Both are rated Ba1 or BB+ from Moodys and S&P respectively; these are the highest rated non-investment grade (aka speculative or Junk Bonds)
Looks to me like the 2025B is being used to pay off a $5M Term note and $27M Line of Credit Draw (converting those variable rates to a fixed rate). The 2025A is described as "construction or renovations of various capital improvements...covering FY2025 to FY 2028, including boiler and roof replacements, renovations to science facilities, renovations to the Harre Union building, and other projects."
Holy c**p. For a school of this caliber -- sound academics, genuinely committed to undergraduate education, a residential campus, values-oriented, deep alumni pool -- to attract only 413 first-year students is jaw dropping bad. Add in transfers in and out, and you're looking at an undergraduate enrollment projecting out to under 2,000 total sooner than later. That's entering "small college" territory.
That's not only about enrollment cliff, or decline in young folks with religious affiliations, or news of cuts (comparable schools have also been announcing major cuts), or iffy dorm rooms, or costs (VU is competitive with its peers). Even with all of the above, it's about somehow not getting a bigger share of the pool that is out there and that should reasonably be considering Valpo as a solid option.
Do we have any reason to believe that the overall quality of a VU education and experience has declined to a level commensurate with these enrollment figures? I don't think so. But the whole way in which the school is presenting itself must be off. And having an unpopular lame duck president isn't helping.
The search for a prez -- the right prez -- needs to get beyond thoughts & prayers quickly. And that person needs to come aboard with a ferocious and inspirational sense of mission in a way that reenergizes the VU community.
You need to get someone who knows how to market and someone who knows how to talk to press. You can't just let news outlets write hit piece after hit piece without a snap back. Someone who knows how to stop the high turnover in key departments that also help with marketing and recruitment
As it stands now. The athletic department is a better run organization than the rest of the school.
When VUIndiana posted the 10 year enrollment drop in engineering, I was stunned. This is a US News highly ranked program in a STEM era, known for turning out practice-ready graduates and acceptances into top graduate programs. Even if a lot of high school seniors who wish to study engineering are playing the rankings game almost exclusively in terms of college choice, VU gets a bigger market share of students than that.
Some of us have been defending the liberal arts until we're blue in the face, and that conversation is occurring across the country. But a top-ranked engineering program? C'mon. Something just isn't right about how this school is being marketed to prospective students.
You need to get someone who knows how to market and someone who knows how to talk to press. You can't just let news outlets write hit piece after hit piece without a snap back. Someone who knows how to stop the high turnover in key departments that also help with marketing and recruitment
As it stands now. The athletic department is a better run organization than the rest of the school.
[/quote
Very true. Over 100 of those freshman are at Valpo because of athletics. Maybe admissions needs to talk to Laurel and very quickly.
@vuindiana provides a spot on, and sobering, analysis of what has gone wrong at Valpo over the past 15 years.
We have to hit a home run with the next President. And we have to bring in talented people. That costs money and I fear that Valpo isn’t up for that.
Im also worried that we’re farming out the President search to yet another consulting firm. Could we have not kept this in-house? I worry we’re going to try and be too clever by half in this hiring and end up with another dud.
I agree we need to nail it on finding a president who will succeed. To do this, you require some level of objectivity from stakeholders that are part and also not associated with the university. You need insiders because they know the situation better than those not associated. You need outsiders because the insiders are in a shell and contributed to the current decline. That being said, two actions also need to be made - the process needs to be expedited and it takes more than thoughts and prayer emails from Steinbrecher, and Padilla needs to be paid severance for the rest of the year and let go immediately. We are too slow and like usual at Valpo way too passive.
The last search update from Jon Steinbrecher claimed there will be a LOT of September activity. So signals will come soon.
Padilla would have never happened if the campus didn't chase away the best candidate I could have imagined when Kirk Farney visited Valpo in 2019 or 2020 as a candidate. If they find a better hire than Kirk, I may get back on the bus. If not, I say Valpo deserves to keep circling the drain.
Kirk is a Lutheran. He is very personable and friendly; constantly smiling. He's an MBA who had a 15-20 year high-level corporate role in investment banking. He built up personal wealth, and then left that lucrative career to do graduate studies in history, getting a PhD from Notre Dame. He's been a board-level volunteer leader for most of the national Lutheran groups that need fence-mending. Then he developed fund-raising skills as VP of Wheaton College advancement and is still in that role! Show me a better resume with more business leadership chops in addition to scholarship. He "get's it."
BUT HE FAILED A LITMUS TEST or two with our cherished woke activists, the faculty and student leaders of the time. Student leaders nationally seem to revel in that viewpoint. The gotcha questions came hard and fast without any real interest in the answers. The board caved and let the inmates run the assylum. Google Mr. Farney and ask any faculty people you trust about how his visit at VU transpired with faculty and students. His sins were his membership in an LCMS church and his unwillingness to foreswear it. Go woke go broke.
