No 'magic switch' will fix St. Cloud State, but interim president reverses retirement to try
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St. Cloud State University has a new interim president, Larry Dietz.
Faced with declining enrollment, leadership turnover at Minnesota State — including a new chancellor — plus staff and budget cuts, Dietz has signed on to serve a two-year term. Dietz joined Morning Edition host Cathy Wurzer to share his plans for the new position and the university’s future.
St. Cloud State has cut dozens of programs, laid off 13 percent of its faculty and past leaders dug a $14 million hole in the budget. Why would you come out of retirement after 50 years in higher education to take this job?
I enjoyed retirement for three years. The best thing about it was the flexibility. But frankly, I missed [the] opportunity to contribute to higher education. Education changes lives. And I missed the challenge of that, and the gratification that you get whenever you see students walk across the stage and achieve their goals.
And so when this opportunity came up, I thought, you know, I don't have any magic switch to flip and make all this better. I didn't arrive with a cartload of money or anything of that nature. But I thought “I think I can help. I think I've got some skill sets that I've applied at other institutions.” There's great opportunity here.
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St. Cloud State is not alone in terms of the challenges that it has faced. We have a new plan that was put into place to address some of the budget issues, working hard on the enrollment side of things. And so if I didn't think the future of this place was bright I wouldn't have taken the job.
Declining enrollment is a nationwide issue. At St. Cloud State, it's dropped about 40 percent from 2010 to now. How do you plan to stabilize enrollment?
I think the first thing that we've got to do is to make sure that all of our systems are working well [and] that we're doing everything that we can to recruit folks in the door. But I think the other major part of that is to make sure that we're doing everything we can to enhance retention. We've got to focus our attention a little bit more on why students are dropping out. And every institution again, has those same concerns.
So the best thing that you can do after you recruit students is to try to retain them. It costs less money to do that, than go out and find another person to replace them. But the enrollment picture, really across the country is a tough one. Particularly in the Midwest and the upper Midwest, oftentimes the states are having out-migration of individuals. The birth rate has declined to the point that there are not as many students available to enroll in higher education. And there's more fierce competition for the market that's there. Every institution has their work cut out for them on that.
We have a new team in the enrollment area that [is] working hard. And so we hope to first of all stabilize. And then if we can grow in specific areas, obviously, that's what we want to do. And so that was part of the restructuring, if you will, of the academic programs was to make sure that we were offering programs that students wanted to study. And so we'll do additional investments in those areas that are of higher demand and others, and we're going to be open to exploring new opportunities as they present themselves.
Do you expect more budget cuts will be coming down the pike to stabilize the situation?
Well, the plan is a five-year plan. The bulk of the cuts program cuts in the faculty and staff cuts really were in effect at the end of this last fiscal year. So this will be the first tough year of that five-year plan. But we really have a number of markers in place we need to hit both on the enrollment side and on the financial side. And if we don't hit those, we will have to adjust again.
I've always maintained an important thing to do is to plan your work and then to work your plan. Our work has been planned. And now we need to work that plan. We're going to be very vigilant about the budget side. Again, I think there's great promise, great hope there.
Do you see SCSU returning to its former glory? Or have those days passed?
I think that's an unrealistic expectation just given the overall demography within the state and within higher education. But I think the first phase is to try to stabilize the enrollment, and then live within our means.
We all have limited resources, whether it's personal or within the areas that we're working in or our own organizations. If we grow some and that's, that's wonderful. But I think that the first step is to right-size [what's] happened and then to implement the changes and move forward.