Some Ohio colleges still accepting students

A month after admission deadlines passed at most Ohio colleges, at least 18 are still accepting students. It’s an indicator in some cases that they haven’t hit their enrollment goals for fall.

Those schools are among about 280 in the U.S. that have space to add students after the traditional May 1 deadline,

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according to an annual report compiled by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Colleges notify the association if they want to be added to the list.

The group publishes the report for students still searching for a college late in the admission process, sometimes because they didn’t apply to enough schools or because their top picks rejected them.

Many Ohio colleges routinely keep their doors open this late to help those students. But being on the list can also signal that a school is struggling to meet recruitment goals that factor into their financial bottom line, said Ross Grippi, president-elect of Ohio’s chapter of the national admissions group.

“We all face financial challenges because of how enrollment-driven we are,” said Grippi, who is also head of admissions at Baldwin-Wallace University in Berea, near Cleveland, which is on the list. “We’re going to accept them as long as we have space.”

Most Ohio schools in the report are private institutions with fewer than 5,000 students. Absent from the list are highly selective private schools and most public universities, except for those that the state requires to have rolling-admissions policies, such as the University of Toledo and Cleveland State University.

Some on the list have already hit enrollment goals for fall but are still accepting students, including Capital and Xavier universities. Others, though, are faced with the task of recruiting dozens of new students before fall.

Bluffton University, a school of 1,200 about an hour south of Toledo, is about 60 new students shy of its enrollment goal of 260. Ashland and Heidelberg universities are each about 10 percent short, and Wittenberg is about 28 students under its goal of 560.

Officials at some of those schools said gaps are normal this early in the summer.

But reviews by Moody’s Investors Service found that lagging enrollments at Wittenberg and Ashland have contributed to serious financial trouble in recent years. The credit-rating agency has downgraded debt at each university more than once, warning that it’s getting riskier to invest there.

Ashland now has one of the poorest ratings on the agency’s scale, and the school relies on credit lines to stay afloat. “We believe the probability of default has increased,” Moody’s wrote of Ashland in November. “A third year of declining enrollment stresses the university’s ability to grow revenue.”

Leaders at Wittenberg, including a new president who took over two years ago, are trying to balance the budget by 2017 after years of deep operating deficits. Over a three-year span ending in 2012, the university spent an average of 12 percent more than it generated, according to a Moody’s review.

Stiff competition for students amid a declining population of college-age Ohioans has fueled those financial struggles. With 225 degree-granting institutions in Ohio, among the most of any state, and fewer students, some schools are losing out.

“It’s so competitive here in Ohio,” Grippi said. “We’re just fighting for every student.”

Some say that the May 1 cutoff, which was once a hard deadline, is no longer the norm. Instead, this is now a time when admissions officers bolster mailing campaigns and pad financial-aid packages to woo students who haven’t made a final choice.

Students have drawn out their decisions further into the summer, too, as they apply to and are courted by more colleges, said C. Todd Jones, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Ohio.

“The joke among admissions folks is that June 1 is the new May 1,” he said.

Despite challenges, officials at most Ohio schools on the list said they expect to meet their recruitment goals before fall classes start.

Capital University is on track to have its largest freshman class ever, with a boost in outof-state students at the Bexley school. More than 730 first-year students had paid deposits by last week to reserve a spot there.

Enrollment is up so far at the Columbus College of Art & Design, too.

Officials at Ashland said they expect their enrollment to hold steady after years of declines. There has been an uptick in transfer students since the board of trustees cut annual tuition by more than $10,000 starting this fall.

That decision was one of many that Ashland leaders will soon announce as part of a plan to balance the university budget and improve its credit rating, said Scott Van Loo, vice president for enrollment management and marketing.

“There’s a lot of things that can happen in a few months,” Van Loo said, “but we feel very good about the position we’re in.”