This fall University of Missouri at Columbia will be admitting a freshman class that will be 35 % smaller than the class it admitted in September 2015. Overall enrollment will be down from about 35,000 to some 30,000.
If you have been following the trials and tribulations of Missouri's flagship public university during the same two years, then you know that racial tensions resulted in the resignation of a president and a boycott of the football team.
Reportedly, the new president and his administration are surprised by the depth of the fallout from these high-profile incidents.
Piling on to the school's problems, legislators angry about university ties to planned parenthood cut funding for grad assistants, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Other factors include changing demographics, a fact of life to which many of us must adjust.
There is also a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't aspect to the school's enrollment problem. Rural students may choose to apply elsewhere because they are concerned about the campus unrest and how it was managed. African-American high schoolers and their parents continue to have concerns about the racial atmosphere.
I'm fond of weather analogies --- thus "the Fifth Wave". So, to borrow a cliche, the school fondly known to locals as Mizzou is being buffeted by a Perfect Storm of demographic, racial and political winds. Administrators had best batten down the hatches.
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