Chapter Seven: 1973—1974

Hurrle's assessment of enrollment prospects at the University appeared in the first article of a series based on six weeks of research on and off the campus, including extensive interviews with faculty, staff and students. One might properly challenge other conclusions offered by Hurrle in the course of his four-part critique. But in the matter of enrollment expectations, his analysis was right on target.

“Head count” had, indeed, continued to grow; University officials in 1973 could quite legitimately report a 13.5 percent increase in registration for the January interim, a record summer enrollment of 1,300-plus, phenomenal growth in transfer students, and, for fall, another modest percentage gain over the previous year. But the bottom line for budget purposes—full-time-equivalent enrollment, or FTEs—had started on a downward spiral that would continue for the remainder of the decade.

The extravagantly optimistic forecasts of early planners—made primarily for political purposes—had projected a 15,000-student campus by 1985. The figure had long since been revised downward. But it was obvious by now that the University would also continue to fall short of more recent FTE projections that formed the basis for annual budget allocations.

A November 1973 report to the UW System told of the immediate predicament: with a deficit of 103 FTEs, the University would be liable for a budget “adjustment”—a giveback to the UW System—of $190,511, payable in equal installments immediately and in July 1974. Funds recovered from UW-Green Bay and other campuses not meeting their FTE estimates would be allocated among the five units where enrollment had exceeded budgeting goals. Beneficiaries would be Milwaukee, Madison, Stout, La Crosse and the Center System.

UW-Green Bay, obviously, was not alone. Nor was the UW System. College graduates, including many with advanced degrees, were joining unemployment lines nationwide. And public and private institutions alike were feeling the impact of a shift in attitude toward higher education.

Hurrle put it this way: “People are getting wise to the fact that a degree's worth has declined considerably on the job market. It no longer is a ticket to the middle class.”

An October 1972 editorial in the Appleton Post-Crescent laid some of the blame on higher education representatives who had “oversold their type of higher education” by defining its benefits to the student solely in economic terms:

“The inference (by the student) was that education alone raised him in the socio-economic sphere with no relation to his abilities, the facts of why he went to college, job opportunities or his background. As students have found out that they didn't get the whole story, they began looking at the reasons. More than that, the current youth generation does not always see college as the natural succession from high school. The new emphasis upon manual labor, organic living as well as food, and suspicion of the entire establishment, including most definitely the academic one, have cut the applicants’ ranks.”

Alternatives to traditional higher education were also promoted by no less an authority figure than Sidney Marland, U.S. commissioner of education. His decision to make the development of “career education” his first priority helped to swell the rolls—and the budgets—of vocational and technical schools.

Chancellor Weidner was among those who found Marland's campaign “disturbing” for two major reasons: the assumption that persons seek an education for purely economic motives and the implications for class structure.

“It is likely to create a new elitism in this country,” Weidner commented in a Milwaukee Journal op-ed piece appearing in April 1973. “Twenty years from now the pundits who write editorials against universities today are going to criticize those of us in higher education for allowing a new elitism to arise.”

College entrance statistics, comparing nationally the freshman class of 1971 with that of 1969, showed a marked decline of 10.1 percent in the enrollment of students from families with incomes of less than $10,000, Weidner said. All income categories below $10,000 showed declines, while all income categories above $10,000 showed increases. At UW-Green Bay, he pointed out, the 1972 freshman class showed a substantial decrease in enrollment of students who were in the 50th to 80th percentile in their graduating classes. “The conclusions are clear,” he added. “Many potential students with promise are not going to college.”

And many who did choose college were themselves embracing what some administrators called “the new vocationalism,” a shift toward the concrete in college studies, wrote New York Times reporter Iver Peterson. From coast to coast, according to Peterson's report of a survey by campus correspondents, students were swelling enrollments in pre-med, pre-law, business, nursing, agriculture and newly developed courses in health sciences and handicapped training.

“In most cases, students were frank to point out that the jobs and security beckoning at the end of a long and arduous professional training were a prime reason for their choices,” Peterson wrote in December 1973. The reporter found further confirmation of the trend at the University of Minnesota. A survey of enrollments at the various campuses found “significant increases at the professionally oriented colleges and campuses,” while the liberal arts-oriented Morris campus seemed to be “undergoing a larger enrollment decline than expected,” the University reported.

UW-Green Bay did not escape the trend, according to Ronald Dhuey, who served as registrar for almost 20 years before taking the post of associate vice chancellor for institutional research. The innovative nature of the program was probably another drawback, Dhuey said in a 1990 interview.

“We tried to institute a radically new curriculum across the board before we were really ready to do it,” Dhuey observed. Other factors in the sagging enrollment picture of the early 1970s ranged from the advent of merger to the location of the campus, in Dhuey's view.

“At the very beginning, when you went out to recruit students at a high school, it was a real plus to be part of the University of Wisconsin,” Dhuey said. “There was the appeal of prestige. With merger, when every university became a UW campus, we lost that recruiting edge.

“Then there was the physical detachment from the community. We were out in the country without city bus service, so every student had to have a car. There was the freeze on campus housing construction that came after the merged board of regents took a look at their indebtedness for dormitories and the plunging occupancy rate at other campuses. It was a period when students had deserted the dorms. We weren't allowed to build dormitories with state funds. We had the apartments, but because they were a private enterprise, the rents had to be high enough to turn a profit. Many students couldn't afford to live there.”

The incomplete campus was also a liability in attracting students, Dhuey recalled. As admissions counselors recruited prospects for Year Five, the 1973-74 academic year, the University still lacked a student union and a physical education building.

Academic facilities, however, were developing with dramatic speed, and the University staff was coming together, finally, at a single location.

While construction continued on College of Community Sciences buildings, Dhuey and others in administrative posts took up residence in the new Student Services Building. The personnel office moved in from its farmhouse, and the purchasing office from the golf course pro shop. With the opening of the Studio Arts and Creative Communication buildings, the Deckner Avenue building was vacated except for physical education activities. Classes and practice sessions for sports teams would be held in the small UW Center gymnasium, five miles from the campus, for three more years.