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Student recruiting at MSU - not all roses

BadlandsGrizFan said:
It also sucks living in Bozeman unless you’re a wealthy ski kid.
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God that place is a fake phony suburban sprawling hellhole. it exists to be the backdrop of other people’s vacations. Choosing to live there is actual NPC behavior. There is no character or charm. It is selling a lifestyle long since shot, buried, and danced on to people who haven’t heard of or can’t afford Paws Up (also gross place).

Any cowboy or rancher who tries to say otherwise to defend that university is selling what little credibility and authenticity they have to 10,000+ students who have never ridden a horse for a bag of beans.
 
GriznMN said:
Update: this is not to pour salt into our wounds but to open our eyes to the bigger picture.

MSU sent an acceptance package to my daughter sometime last week. She told me about it yesterday. They had a good marketing package, not great but good, with what I thought was a good award package.

Nothing from Montana...yet.

FWIW, the University of St. Thomas's acceptance package has blown everyone else out the door. Watch out for the Tommies, they are coming after the top dogs in the FCS. I think that might be one of the reasons NDSU is considering moving up to FBS. NDSU knows they can't compete against the University of St. Thomas in terms of location, education, connections for jobs after college (alumni network), and money. The University of St. Thomas has deep pockets, similar to JMU.

I will keep everyone updated.
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Weird thought, but you know that “Snow Belt” thing that Schmidtty keeps pushing on Twitter?

If a version of that were to come to pass, I would want St. Thomas to be a part of it. Gets a little more exposure in the Twin Cities and they are a respectable school whose investing in athletics.
 
5280Griz said:
Doesn’t St. Thomas not offer any scholarships for football which would put them at an inherent disadvantage against NDSU?
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They don't offer athletic scholarships but they offer academic scholarships, merit aid, and need-based aid and they have the money to offer huge scholarships.
 
GriznMN said:
Update: this is not to pour salt into our wounds but to open our eyes to the bigger picture.

MSU sent an acceptance package to my daughter sometime last week. She told me about it yesterday. They had a good marketing package, not great but good, with what I thought was a good award package.

Nothing from Montana...yet.

FWIW, the University of St. Thomas's acceptance package has blown everyone else out the door. Watch out for the Tommies, they are coming after the top dogs in the FCS. I think that might be one of the reasons NDSU is considering moving up to FBS. NDSU knows they can't compete against the University of St. Thomas in terms of location, education, connections for jobs after college (alumni network), and money. The University of St. Thomas has deep pockets, similar to JMU.

I will keep everyone updated.
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Is your daughter applying for a Presidential Leadership Scholarship?
 
Oh my, nobody holds a candle to Marquette so far. Marquette's admissions packet and effort is blowing everyone else out of the water.

On a related note, my daughter was offered more by Montana than MSU. I found out she didn't apply for the Presidential Scholarship so that's a big loss on her. Right now, she has her sights set on Loyola or Marquette for business and pre-law.
 
GriznMN said:
If the entering first-time students in Fall 2021 was 65% out of state and 35% in state and the current composition of the student body is 50% in state and 50% out of state and the overall retention rate is 81.8%, then the retention rate for in state and out of state varies according to the table below.

In-State RetentionOut-of-State Retention
75%90%
80%83.68%
85%78.84%
90%75%
95%71.83%
100%67.68%
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I like turtles!
 
Stop_HammerTime69 said:
God that place is a fake phony suburban sprawling hellhole. it exists to be the backdrop of other people’s vacations. Choosing to live there is actual NPC behavior. There is no character or charm. It is selling a lifestyle long since shot, buried, and danced on to people who haven’t heard of or can’t afford Paws Up (also gross place).

Any cowboy or rancher who tries to say otherwise to defend that university is selling what little credibility and authenticity they have to 10,000+ students who have never ridden a horse for a bag of beans.
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Bozeman is a nice and fun place. Very good restaurants. Some good bars and stores. It’s been a good place to have a big lumberyard for the past more than 75 years. Very good airport. Good high school athletics. Terrific skiing. Terrific outdoor activities and fishing. Bad college football team and weak stadium. Bad winter weather.
 
mthoopsfan said:
Bozeman is a nice and fun place. Very good restaurants. Some good bars and stores. It’s been a good place to have a big lumberyard for the past more than 75 years. Very good airport. Good high school athletics. Terrific skiing. Terrific outdoor activities and fishing. Bad college football team and weak stadium. Bad winter weather.
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Bozeman is too small although it is growing. Billings and Missoula feel like larger cities than they are because they are regional commerce hubs, which Bozeman is not to the same extent.
 
BWahlberg said:
My middle daughter is a freshman @ the UM

MSU's recruitment when she was a sophomore & junior was far more detailed than UM's - IMO. She would get far more "stuff" from Bozeman and it showed they just naturally had a bigger / better budget where they could spend more to send to kids. It really did seem focused on "selling the state" so it felt a little off telling her about all the great mountains and rivers and forests... bc... yeah she knows that already.

UM's was very steady but was postcards and letters instead of pamphlets.

She's a great student and landed the state's Presidential Scholarship but UM and MSU informed her that in different ways:

- MSU sent a giant packet stating she has a scholarship each year for the following 4 years as long as she maintained her GPA and (as I recall) live on campus for 1 year.

- UM sent a letter saying she gets it for 1 year.

Me, being the negotiator, told her we should reach out to the UM and tell them MSU has offered this for 4 years, and to see if they would match it. She opted to email them and the response back was, "well yes, that's how it works, you get that every year here as well." I sent this feedback up the ladder bc clearly the UM's messaging to high school students needed some tweaking.

One thing that MSU did which UM didn't that also impressed me was at some point in her senior year they sent her her student ID# and a login where she can review and hold classes for the fall semester. Open invitation to do so, just so she can get ready for college - UM never did anything like that, it was an impressive move I thought.

For her, in the end, she's pre-med and she researched the two biology departments and the UM department has far better connections and secondary school placement - so she opted to be a Griz (thank goodness haha). She was accepted right away into the pre-med here and is currently taking a chemistry test as I'm typing this.

I will also say, her senior year UM really turned up the recruitment, the mailers and information became more detailed, the communications really ramped up too, being a Missoula kid she was obviously able to get some great on-campus access from her health-science track she was on in high school.

Also funny, she was also accepted into Tech and they would send her a typed letter every 60 days, that's it. They did that for 2 years straight but had no other follow up.
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Question. Did the State recruiting effort feel like they were selling the Mountains before the Minds or was the significance to the academics as well?
 
MissoulaMarinerFan said:
Enrollment cliff is firmly one of the challenges and it is really many factors, including but not limited to: less “traditional high school seniors” due to folks having less kids and having them later if at all, folks looking more at 2 year degrees to bump income slightly before finishing a 4 year degree later. More doing the apprenticeship route (get paid for training, earn a decent amount) - plumbers, electricians, welders because you can earn good money sooner than you would slogging through a 4 year degree.

Hence the balancing act of focusing on retention as well. It does you no good to get a student for one semester and they bounce - 2 semesters and bouncing isn’t good either.

While some retention may be a better indicator than other (ie, spring 24 student returning for fall 25 - since the student is still paying their bill after a summer break), students still need to pay their bill via scholarships/fafsa acceptance and choose classes each semester - the longer you have them, the more money you make.

I doubt any public funded institutions will shut down due to the enrollment cliff, but more the small niche high price private institutions (more prevalent on the east coast) are feeling the pinch and have shut down in recent years.
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Off subject a little, but I recently had a conversation with thr head of placement at City College here in Billings.
She stated they had 14 students complete their welding program and were only able to place two. The closest job opportunity was in Gillette, WY.
She mentioned the trade schools are graduating more students than the market demands in some fields and there is concern about it.
 
5280Griz said:
When I was in college 10 years ago I knew many people who dropped out of UM and MSU after their freshman year. If you have under 2.0 GPA for 2 semesters in a row you get removed from the university. One of my buddies had a 0.0 GPA both fall and spring our freshman year so he had to drop out of UM. He eventually transferred to and graduated from Ole Miss if that tells you anything about Ole Miss academic standards.
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Blutarsky?!
 
mthoopsfan said:
Bozeman is a nice and fun place. Very good restaurants. Some good bars and stores. It’s been a good place to have a big lumberyard for the past more than 75 years. Very good airport. Good high school athletics. Terrific skiing. Terrific outdoor activities and fishing. Bad college football team and weak stadium. Bad winter weather.
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So, the Griz are losing almost every year to a "bad college football team"?
 
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