Thunderstorms, some heavy during the morning hours, then skies turning partly cloudy during the afternoon. High around 85F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected..
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Updated: September 22, 2023 @ 5:07 am
Thinking a little bit more about K-State’s goal of hitting 30,000 students by 2030. It’s a Herculean task. Just to get your head around it, it’s about like what Bill Snyder did in football.
K-State stood at 24,766 students in the fall of 2014. We don’t yet know what the number is this fall – it’ll be out late this month or early next – but we know that it had fallen to 19,722 by 2022. That’s a drop of a little more than 5,000 students in eight years.
Down 20 percent. One in five kids, just — poof! — vanished. On average, that loss translates to 630 fewer students every year. Or nearly two fewer kids every day, year after year, deciding to go to K-State. Two fewer, and then two fewer than that, and then two fewer than that.
So now, in seven years, the goal is to get it to 30,000. That means not just stopping the slide, but turning the battleship around. It would mean an increase of 55 percent. It would mean four MORE kids every single day donning the purple. You see what I’m getting at? You’re going from negative two to positive four. Every single day. Compounded, day after day after day, for seven years.
What’s interesting, taking a longer view, is that this has actually happened before. Twice.
K-State went from just over 7,000 students in 1960 to just under 14,000 in 1970. It also grew by nearly 6,000 students from 1970 to 1980. So it more than doubled in 20 years.
It also turned around from a period of decline in the 1980s, with Jon Wefald banging the drum and Pat Bosco scooping them up by the hundreds. Basically that led to the peak in 2014 of just under 25,000. That was the highest ever. To be fair, that peak occurred five years after Wefald’s retirement, when Kirk Schulz was in charge. The decline from that peak started under Schulz, for his last two years, and then continued under Richard Myers.
I’m not blaming them. They were fighting an uphill battle in terms of demographics.
Richard Linton is prioritizing stopping that decline. That’s the headline of the university’s big new plan, what they’re calling Next-Gen. As I said here before, I completely agree with that priority. I’m not entirely sure how the rest of us around Manhattan can help, but I’d say we should all think carefully about that. Manhattan is not K-State, but…let’s be serious. This is a college town.
It’s a giant task, because the demographics are still not favorable. But nobody thought the football team could ever win, and Bill Snyder got it to number one in the nation. Twice. Now they’re coming off a conference championship, and they’ve built a bazillion-dollar cathedral up there, and…well, you know all that.
How to do it? I have no idea. But I do know this: It all starts with the person in charge.
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