A year after new president Ken Hush took a scythe to the faculty of Emporia State University, fall enrollment figures paint a bleak picture of what his “realignment” has done to what once was the little college that could.
Figures released Wednesday show a year-to-year drop of 512 full-time equivalent students, a whopping 13% enrollment decline from last year.
Current FTE enrollment at ESU, 3,431, is the lowest in the past 20 years, which is as far back as statistics are available from the Kansas Board of Regents.
It’s also the largest year-to-year percentage drop on record for any state university. It nearly doubled the worst decline at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the small K-State veterinary school, which is counted separately from the larger university, posted a 6.6% enrollment loss between 2020 and 2021.
Lest you may think this is just symptomatic of a general decline in four-year college education, the next largest decline this year was at Fort Hays State, a more-or-less status-quo drop of only 1.1%. The only other enrollment loser in the state system was Wichita State, which dropped a minuscule 0.5%.
KU led enrollment gains with a hefty 7.5% increase and the rest of the universities were basically stable, with increases less than 1%. K-State was up a bit, its first increase in nine years.
So we can safely conclude the massive enrollment decline at Emporia falls squarely on the shoulders of Hush and the Kansas Board of Regents, which appointed him to his position and unanimously approved his chainsaw approach to university (mis)management last year.
Hush, a tennis standout at ESU in the early 1980s, had no experience in higher education management or teaching when he was hired as the interim president of the university in 2021.
At the time, he was running a company called BLI Rentals, an Emporia-based company that specializes in rent-to-own backyard storage sheds.
But it seems Hush’s primary qualification was that he’d held a variety of executive positions with Koch Industries, including president of its minerals and carbon division.
Koch has donated millions to ESU and other Kansas universities to promote the economic and public-policy goals of the company’s billionaire owner, Charles Koch, and it wields outsize influence throughout the system.
Hush’s tenure has been roiled with controversy.
Just before the regents made his interim job permanent, he shut down the university’s Center for Early Childhood Education, which provided on-campus day care for employees and gave students experience working with young learners. It was a weird flex for a university that has always prided itself on being one of the nation’s premier teacher colleges.
In an interview with the university newspaper, the Bulletin, Hush said he laughed at the criticism of the decision to close the center. Then he tried to walk the comment back, and when the student reporters didn’t let him, he told them “I think this interview today will determine how our relationship is going to exist on a go-forward basis — and I’m meaning the whole newspaper on campus,” the Bulletin reported.
It was a foreshadowing of much larger controversy to come.
