Boots & Sabers

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Owen

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0721, 05 May 16

Mizzou Spirals

This should be a lesson to other college campuses who let their lunatics run wild.

Compared to last year, 1,470 fewer students had paid their $300 enrollment fees by the May 1 deadline—and with cancellations rolling in over the weekend, the numbers may be even more grim, the local TV station KMIZ reports. That’s a drop of about 25% from last year’s freshman class of about 6,200.

Mizzou also reported a three-year low in grad-school applications, down 1,140 from two years ago. The number of new students shrunk even as the university has embarked on an aggressive effort to drum up interest in the school, using text messages and Skype and deploying more out-of-state recruiters.

Here’s how steep that drop is: Fox Business’s Clay Travis writes that “the only comparable undergraduate enrollment decline in recent decades that I can find at any major college or university is Tulane University the year after Hurricane Katrina.”

The steep dropoff in enrollment appears to directly traceable to the events of last fall.  During October and November, the university found itself in the national spotlight after reports emerged of several racist incidents on campus. Protests erupted, forcing the cancellation of classes. In solidarity with a graduate student who went on a hunger strike, the university’s football team refused to play until the demands of one organization, #ConcernedStudent1950, were met. As the protests raged, a video went viral portraying one of the university’s communications professors, Melissa Click, calling for “muscle” against a student journalist covering the controversy.

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0721, 05 May 2016

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