David Porter is the pioneer of creating community with Next-Gen Residential and Retail Dining crafted through the lens of SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Abundance Thinking for campus dining programs.
The fall census numbers are in, and they are hard to read. On September 25, Higher Ed Dive tallied what major public universities are reporting on international enrollment. The University of Colorado is down 582 international students from last fall. Ohio State is down 12.7 percent. Indiana is down 15.6 percent. North Texas lost more than 1,300. Across the Universities of Wisconsin, 1,100 of a 1,732-student decline were international students.
Then the University of Maine System did something most institutions avoid. It put a price on it. Losing 100 out-of-state students, administrators said, costs $7.2 million over four years.
I am not an immigration attorney or a visa policy expert, and I will not pretend to be. Those decisions are made far from campus, and no president, provost, or chief business officer in America controls them. So let me set that ledger down and pick up the other one.
Every campus in those headlines is also losing students it can control. They are already admitted. They already moved in. They are sitting in a residence hall tonight deciding, quietly, whether they are coming back.
The Ledger Nobody Is Holding a Press Conference About
Maine’s arithmetic is worth reading twice, because it works in both directions. $7.2 million across 100 students is $72,000 per student over four years, or about $18,000 a year. That is what one student leaving costs. It is also what one student staying is worth.
Now look at your own first-year class. If it is 2,000 students and your first-to-second-year retention is 80 percent, 400 of them will not be back next fall. Nobody will write a news story about those 400. There will be no roundup and no federal policy to point to. They will simply not re-enroll, one at a time, for reasons that rarely show up on an exit survey.
One point of retention on that class is 20 students. Each one who comes back as a sophomore brings three more years with them. Three points is 60 students. Multiply by the net tuition, room, and board you keep for every student who returns, and you have a number that belongs in the same board presentation as the international decline.
We are subject matter experts, so let us run the numbers for you, with your class size, your net revenue per student, and your retention rate. On most campuses the result is larger than anyone in the cabinet expected, and it dwarfs the line called remuneration from campus dining.
Where the Controllable Students Are Decided
Over the past thirty-six years of interviewing newly minted freshmen, I have asked what they were looking forward to about college back when they were high school seniors. The answer comes back in two words, almost universally: freedom and social.
Colleges and universities have long known that when a new student connects socially within roughly the first 45 days, the odds of returning as a sophomore rise sharply. For the class that moved in this August, that window is closing right now. By the time the board meets in October, most of next fall’s attrition has already been decided. Not in the registrar’s office. At a table, or in the absence of one.
So ask the question I ask on every campus: where, physically, are those friendships supposed to form? Not the classroom, where talking to your neighbor is a disruption. Friendship is produced by repetition without obligation: the same faces, at the same tables, at the same hours, until the accidental third dinner with the same crew quietly becomes a friend group. Only one venue delivers that two and three times a day for four years. It is the residential dining program, the last Big Mix, and it is already in your auxiliary services portfolio.
The phone call that precedes a lost student is not “send money.” It is “Mom, I haven’t really found my people yet.” Every enrollment manager knows what that sentence becomes by spring.
What the Controllable Side Requires
The room already exists. The students already walk in with a paid meal plan. What separates a dining program that holds students from one that loses them is not capital. It is a set of decisions.
The institution owns the vision, not the operator: a granular picture of what a world-class residential and retail dining program is on this campus, by location, method of service, daypart, meal plan, and brand portfolio. Do not abdicate your responsibility to an FSP’s sales team. You may rue the day.
The program runs on the Student Clock and on Abundance Thinking. Hours that match when students are actually free. Stations that stay full until the posted close, on weekends too. Table configurations that invite joining, so that sitting alone is a choice rather than a sentence.
And it is measured by the outcome the mission cares about. Voluntary participation is the purest measure of value. If your residential commons holds roughly 70 percent meal plan participation without equivalencies, swipes, or exchanges in retail propping up the count, you have a Social Coliseum, and you are watching retention happen in real time.
Across nearly 500 campuses over more than three decades, many of our clients have reported that student retention increased by 1 to 3 points after their programs were rebuilt through SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™. Hold that next to the arithmetic above.
Our mini documentary, SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™: The Missing Ingredient, directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Nick Nanton, was filmed on four campuses across two countries. The voices are first-year students describing what it feels like when a campus engineers belonging instead of leaving it to chance. Watch the mini documentary. Those are the students on the controllable side of the ledger.
Two Columns for the October Board Meeting
The leaders at the campuses in those headlines are doing exactly what they should: reporting hard numbers honestly and planning around them. The question is for every campus preparing its own board report this month.
Bring two columns. In the first, write the number of students you lost this fall to forces you could not control. In the second, write the number of first-year students who will not return next fall, and what each point of that number is worth over the three years that follow. The first column is news. The second is a decision.
In the Big Dance, where families choose among hundreds of academically interchangeable schools, you cannot recruit your way out of a door that is open at the back. The students you can still keep are on your campus tonight. Whether they stay is not only solvable; it is preventable, and the single most potent day-to-day catalyst for engagement, belonging, retention, and persistence is already yours. Organize it through the lens of SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Abundance Thinking, and then walk through the dining commons at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday and count the students who found their people.
