Segmentation leaves mark on Springfield colleges

Twenty-five years later, SMSU and Evangel University are celebrating major anniversaries while Drury University is welcoming a new leader ...

Parallels aside, much has changed in the last 25 years.

The higher education institutions in Springfield – SMSU, Drury, Ozarks Technical Community College, Evangel University, Baptist Bible College and Central Bible College – had 2004–2005 combined enrollment of nearly 33,000 full-time students.

The majority of those students – nearly 20,000 – were at SMSU.

A decades-long effort to rename SMSU Missouri State University succeeded this year and goes into effect in August, and the university welcomed new President Michael Nietzel July 1.

Bruno Schmidt, outgoing vice president of academic affairs, has been an administrator at SMSU for more than three decades. In that time the school founded the College of Business Administration – now one of the largest in the state – the Center for Applied Science and Engineering and expanded into the downtown area.

Schmidt said all of this has come despite a trend of declining state funding.

“What it really represents is a shift from the entire state recognizing the importance of supporting higher education toward privatization, where the students who are graduating are being called upon to shoulder more and more of that responsibility,” he said. “We’re seeing, throughout the country, students having to pay more and more for their education, and in the near term, I don’t see that changing.”

Changing dynamic

The lack of state funding, plus an explosion in enrollment in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, caused the university to make the switch to selective admission.

With SMSU’s shift away from open enrollment in the early ‘90s, Schmidt said, there was a need to give students who didn’t qualify for university admission an alternative.

And along came Norman Myers, who took the lead of a newly formed community college.

Myers is the first, and only, president of what was originally called Heart of the Ozarks Technical Community College, established in 1990. Now called Ozarks Technical Community College, OTC serves nearly 9,000 students each semester, and projections call for up to 15,000 students by fall 2015. OTC is working on an almost $13 million south campus in Ozark.

OTC was a necessity, according to Myers. He said the school provided a place for residents to get affordable yet specialized training to work for the area’s largest employers at the time, including Zenith, Lily-Tulip and Paul Mueller Co.

Myers said the school’s place in the community has not changed, but the training certainly has.

“As time has passed, everything has become more technical and computerized,” he said. “Even the job skills have changed – nowadays you don’t have an auto mechanic, you have an auto technician. It’s up to us to try to keep all of that changing and stay on the cutting edge, to keep training up to date so it’s what the employers want and need and expect.”

In addition to the community college option, four-year colleges Evangel and Drury enhanced their missions and prestige by becoming universities – Evangel in 1998 and Drury in 2000.

Robert H. Spence has been president of Evangel for 31 years. He said that Springfield is lucky to have such a wide variety of educational opportunities.

“I think Evangel is recognized as a very strong member of the academic community, taking its place with what is now Missouri State and Drury University in making a very viable offering to the community,” Spence said.

“Springfield is extremely blessed; the total number of students enrolled in all of these institutions of higher education really makes a tremendous economic contribution to the community.”

The future

So what lies ahead for higher education?

Spence said “nontraditional” students will continue to be an emphasis.

“I think you’ll see more and more online opportunities and more attention paid to the adult learners – people who are even midway through a career deciding to prepare for something else,” Spence said. “All of that will happen as additional growth – it shouldn’t impact the traditional offerings.”

Myers agreed, adding that the increased role of nontraditional schools like Vatterott College, Springfield College, University of Phoenix and Webster University’s Ozarks Regional Campus are important but won’t take away from traditional college offerings.

“They have their own accreditation, not the same one as all the public and large private institutions,” he said.

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