Experts are anticipating an “enrollment cliff” to hit colleges in the coming years due to declining birth rates. However, student levels at private Mid-Missouri secondary schools appear to be holding relatively steady.
Tuition makes up the vast majority of most private school budgets, making consistent enrollment essential.
Max Vikhter, head of school at the Christian Fellowship School in Columbia, said that although the school’s lowest numbers are at the high school level — the age students would be ahead of the projected collegiate drop — overall enrollment is strong.
He said state school choice policies like MOScholars, a program that provides state scholarships to offset tuition, make private school more accessible.
“As that continues to expand, I think we're going to start seeing what we see in a lot of other states, which is where it'll become a lot more commonplace for families to have those options be available and be able to choose the schooling for their children that they feel is the best,” he said.
Christian Fellowship School has seen consistent growth in the last five years, Vikhter said. Enrollment in 2020 was around 290 students, and the religious school is anticipating more than 500 students this fall.
“From 2020 we added 50 students. In the following year, we added 40 … following year we added 40 more,” he said. “It's slowed down a little bit, but still consistently growing.”
Vikhter said Missouri is in a “time of transition” where school choice programs and policies are changing student levels for private schools.
“If a child started in 2018 as a kindergartner with us, they would have been part of a class with 16 students,” he said. “Well now they're about to be a seventh grader of a grade with 44 students.”
Kari Stockwell, director of admissions and marketing at Columbia Independent School, said the private school’s enrollment has also been growing in recent years and administrators anticipate that continuing.
“Last fall, we opened a new upper school building on campus to accommodate growth in the upper school and in our entire school, age 3 (through) 12th grade,” Stockwell said.
The Mexico Military Academy provides education for middle and high school boys — the generation most affected by the anticipated “enrollment cliff.”
The boarding school’s capacity is 350 students. Last year’s enrollment was 237 cadets, and school leaders anticipate holding steady at that number of students this year.
Richard Geraci, president of the all-boys school in Audrain County, said the academy is still slowly rebounding from enrollment declines caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We've never been able to recover for a couple reasons. The biggest reason is probably our international population … about 25%-30% are international cadets, which tremendously enriches our environment,” he said.
Approximately 92% of the military academy’s middle school and high school students live on campus and around 8% are students from Mid-Missouri who commute as “day cadets.”
“Our economic engine is bringing in cadets,” Geraci said, adding that he’d like to expand the number of Missouri students in their ranks. He believes the military academy can compete with other education options in the area.
“We have families — generally from the Mexico area. We've had families from Columbia, Centralia … in the local area coming here,” he said.
Geraci said the enrollment cliff provides a “renewed impetus to evaluate our recruitment efforts.”
