Seeking an Enrollment Hail Mary, Small Colleges Look to Athletics

If we build it, will they come? That’s the question Adrian College president Jeff Docking asked himself when he first arrived at the small liberal arts institution in southern Michigan in 2005. At the time, Adrian’s enrollment was at a near-historic low of about 800 students, and incoming classes were shrinking. The tuition-dependent college was losing millions of dollars a year, and its endowment wasn’t large enough to compensate.