Is Cape's reputation for violence hurting SEMO enrollment?

 

There is a question hanging over Southeast Missouri State University that nobody has an answer for yet.

Is the growing perception of violence in and around Cape Girardeau becoming a factor in SEMO’s continuing enrollment decline?

There is no data currently available showing that students are leaving SEMO because of crime. The university has not said that crime is responsible for its enrollment losses. There is no survey showing that parents are choosing other universities because they are worried about Cape Girardeau. But the question is worth asking.

This week, Stephen Schultheis, SEMO’s vice president of enrollment management and student success, told the Board of Governors that overall enrollment had fallen another 4.5% this fall. The latest decline continues a trend that has been building for more than a decade. 

The university has had some areas of growth this year. Dual-credit and early-college enrollment increased 2.5%, while online enrollment increased 3.5%. SEMO also reached its undergraduate retention goal and exceeded its graduate retention goal by 3.5%. Still, the overall number went down again.

Then there was Parents Weekend. On the weekend families were in Cape Girardeau visiting their college students, two SEMO students were among the people injured in a downtown shooting that killed 17-year-old Keyon Malcom of Parma.

The shooting happened early Sunday, Sept. 27, on Main Street in downtown Cape Girardeau. Police later arrested 21-year-old Quazerious Murray and charged him with second-degree murder, three counts of first-degree assault and four counts of armed criminal action.

According to court records, a witness identified Murray as the shooter, and investigators used photographs from his social media accounts to compare him with surveillance images. The allegations have not been proven in court.

The two SEMO students survived.

Malcom did not. He was not a SEMO student, but his death happened in the community closely surrounding the university during one of the weekends when families were coming into town to spend time with their students.

And that was only one part of the weekend.

On Monday, SEMO’s Department of Public Safety received a report from a student who said she had been assaulted and raped beginning Saturday and continuing into Sunday.

The suspect, 20-year-old Daronne Lee Wright, was a SEMO student and had been a member of the football program. The university later confirmed that he was a non-recruited walk-on who was no longer affiliated with the team.

Wright has been charged with first-degree rape or attempted rape, first-degree sodomy or attempted sodomy, first-degree kidnapping, two counts of second-degree domestic assault and two counts of armed criminal action.

According to the probable-cause statement, the alleged assault involved a handgun. Wright is accused of choking the victim, striking her on the left side of the head with the gun and placing it in her mouth before sexually assaulting her. A forensic examination documented injuries including facial swelling, cuts to the lip, bruising to the arm and abrasions on the neck, according to the probable-cause statement.

All of that happened while Cape Girardeau was already having a larger conversation about what kind of city it wants to be.

There has been a lot of talk on social media lately about Cape needing a tourism identity. People have pointed to Paducah, which built much of its tourism identity around quilting, and asked what Cape could build around.

Maybe Cape already has an identity. Maybe we’ve been earning it every Friday and Saturday night for years.

The shootings. The fights. The arrests. The police calls. The headlines coming out of downtown. Those things are part of how people outside Cape see this city, whether we like it or not. That includes parents looking at colleges.

SEMO is asking families to send their children here for four years. Cape is asking visitors to spend their weekends here.

What happens when those people search the city and see the same headlines we have been seeing?

This isn’t an argument that Cape is a bad city. It isn’t an argument that the police aren’t doing their jobs. Cape Girardeau police have pointed out that officers were working downtown during the recent shooting, that other law enforcement agencies were there as well, and that a suspect was arrested within 72 hours. The enrollment decline started years ago.

There are plenty of factors involved in university enrollment, and SEMO itself reported areas of growth this year. But perception is part of choosing where to live.

If a parent is comparing SEMO with another university, they aren’t just comparing classrooms and tuition. They are also looking at the city their child will live in.

If that city has spent years producing weekend headlines about violence, those headlines are part of the picture.

Maybe they make no difference. Maybe they do. We don’t have the answer because nobody has asked the people making those decisions.

All we know right now is that SEMO’s enrollment fell another 4.5% and people are talking about what kind of identity Cape needs to build to bring more people here.

Before we worry about a new identity, maybe we should be honest about the one we’ve already been building.