What has created Avila University’s rapid growth?

By Brad Ziegler

As winter begins to melt away and thoughts turn to spring, area high school seniors turn their attention to their mailboxes in anticipation of receiving acceptance letters and financial aid offers from the colleges and universities of their choice. An increasing number of them are hoping to hear from Avila University.

Avila recently celebrated their 100th anniversary and started their second century with a bang, adding students, programs and facilities and employing an innovative and aggressive plan for raising their profile and their campus population.

Not unlike many smaller private schools in the Midwest, Avila saw a decline in enrollment during and after the recent pandemic, falling from an average of approximately 1700 undergraduate and graduate students in the years leading up to 2020, to 1300 total students in 2022.

James Burkee joined the university as its new president on July 1, 2022, and moved quickly to stem the decline in student enrollment at Avila. Soon after his arrival, Avila announced a new partnership with KC Scholars that would provide $130 million over eight years to fund full tuition scholarships to 100 low to modest income students a year.

Soon thereafter, Avila announced a diverse group of new board members, including Wendy Guillies, the former president and chief executive officer of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and promoted a group of new strategic leaders within the senior ranks of the university.

The school began to address projected student growth with a renovation and 40-bed expansion of a campus dormitory, the former Ridgeway Hall, funded by a large donation by Avila alumna Jean Buchanan. The renovated dormitory, now named Buchanan Hall, opened in September 2024 and also houses the Buchanan Initiative for Peace and Non-Violence.

The university’s growth plans also led to the acquisition of the nearby Villa Ventura Senior Living Complex in 2024, which began housing students last fall and which they say will be able to house up to 500 students when the transformation to student housing is complete.

The increase in housing capacity has coincided with a growing student census, which has more than doubled since 2022 to more than 3000 students, more than half of whom are graduate students. The growing student body is made up of students from across the country and, increasingly, from around the world.

Avila says that their ability to draw so many new students in such a short period of time is the result of innovation and the institution’s commitment to Education Without Limits.

This philosophy is rooted in listening to the needs of students and the community.

“At Avila, we really listen to workforce and community leaders and use our history of being an innovative institution to best serve our students by preparing them for the workforce,” said Andy Jett, executive vice president and chief growth officer of Avila. “This means offering a wide range of programs across different modalities.”

The rapid increase in the size of the school’s graduate degree programs have been due in part to implementation of a new hybrid learning program which allows online learning for students anywhere in the United States coupled with periodic in-person intensive weekend campus gatherings. The programs primarily extend the scope of the school’s traditional undergraduate health sciences, education and business programs.

The growth in the university’s traditional undergraduate student population has been fueled, in part, by the expansion of undergraduate study programs to include more than 60 different major and minor programs, the expansion of the school’s athletic programs, which involve nearly a third of all undergraduate students on campus, and partnerships with outside organizations such as the nursing program developed with North Kansas City Hospital in late 2024 to address the shortage of nurses in the area.

A recently implemented effort to address financial barriers to attending college is the Swift Pace program, which allows students to complete undergraduate degrees in kinesiology, elementary education and communications in three years, and their accelerated Bachelor of Science in nursing program. The school’s partnership with the K-12 Teachers Alliance provides a similar impact, offering a 30% discount to students taking online Master of Arts classes in education.

Potentially the most impactful effort to provide access to an Avila education is the school’s recently created Access Award program, which offers free tuition to Missouri residents who come from a household with an adjusted gross income of $80,000 or less. Access Awards were developed in response to recent challenges created by delays in the application process for the traditional Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which reduced number of federal student aid applicants by more than 40% and dramatically impacted schools like Avila, whose annual tuition will exceed $40,000 in 2025.

“Access to college is the most critical factor in transforming a student’s financial future,” said Jasmine Van Houten, director of admissions at Avila University. “We are committed to changing this reality and ensuring financial barriers do not prevent deserving students from achieving their educational goals is the first step.”