How should small colleges prepare students for jobs? Three models

Three stone stairs, Winston-Salem, NC

Three weeks ago Hult International School of Business released survey results under the title, Traditional Degrees Hinder Graduates at Work.  The study found that HR Directors and young employees both widely believe that colleges did a poor job preparing them for their current positions. Hult’s findings were picked up by higher education commentators as yet more evidence that colleges are failing to do what they are supposed to do.  Mark Perna’s widely read Forbes piece, “New Data Reveals Just How Deep the College Crisis Goes” argued that when employees and employers are dissatisfied with the job preparation delivered by colleges, everyone, including colleges, is hurt. Take a few minutes to read both pieces, or any of the hundreds of other recent articles on the failure of higher education to train employees well. Make what you will of them.

My goal in what follows is to describe three models that colleges, employers, and policy-makers have in mind when they say that colleges should prepare students for jobs. Each model has a different conception of what a job is and what a college’s responsibility is to students and employers. While I favor one of these models, particularly for small colleges, any of them could work.  But each requires a different approach to education and different roles for students, employers, and schools. Frequently, all three models exist on campus and they are entangled in the minds of students, professors, and employers. Clarity, then, about the model that a college has in mind is essential, since such clarity then can shape a college’s approach to work and to readying students for the workforce.

The first model suggests that college isn’t primarily about preparation for work. In this model, getting a college education has many purposes, both personal (discover your calling, develop good learning habits, expand your curiosity, adopt a field of study) and public (become civically engaged, build community, advocate for a better society). Preparation for work is not contrary to any of these outcomes, but it is secondary to them.  That is, the job that graduates will pursue is a result of a student’s formation, rather than driving that formation. And thus a student may run through many jobs until they find one that fulfills the private and public values that the student holds. 

This model has many adherents among faculty and staff, and at liberal arts colleges.  And it describes the de facto experience of many college graduates who, regardless of field of study, end up in a job for reasons that are less about the job and more about the sort of life the student seeks at that particular time in their lives. But it depends for success on certain economic and cultural conditions–widely available jobs, decent compensation across the workforce, employers openness to employees with a wide range of backgrounds, confidence about the economy, unencumbered college graduates–which only obtain from time to time and place to place. And it runs contrary to trends in the disciplines, which seek greater specialization and thus prepare students for narrower ranges of jobs. 

The second model is the one at work in studies like the Hult study and much of public policy as well. It assumes the following. There is a thing called a job–manager, say, or nurse. It is largely the same everywhere. Colleges can prepare for the job by teaching them the skills necessary to complete the job. These skills are clearly defined, easily taught, and transferable from the classroom to the job for which the student’s field of study has prepared them. The college is responsible if one of its graduates has the wrong skills to do the job well, or if the employee is dissatisfied with their job. In this model, colleges bear heavy responsibility to employers and students, who, in turn, have little responsibility to the college. Hence the spate of articles blaming educators for workforce dissatisfaction.

I’d like to make two points about this model. First, it misunderstands what a job is and how one prepares for it. No job is a simple amalgamation of skills.  The word job derives from “gobbe”, which means “mass, lump…[or] ‘cart-load’.” Anyone who has had a job knows it to be a cart-load of stuff, some portion of which requires skill (derivation: power of discernment, sound judgement) and some portion of which requires techniques, or tools, or knowledge, or habits or character traits, or any number of other behaviors which a person may or may not be able to learn.

And, there is no such thing as a job.  The same positions in the same field at two different employers vary wildly from each other. A nurse will have learned to use certain tools, have become familiar with many techniques, have developed knowledge about the field in general, and have demonstrated those things by earning a degree and becoming licensed.  But no nurse works in the field in general.  They work in actual places for actual employers with other human beings.  All of these variables make two positions with the same titles and similar descriptions distinct from each other.  Or, put another way–there is no Job, only jobs.

As with the first model, this one only works at certain times and certain places.  It relies on standardization of job responsibilities and of curricula. It treats employees as largely interchangeable.  And it thrives during times when the status of educators lags that of employers, and when students are broadly considered as consumers. It is thus strangely situated today, where on the one hand educators do lag employers in prestige and students are consumers, but on the other, the standardization of jobs and employers is diminishing. It is a model, then, with internal contradictions. Or put another way–it is a model designed to further the dissatisfaction of employers and workers.

The third model requires a partnership between employers, colleges, and students. It assumes that there is a body of knowledge, tools, and techniques that is common across a type of job, but that the application of those things and the development of skill takes place in a particular workplace, not in the classroom.  Thus educators need to ensure that students are learning the right things in the classroom, employers need to be dedicated to training employees in the particular ways that turn their tools, techniques, and knowledge into workplace-specific skill, and students need to aspire to stability in the workforce.

This model, too, relies on certain cultural conditions to work. Employers must be committed to developing their employees. Employees must be committed to their particular job and employer.  And colleges must understand both the particular employers who hire their students, and the particular students they educate.

This third model might thus seem the most fanciful, for it places heavy responsibility on students and employers.  But for certain schools, employers, and students, it works best.  It is the de facto model at the Ivy League schools, where history, alumni relations, and prestige seeking ensure that graduates pursue work at certain employers, not any employer.  It is the model embraced by many top employers–Enterprise, Costco, Deloitte, Chik-Fil-A among them–who spend significant amounts of time and money preparing their employees to do their work in accordance with the culture and expectations of the employer. And of course many of the most popular solutions to the “workforce crisis”–developing more tradespeople, apprenticeships, internships–continue, unwittingly perhaps, to assume that employers should train their employees, and employees should learn to do work at work. 

Let me close by suggesting that while many small colleges assume the value of the first model and are moving under pressure to the second (hence the expansion of certificate offerings and the vogue for “skills” (which are, actually, “techniques” if I were to quibble about what words mean)), it is the third model that suits them best. Healthy small colleges are defined by their focus–be it focus on a particular place or on a particular approach to education.  Such focus on the part of small colleges permits them to recruit specific students–those who share their commitment to content or to place. And it permits them to build partnerships with the specific employers who desire their graduates. When those things happen then colleges can focus on the work they do best–helping students learn particular things that will serve them in the particular places they will do their work.

What would happen if federal financial aid went away?

Fog. Winston Salem, NC

Until Tuesday’s announcement that student financial aid was not included in the federal pause on loans and grants (and yesterday’s “de-pausing the pause” overall), I was getting reacquainted with a particular sort of nausea. I felt it in 2008 when the liquidity crisis led my college to realize that without access to federal dollars it could only stay open for a couple of weeks.  It was the kind I felt at each of the threatened government shutdowns, the kind that lingered for months as the Biden administration botched FAFSA again and again.  It is the sort of sickness you feel when you are powerless to respond to a crisis and responsible for its outcomes.

Then Ben Roberts, a smart man and a great friend, texted me and said “we need a blog post on what to do without federal funding.” He was right, of course. We do need to think about how to operate colleges and universities with less or no federal aid, not because it is likely to be the case, but because thinking wisely about the worst cases can help in merely difficult ones.

So, here are a few thoughts, brief and incomplete to be sure, about what schools might do to learn from an uncertain aid pipeline, and about how that uncertainty might affect the industry as a whole.

Learn from those who’ve done without

The year I was born is the year that student loan uncertainty first became a possibility. Though the GI Bill provided tuition benefits for World War II veterans, before the Higher Education Act of 1965 very few federal dollars flowed into college coffers as a result of loans to students. Or put another way, nearly all colleges and universities now functioning in the United States once operated without student loans. Of course, today’s colleges are different from colleges in 1965–they are more complex, host more activities, have different aspirations, and serve different students. But their core operations are the same.  So if you want to see how to operate without federal aid, go into the archives, pull financial records from, say, 1958, and look at the budget.

Or, take a look at the operations of those colleges and universities who forego federal aid today. (Here’s a slightly outdated list.) A few years ago, I worked with Grattan Brown and Clifford Humphrey to get Thales College off the ground.  Thales’ founder, Bob Luddy, mandated that the college not rely on federal aid. We built the business model to comply. My argument here is not that all schools can or should eschew federal aid.  It is, instead, that if you expect uncertainty in federal aid flows, be sure you know about models that work without them.

Learn what things cost and what people will pay for them

I’ve argued elsewhere that American colleges and universities have an overdelivery problem. We provide many things to students that they do not participate in and which they do not value. But because we charge “tuition and fees” for all of the academic and co-curricular offerings we provide, neither we nor our students understand how much individual services cost, how much students will pay for them, and therefore whether we should continue offering them or not. Schools can respond most wisely to fluctuation in student revenues by being clearer about what students want to pay for with their money, and pricing those things in a way that reflects their value.

Figure out other ways for students to pay for their educations

When I joined Barton College as Provost in 2013, one of the first stories I learned was how, during the Great Depression, Barton’s president accepted cotton and tobacco as tuition payment. That story stayed alive as an emblem of Barton’s grittiness, but also its creativity. Before the HEA, Barton hosted loan programs sponsored by local churches, civic organizations, and employers. Students worked on campus in real jobs for real money (a practice maintained and slowly expanding among work colleges). Only since 2010 has the federal government provided nearly all student loans.  Before then, private lending and federal aid were both legitimate sources of aid.  Federal loan uncertainty should encourage schools to explore financial partnerships with all sectors of their communities–churches, civic organizations, banks, foundations, employers–who benefit from their graduates.

Examine key assumptions about what makes for a good education

When you look closely, many aspects of a traditional undergraduate education, strong or wobbly as they may be, rely on the availability of reliable federal financial aid.  Here’s a list of key assumptions that might have to be reconsidered if federal air becomes more unreliable:

• Accreditation–the system that emerged after the Higher Education Act vested responsibility in accreditors to certify that colleges qualified to receive Title IV (federal aid) funding.  The past two decades have brought attacks on accreditors from all sides, with their sustenance being that their imprimatur makes federal funds flow.  More uncertainty about federal funds, more uncertainty about the value of accreditation.

• Restricted endowments–Without reliable federal aid, schools will turn to their endowments to maintain and guide their operations.  Too many schools have built endowments around marginal parts of their operations, or permitted restrictions which make funding almost impossible to use.  Challenges to endowment laws and appeals for relief from donor restrictions will expand.

• Residential colleges–for many students, scholarships, grants, and savings just about cover tuition and fees.  Loans cover the rest of their expenses, the major portion of which are room and board.  Families already question the value of living on campus (that is, they wonder if it is worth the cost, rather than whether it is a good thing in the abstract). If loan dollars and other federal money are harder to come by, I suspect many more students will figure out how not to live on campus.

• Four-year degrees–Already interest in certificates and sub-degree credentials is exploding among students attending traditional undergraduate institutions.  The three-year bachelors degree is reappearing (for the third time, now, in my thirty years in higher education).  The availability of federal aid for up to 150% of the time to complete a bachelors degree makes it possible for many students who might otherwise prefer a shorter time in college to stay in college and earn the full bachelors degree.  Here, too, uncertainty about aid will likely encourage students to seek less-than-four year credentials.  It should also push schools to offer more of them.  (I would particularly like to see the return of associates degrees at bachelors granting institutions, both for the first half of the bachelors–a rigorous cohesive introduction to the liberal arts, say, and for the second half–a deep dive into a particular discipline, without appended general education requirements.)

• Retention and graduation rates–As with the bachelors degree, the focus on retention and graduation rates depends on the assumption that the default model for higher education is a student staying continuously enrolled for four years and earning a degree. Financial concerns are already one of the top three reasons why students leave a school before graduating (fit, and poor academic performance being the others).  If the reliability of funding becomes more uncertain, more students will stop out of undergraduate education.  At some point, then, the focus on retention and graduation rates will need to be replaced by other measures of institutional value.

Closing thoughts

American higher ed would be worse off in the short term if federal aid became and remained unstable.  School closures would increase, as would the number of students leaving college with debt and no degrees.  Educational attainment would suffer. But just because that is a bad future doesn’t mean it won’t happen.  It is wise to plan for such a future, and find the opportunities that lie hidden within it.  

Thinking clearly about liberal arts colleges: cost

Full moon at dawn, Winston Salem NC

If you wanted to build a low-cost college you might start by selecting the disciplines that are the least expensive to deliver.  And if you did that, you would find liberal arts disciplines at the top of the list. But if you were wondering which colleges in the United States are most expensive based on tuition and fees, schools that think of themselves as liberal arts colleges would also be at the top. Understanding this paradox is a key to thinking about the future of the liberal arts, and the future of college, in America.

Why are the liberal arts inexpensive? Liberal arts faculty earn less, on average, than faculty in other disciplines (though some social science disciplines are also low-paying). There are many more qualified liberal arts faculty than there are available full-time liberal arts faculty positions, which depresses salaries. So does the fact that in many disciplines there is limited competition from “industry” for people with advanced liberal arts degrees.

The liberal arts are inexpensive to deliver.  Few require special classrooms or equipment, and even those that do–biology for instance–can be outfitted to meet undergraduate needs at a manageable cost. Learning materials aren’t specialized. Many are in the public domain and those that aren’t can be readily acquired. And liberal arts disciplines have worked hard to provide low-cost materials to students.

Why are liberal arts colleges expensive? If you pay attention to debates about college costs, you can recite a number of answers to this question. College cost increases, though moderating significantly in the recent past, have risen faster than inflation for decades. The easy availability of student loans makes it possible for colleges to raise their rates. Because cost is a signal of prestige, tuition and fees at liberal arts colleges are higher than those at other sorts of institutions.

Behind these causes there are two others, equally obvious but less frequently remarked.  First, liberal arts colleges receive fewer operational subsidies from local, state, and federal governments than do other sorts of institutions. Community college operations are subsidized by city and county governments.  Public universities are subsidized by state governments. (Those few public liberal arts colleges receive these subsidies as well, and charge less expensive tuition than their independent counterparts). And the federal government subsidizes the operations of research institutions. The bulk of liberal arts colleges don’t have access to these operational subsidies and therefore have to find other ways to cover operational costs.  Charging higher tuition is one of them.

Second, while the liberal arts are inexpensive to deliver, liberal arts colleges offer all sorts of services, activities, and programs that are not directly related to the liberal arts. These activities can be valuable for students, and many of them–study abroad, say, or athletics, or living on campus–are routinely associated with institutions that call themselves liberal arts colleges. Those same activities, though, flourish on all sorts of campuses and may not bear any liberal arts imprints.  They are also expensive to deliver, and raise the cost of an education at schools that call themselves liberal arts colleges.

Does it matter?

People from all sorts of financial backgrounds perceive college to be expensive. And people perceive the liberal arts to be less useful than other fields of study–business, say, or nursing, or the trades.  Given these truths, many liberal arts colleges have eliminated liberal arts disciplines.  Others have added new disciplines outside the liberal arts.  Still more have built out the co-curriculum so that the experience outside the classroom is attractive to undergraduates even if the liberal arts may not be.

All of these moves are rational.  But none of them respond to the truth at the core of this essay–that the liberal arts are cheap but liberal arts colleges are not.  This truth suggests another approach, one that embraces the liberal arts both because of their intrinsic value and because they can be taught and learned inexpensively. It then reduces other costs so that the price to students shrinks and the experience of students is consistently a liberal arts experience. Several start-up colleges (here, here, and here) have designed themselves in this way, promising a rigorous liberal arts education coupled only with the experiences most essential to heighten the meaning of that education.  I suspect we will see more established liberal arts colleges follow that path.

Watch for my upcoming book: How to be a small college

Friends,

After years of working closely with small colleges—experiencing their unique challenges, triumphs, and transformations—I’m happy to announce that I’ll soon be publishing a book based on that work: How to Be a Small College: Essays on Small Schools and the Communities That Support Them.

Why This Book?

In a world where large and rich institutions dominate, small colleges often feel pressured to mimic larger universities. But from my experience—both as an administrator and consultant—small colleges possess a unique power. It is a power that comes from being small and distinctive, not from acting like larger, better funded institutions.

Small, distinctive colleges provide things big institutions can’t: authentic connections, strong communities, and focused education.

As I write in one of the essays:

 "A small college can never outbuild or outspend a big university, but it can out-serve, out-care, and out-focus any of them."

What’s Inside?

The book is a collection of essays addressing the most pressing issues small colleges face. Here are some of the themes:

Don’t Be Big: The push to grow often leads colleges to lose sight of their mission and the things that make them distinct.  

Excellence Before Status: A clear focus on mission allows small colleges to be excellent at a few things rather than chasing trends or rankings.  

Localism as Strategy: Focus is both a way of choosing the best things to do, and also a way of serving actual people in actual places.  Small colleges do this better than any other sort of college or university.

Leadership and Focus: Leadership at a small college starts with careful attention to the school itself–its culture, students, and location.  Only then can leaders shape their work to the actual needs of the places they serve.  And only then can leaders work authentically–acknowledging their own gifts and weaknesses, and attending to the gifts and weaknesses of others.  

A Renaissance for Small Colleges?

If you follow higher education this seems like a dire time for small colleges.  And certainly more will close in the years ahead. But I see the coming decade as a period of rebirth for small colleges.  For whether they are brand new, or have existed for centuries, small colleges can offer something students increasingly crave: personal, authentic experiences. And by embracing their size and focusing on their strengths, these institutions can not only survive—they can thrive. 

If you’ve been following me on LinkedIn, you’ve seen parts of my argument already. I’m excited to share more insights and excerpts as the book gets closer to publication. Thank you for all your support.  Stay tuned here–more to come.

The behaviors of skillful administrators

Bell Pull, St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church, Winston Salem, NC

Last week Matt Lindsay and Jesyca Hope from the Kansas Independent Colleges Association (KICA)  invited me to give a workshop on academic structure to 14 Chief Academic Officers. Thanks to Matt and Jesyca for the invitation.  And thanks to the CAOs for reminding me what is good in the work of college administration.

It isn’t a great time to be an administrator. Everyone says they want to lead, hardly anyone says they want to administrate. The reputation of administration is declining and under siege. Managers are busy building empires, raising their salaries, and amassing power. They are more concerned about systems, efficiency, and consistency than they are about helping an institution actually run. They duck responsibility and shun the hardest work. Or at least that is how the story goes.  

The story is probably true somewhere; all stories are true in one place or another. And yet it is more routinely true that administrators are doing hard, complex, fraught, nearly invisible work so that the institutions they serve and the colleagues they love can get to the next day. The most skillful of them do their work in particular ways.  This is what those ways look like to me.

Administrators are ministers, not leaders. The root of “administrate” is also the root of “ministry” and “minus” and “minor.” That root doesn’t necessarily imply holiness or spirituality. But it does imply a willingness to serve an organization, to care for its soul, to be subordinate to it.  Most good administrators were great at something else before they became good at their current job: they were teachers or scholars or analysts or problem-solvers. It is a measure of their commitment that those former greatnesses stay behind as they become skillful administrators.

Administrators watch much and speak little. Skillful administrators are quiet in part because everyone they meet wants to talk to them: the employee with a complaint or an idea, the leader with an imperative, the vendor with a product. They are quiet, too, because they are watching–seeing what is common and what is rare, weaving together threads of conversation into a story. They know that to say too much too soon is to lose the chance to hear more.  And they know that when they speak, others will take their words as pronouncements not considerations.  And so, when they speak, they speak briefly, and only of the things most important at that moment.

Administrators see smoke where there is smoke. Advocates and grievants, leaders and followers all want to see fire wherever there is smoke. Fire is exciting. It illuminates. It burns. There may be fire, it may yet come. When it does come, a skillful administrator will see it first. But until it does, skillful administrators see and work in the smoke, and remind people that what they are seeing is, in fact and obviously, smoke, before it is anything else.

Administrators may like people but they prefer being alone. This, too, is in part an accommodation to reality.  People come to administrators for things: funding, permission, information.  It is the thing, not the interaction with the administrator, that is their goal.  And so administrators pass entire days alone surrounded by people.  That aloneness is a gift. An administrator who serves an institution well will, in time, displease everyone, and so comfort in isolation is a necessarily healthy thing. And independence allows the skillful administrator to do the right thing, at the right time, for the good of the institution.

Administrators know that no plan will take them where a path does not lead. The organization will make plans. That is what organizations do. Plans intend to define the future, to shape it in favor of the organization. No plan has that strength.  When it is unleashed in the actual world, that world will push the plan where the world will. The administrator’s  job is to note the path, to show how the path turns the plan into something else, perhaps spectacular, certainly more real, and then to help the institution make good on that new thing that no one planned exactly.

Administrators care about systems and tools but they give their organizations ritual and love. Most organizations want to be machines.They build systems using tools–software, templates, rules, policies–that become techniques, algorithms of action, habits of distance from reality. Techniques hope to manipulate, they see people as objects.  Administrators know that their organization would not be an organization without systems and tools. But they know, too, that systems and tools leave a gap at the organization’s heart. Skillful administrators fill that gap with rituals that knit people together, and love when only love will work.  Most people never see these things. The start-of-the year event is just fun, a kind word in a moment of crisis is just the right thing.  The administrator knows, though, that without such rituals and kindness, the people who rely on the organization would suffer more.  

And so, the good administrator plans the next event, gets the agenda right, speaks about the right things in the right ways, takes note of the sadness and the joy in the room, takes care of the people who bear them.  And then goes back to the office, to hone the policies and update the agenda for next year. 

Six postures of contented leaders

Braum's Ice Cream at sunrise, Newton, KS

By titling this article in this way, I want to suggest certain things about the experience of leadership. Good leaders are contented. Contentment comes as much from ways of being–postures–as it does from compensation, or prestige, or success: the things we typically associate with contentment.  I am using the word “posture” primarily to refer to the ways one holds oneself, so that it might be said that a person has an upright posture, or a slumping posture, or a stern one.  And I am writing about contentment, because as much as one might want a leader who is “driven” or “innovative” or “decisive” or “data-driven,” if a leader is to survive in their job, they must find a certain contentment in it.  My thesis, then, is that leaders who are content carry themselves in certain ways, and that those ways–postures–are every bit as important as skills, or philosophies, or competencies.

Leadership competencies are newly in the press, as a result of a new study of college presidents in the United States.  That study generated a list of the “Seven Competencies Presidents Need” (to borrow the title of Inside HigherEd’s article), a list contextualized by concerns about the shrinking average tenure of a college president. The list of competencies is made up of unobjectionable, common-sense skills. They are the sort of skills that one would hope any leader (or employee, for that matter) could master: 

• Trust building

• Demonstrating resilience

• Communication savvy

• Crafting a cabinet and team building

• Emotional intelligence

• Leading with courage

• Data acumen and resource management

At the same time, though, one can imagine many people who have these skills and yet aren’t satisfied leaders.  Or put another way, you can have all the competence needed for your job, and still hate it.

I’ve worked for five college presidents, and with dozens more as a consultant.  I’ve also advised heads of schools, executive directors, business owners, and ministers on leading successfully in their roles.  Those who seemed to fit well in their jobs–who were contented–carried themselves in certain ways.  And it was the ways they carried themselves, more than their competencies, that helped them withstand the challenges of leadership.  Here are six leadership postures that matter for the contentment of leaders and the well-being of the organizations they serve. Contented leaders are:

1. At peace with power and its limits. One might think that leaders would, by their nature, have a clear understanding of power.  Most don’t. Some assume they should be able to do anything they wish.  Others won’t act without overwhelming support and infinitesimal risk. Those who are at peace with power understand what power they actually have (it is typically power over a few large things and very many small things, by the way) and what power others hold.  And, they are content to work within those constraints. 

2. At ease around wealth. The leader of any organization will be, in most instances, wealthier than the organization’s other employees.  And they will spend their time in the presence of many people–donors, board members, business leaders–who are wealthier still. Leaders may not value wealth as highly as their organizations or their cohorts. But to be content in leadership, leaders need to be at ease near wealth–neither disoriented by it nor driven solely to acquire it.

3. Candid when they communicate. The word “candid” comes from the same root as the word “candle.”  It implies clarity and brightness, in the way that a candle offers clarity to a dark room.  Rather than being candid, discontented leaders tend to be obscure–using many words to say little–whether they are trying to be transparent or trying to keep confidences. When they are obscure, they darken rather than enlighten the organizations they lead.

4. Relaxed in the presence of others.  Most leaders are awkward in some way. Their path to leadership has either depended on their highly specialized skills or kept them from interests– TikTok, or college sports, or pop music–that are common among the people they serve. Uncomfortable leaders surround themselves with people awkward in the ways they are. Contented leaders are comfortable enough with their awkwardness that they can relax around people even if those people share few of their interests.  This ability helps others see them as real human beings–”Jenny,” say, rather than, “President Jones.” It gives leaders much needed moments of relaxation, even if they spend nearly every minute in the presence of others. And it permits them to be satisfied even at events focused on things about which they care little.

5. Enraptured by one part of the job. A leader who says they love every bit of their job has likely remade the job in their image–an unhealthy move for the organization and for the leader.  Comfortable leaders know what they don’t like and find colleagues to carry that work. When they find the part of the job that they love, they do it well, visibly, and with gusto. Doing so satisfies them. But it also gives satisfaction to those they work with.  After all, people would rather work for a leader with real loves and honest dislikes than for a person who is emotionally bland and omnicompetent. 

6. Clear where the job ends and they begin. The most discontented leaders hate their jobs and see no way out of them. The best way for leaders to avoid this situation–unhappy and trapped–is to make sure that they know where the job ends and they begin. In a practical sense doing so is about time management–taking vacation, practicing hobbies, going to the kid’s ball games, attending the niece’s wedding, finding someone else to join the Rotary Club.  But more essentially, it is locating the deepest parts of one’s identity–the richest loves, the strongest passions, the uncompromisable beliefs, the limitless sacrifices–outside of the workplace. Doing so allows them an outside perspective from which to reflect on their work and the organization they lead. And it lets them know how and when to step away. After all, even the best jobs will diminish. Moments of real satisfaction will fade. The role that once fit perfectly will fit no more. When that happens, contented leaders will know they can leave, intact and human, because the most important parts of them were never dependent on the leadership role they have now fulfilled.

When a college cuts programs, what is it becoming?

Tree split by lightning.  Durham, NC

Colleges that cut programs always provide the same explanations: We are making cuts to balance the budget, or We are dropping programs that do not align with the market, or We are responding to demographic and cultural shifts, for instance. That is, they explain why they are taking the steps they are taking. There is nothing wrong with doing this.

But when they cut programs (or add them) colleges rarely describe what they hope to become. This omission is a problem.  Here are some reasons why:

The institution may be unwisely assuming that it will continue to be what it has been. Some colleges are fundamentally strong, and so the revision of their academic and administrative programs is a way to continue to be what they are.  But in many instances, schools with fundamental difficulties assume that changing the program array will preserve the institution as it is.  Making this assumption is unwise, if only because it keeps the institution from looking deeply enough at what needs to change in order for the institution to endure. 

The institution may not know what it actually is. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the past generation in higher education has been characterized by colleges adding programs and activities without attention to whether they support the institution’s vision, mission, market, and core competencies.  When such institutions find themselves in financial difficulty, they can try to cut or add programs without addressing the fundamental incoherence of the institution. Doing so is a failure, since competing views of what the institution is always limit the effectiveness of program revisions.  If faculty members believe they teach at a liberal arts college and the administration thinks it is leading a professional school, program optimization will be very difficult. If the enrollment team thinks they can attract local students and the president thinks their reach should be national, improving enrollment is impossible.

The institution may miss the opportunity to actually change. Higher education leaders like to say that a good crisis shouldn’t be wasted.  While the comment itself can be callous, the sentiment behind it–that if change is coming, we should make the best of it–isn’t wrong.  But if an institution fails to describe what it is hoping to become as it works through difficulty, it will have missed the opportunity to choose wisely between good and better (or bad and worse) options. And it will struggle to design systems, processes, and policies that actually align with the decisions that are taken and the course the institution is following.

The institution may fail in its most basic obligations to its faculty, staff, and students. It is disheartening to eliminate activities.  It is horrible to say goodbye to colleagues whose positions have been eliminated.  It is worse when it feels like these changes don’t make life better for anyone. The explanation of what an institution hopes to become does these two things: it provides context for why the current cuts are being made, and it offers a vision of how, in the future, the pain will be less, the work will be different, the challenges won’t be the same as they are now. 

Describing a future different from the present is the most basic function of change management.  Telling people where you are taking them is the most fundamental task of leadership.

College mergers for the rest of us

The conventional wisdom is that a large, wealthy institution acquiring a smaller, healthy one is the form of college merger most likely to succeed.  That may well be true, but it is an option that works only for a very small portion of higher education, requiring as it does a wealthy institution finding a smaller one whose assets are desirable–a sort of matchmaking that excludes the vast majority of independent colleges.

Which is why yesterday’s announcement of the merger between St. Ambrose University and Mount Mercy University deserves the close attention of anyone who cares about independent higher education.  Two institutions–stable but not wealthy, and in a difficult market–have found ways to unite and to become stronger.

These are the take-homes:

Mission matters: St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy merged as Catholic institutions who seek to strengthen and extend that core mission. That shared mission offers both inspiration and constraint–essential components of a successful merger.

Geography matters: Many mergers are an effort to escape geography. St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy thought carefully about their geographic proximity and the actual needs of the people and employers in their parts of Iowa, and designed their merger around those things. While both enroll students from outside of Iowa, both are committed to living out their mission in particular places, and organizing themselves to do so. Given that so many independent colleges are located in small, rural areas, and in states with declining college-going populations, following the work of St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy is wise.

Efficiency is a good reason to merge: I’ve heard many people downplay the potential in mergers between small institutions because the efficiencies wouldn’t be big enough to eliminate structural deficits, or because finding efficiencies is difficult.  Those things are both true.  And it is also true that every independent college should be seeking efficiency.  One version of efficiency–economies of scale–comes about through mergers.  But mergers also push institutions to consider all of their systems, and find new ways to do things well.  This approach to efficiency doesn’t just save money, it improves performance.

Learning is the best reason to merge: St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy are dedicated to using their merger to ensure better, more innovative learning on their campuses.  This point needs emphasis for two reasons.  First, colleges educate.  Any major move should ensure that they educate better because that is their core function.  Second, mergers offer the opportunity to commit to building consistency, commonality, and vision into curriculum and instruction.  To do so is to deliver on the promise of independent higher education and to ensure that students graduate as the sorts of people colleges promise to produce.  Or, let me put it another way: any merger that fails to improve student learning fails as a merger.

Cooperation and trust are both possible and essential: Most mergers take place in secret.  People who follow higher education, though, will have seen the partnership between St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy emerging over time.  More importantly, the faculty, staff, and administration of these institutions have been informed and engaged through the process.  This is not to say that all merger work should be out in the open before the ink dries.  But it is to say that good leaders trust faculty and staff of good will to be at the table as the new institution is built.

Kudos to the faculty, staff, and leaders of St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy.  And to the rest of independent higher education, an admonition: Don’t wait for a big rich institution to buy you up.  Instead, watch, learn, and duplicate what St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy have done.

How colleges should engage with the ROI debate

“You deserve what you dream” graffiti, Palma, Mallorca

Colleges can be forgiven for not paying close attention to the ROI of the education they offer. After all, the past several years have brought COVID, declining enrollments, growing student needs, declining trust in higher education, and political disruption to the top of the college leader worry list.  For the past generation colleges have been focused on access, enrollment, retention, and graduation rates as their key measures of success. And for a long time, the one thing colleges could count on was the ROI argument: if a student earned a college degree they would be notably better off financially than if they hadn’t gone to college.  

Three things have changed to undermine the comfort that colleges once felt in ROI.  The pay and attractiveness of many jobs that don’t require a college degree has risen. A spate of new studies indicate that the employment outcomes and ROI of a college degree are less attractive than was once thought. And Republican and Democratic policymakers have taken up those more skeptical ROI studies to craft policy that is less supportive of (certain types of) college experiences.

What follows are some thoughts on how colleges and their friends can engage with the ROI discussion.  While I typically focus on independent colleges, most of what follows holds true for public four-year institutions as well. (Want to talk more about how your school can improve its ROI outcomes? Contact me on my website, or message me on LinkedIn.)

Engage with the metrics

On its face, ROI is a simple concept: you compare what a college graduate earns with what someone who doesn’t go to college earns, and the difference is the return on investment–ROI. But ROI studies have moved well past that simple approach, using more sophisticated datasets and analyses, and offering more nuanced findings. For a good explainer on ROI from the Bipartisan Policy Center, go here. And for a great methodological explanation of a recent excellent ROI study from Preston Cooper  of The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity take a look at this essay.

Colleges face four immediate challenges with these more sophisticated studies.  First, their findings are reported without nuance or context in the media, and thus feed the “college isn’t worth it narrative” which has growing appeal across the political spectrum and with potential college-goers.  Second, the more complex the measurements, the more difficult it is for colleges to improve their ROI outcomes. Third, ROI studies now pay attention to outcomes by academic program–something that small colleges, at least, haven’t watched. Fourth, while in general recent ROI studies still show a financial benefit from going to college, that benefit is smaller than previously reported, and absent entirely for some programs and at some institutions.

Still, there are things colleges can do to respond. Most schools have very limited ROI data on their own students–typically a few sterling success stories of recent graduates earning big salaries and some not-entirely-reliable First Destination Survey data. But it isn’t impossible to do much better.  Craft a definition for your institution’s ROI. Find measures to inform that definition.  Gather the data. Report your findings, and what they suggest in comparison with the national studies.  And make this metric as important as first-year recruitment, retention, and graduation rates.

Colleges would be wise to expand their definitions of ROI as well.  The national focus on the financial ROI of a college degree is part of a long move to shrink the understanding of the purpose and value of college.  Most ROI studies still nod to the once-broader purposes–civic engagement, critical thinking, etc–but their attention is overwhelmingly on how much a graduate gets paid. They do so because most students go to school with their eyes on a post-graduation job, but also because ROI is a place where policymakers might agree, while elsewhere they differ wildly on campus protests, “wokeism,” DEI, etc. Schools can do what they want on those things, but as part of their ROI measures they should include things that they say are outcomes of their approach to education.  If your school promotes civic engagement, then trace the civic engagement of your graduates.  If you value commitment to a life of faith, stay in touch with your graduates on that. If you are dedicated to the local community, then track how many of your graduates stay in town, buy a house, join a non-profit board.  In short, don’t abandon ROI to salary measures alone and don’t settle for vague claims about the ways going to college changes people’s lives. Take Your ROI claim seriously and show evidence.

Engage with policy

The broader definition of ROI has a place in policy discussions as well. To oversimplify, the Biden Administration believes it is working on behalf of college students. The Republican opposition suggests it is working on behalf of taxpayers.  They share an interest in college cost and financial ROI because this is where their constituent interests intersect.  And so their policy view is remarkably limited, their adoption of ROI measures poorly considered, and their interest in the well-being of institutions of higher education is small and shrinking.  A broader definition of ROI, though, one that focuses on the civic, economic, and community behaviors of college graduates, can appeal to both parties and reinsert the value of the core work of colleges–shaping the lives of their students towards wisdom on behalf of the common good–into the ROI discussion.

Perhaps the best way to engage with policy at this moment is to support state and national associations dedicated to representing colleges and universities in the policy environment.  Special notice should go to NAICU’s work on the College Cost Reduction Act (See this and this as examples.) The College Cost Reduction Act isn’t all bad, and its work on Pell Grants, PLUS Loans, and accreditation reform is, to my eyes, helpful.  But the part of the CCRA which reallocates funds from schools with poor ROI (according to the bill’s ill-considered measure) to schools with good ROI is a disaster.  Its metrics make no sense–using price measures not in use elsewhere, and linking loan default rates and ROI value-add.  And its remedy, a system that reallocates funds from some schools to others on the basis of these measures–is morally and intellectually wrong. In short the reallocation system would reward institutions with highly subsidized tuition rates, whether they have good outcomes or not, and penalize institutions that, whatever their faults, don’t rely as much on taxpayer subsidies.  

(To get a sense of the impact, download the dataset mentioned in the article linked above, sort column K “Net Impact” from high to low, and see how the system would reallocate significant amounts of money to institutions who share one characteristic—they are heavily subsidized. Those funds would come from thousands of institutions who would pay a penalty for, essentially, being a lesser subsidized institution (in most instances, read also, an independent college or university).)

ROI debates are being carried out at the state level as well. Schools need to support state organizations who represent their interests in policy discussions. They need to expect the state-level policy work of their associations to be sophisticated and data-driven–that is, to be more than lobbying.  And they need to demand that such organizations robustly defend their members, even when they risk riling up influential legislators.

Engage on operations

In spite of the challenges with ROI I’ve described above, ROI is likely to be the most important measure of college value for a generation to come. Colleges have both the opportunity and obligation to respond.

I’ve mentioned two essential responses already–engaging with ROI metrics and ROI policy.  This means revising approaches to programming, assessment and alumni engagement at the campus level.  It also means a more aggressive involvement in public policy.  

Beyond those steps, schools ought to consider the following:

• Differentiated tuition.  ROI measures pay attention to the value add of individual degrees, not simply of institutions as a whole.  Nearly every institution, though, charges the same tuition to students regardless of their field of study, and even though the cost of instruction varies widely from discipline to discipline.  One way to improve the ROI of a low-paying fields–social work, say, or art, or english–is to charge students majoring in those fields a tuition rate closer to the actual cost of instruction. Or, institutions could increase tuition notably for fields where instruction costs are high, demand is high, and compensation is strong.  (There are a few institutions that charge a premium for certain disciplines–Nursing, say or Engineering.  But the tuition increases are negligible in comparison to overall tuition.) By moving cost of instruction closer to price by program, schools can ensure that their cost input to ROI measures is appropriately linked to operational expense and likely graduate salaries.

• Expanded ROI programming. To focus on ROI well, the institution doesn’t just need a metric linked to its mission, it also needs to align programming with that metric.  Given the seriousness of student focus on employment, and policy focus on ROI, that programming can’t be additive.  It needs to replace some programming which isn’t clearly linked to ROI. I suspect we will see more investment in career centers and less in student life, more attention to internships and less on undergraduate research, work study that is less about reducing the tuition bill a bit and more about preparation for work in the real world.

• Revision of the academic program array. Shifting the suite of academic programs to focus on ROI does not mean abandoning disciplines without a direct link to work.  It does mean, though, ensuring that all disciplines have links to work that are visible in the curriculum and in the co-curriculum. And it means discipline-linked career planning from the moment a student declares a major. Finally, it means an aggressive focus on self-employment as a post-graduation opportunity, particularly in disciplines where the field/work link is less clear.

• Deeper post-graduation partnerships. Nearly every institution works on employer partnerships.  But most such partnerships are weak.  They are ways of expanding the applicant pool for employers more than they are guaranteed pathways for well-paid jobs post graduation.  Small, local schools have an opportunity to develop small, local partnerships with employers who struggle to attract graduates from more noteworthy institutions.  And all schools have the opportunity to create if/then incentives: if a student wants a particular scholarship, then they will work for certain employers in certain roles.  And if an employer seeks good employees, then it will commit to hiring, not just reviewing, graduates from particular schools.

• Consider radical changes. There are ROI-related opportunities that go beyond those listed above. One can imagine, for instance, the creation of discipline-specific colleges, so that programming, expense, revenue, and ROI are consistently linked throughout the student experience, and so that unnecessary things are, well, unnecessary.  We see this trend in small ways already, in the proliferation of coding schools with direct links to employers, school districts offering pathways to teaching credentials, and the emergence of mission-centered trade colleges.  I suspect we will see more institutions become work colleges as well. And we will see a new wave of tuition resets, not for splashy upticks in enrollment, but in order to more closely control the cost, revenue, and outcomes associated with ROI.

Where to look for the “extra administrators”

In the current round of cuts to academic programs, faculty have argued that colleges and universities should reduce administrative positions at least as aggressively as faculty ones.  And they are not wrong, given that the number and cost of administrative positions has risen more rapidly than academic ones for at least a generation.

Making this point is simple. Playing out its implications is harder. Faculty productivity is easier to measure and faculty positions are simpler to compare across the curriculum than are administrative positions.  It is simpler, for instance, to compare a computer science position with a history position than it is to compare an admissions position with one in facilities. And administrative roles have a self-perpetuating logic that faculty ones do not.  One can imagine a college without a classics department.  It is harder, at this moment, to imagine a college without a human resources department.

Since institutions need to reduce administrative costs, where should they look?   Based on my work with more than a dozen colleges and universities on administrative prioritization, here are my suggestions. (Note: I am not suggesting that these areas are necessarily bloated, simply that their costs and staffing have grown rapidly in the past decades, and therefore deserve a closer look, particularly if revenue or enrollment is shrinking.)

Highly regulated areas: Federal, state, professional, and accreditation regulations have all increased rapidly.  So has the difficulty of complying with those regulations.  Since regulation moves unevenly (one year it is Title IX, in another it is student employment outcomes or cybersecurity or an accreditation revamp), regulatory positions grow in an unplanned fashion and are dispersed across the institution. Considering them as a whole often shows places where positions could be consolidated, or management combined.

Revenue-generating areas: Advancement, enrollment management, and retention positions have grown as institutions either seek growth or seek to avoid shrinking. Reducing expenditures in these areas always sounds imprudent. (“You’ve got to spend money to make money.”) And as innovations in these fields come along, new positions tend to be added. But all of these areas do have access to data showing both the activities and the roles that are productive.  A willingness to measure ROI and stop doing what doesn’t work is essential here.

Gap/overlap areas: Priorities that fall between functional areas, or where more than one functional area has responsibility, tend to generate both additional work and additional expenditure.  Let me name just two: It takes more work to hire a faculty member than to hire any other employee because the hiring of faculty resides both in HR and in academic affairs, and is shaped by policies in both areas. Student support staffing and expenses have grown in part because student support resides in student affairs, academic affairs, enrollment, institutional effectiveness, and athletics.  Areas of gaps and overlap tend to be places where work is duplicated, or where similar programs compete for resources. Reorganization and commitment to certain approaches to student support can yield reduced cost and better outcomes.

Areas with weak/broken systems: Where there are weak, unclear, or broken systems, institutions compensate by hiring. (The reverse is true too–in areas where staff are less skillful, institutions compensate by adding systems.) The result is duplication of efforts between the system and staff.  So, for instance, course scheduling, advising, and student registration cross several software platforms, rely on policies dispersed across several functional areas, involve people from several offices, and are done more or less well depending on who is working with students. There is a particular variation of the weak/broken systems area worth noting: when work is partially outsourced, overall cost/staffing–the amount spent with the vendor plus the amount spent inside the institution–is higher than if it were all in-house or outsourced.  (It may also be much better than if it were all in-house or outsourced.) Short-term work to define and fix systems, policies, and processes can lead to reduced administrative costs.

Areas where well-resourced institutions or professional organizations set the agenda: Though it is simpler to be an NCAA DIII school than to be an NCAA DI school, DI priorities eventually expand the obligations of schools lower in the chain.  (Here, think regulations on practice time, compliance, and staffing which complicate things for very small institutions.) Accreditation policies and practices similarly align with the resources and structures of large institutions better than those of small institutions. And professional organizations set staffing benchmarks based on “leading” institutions and professional specialization.  So functional areas that are shaped by such organizations are likely to have grown in response to these external standards rather than internal needs or assets. Evaluating these areas based first on institutional needs, skills, and resources, and being willing to select different agenda-setters are pathways to better quality and reduced cost. 

Areas that used to be part of faculty work: Faculty roles have narrowed in the past fifty years as research and publication have become more important, and as specialized expertise has arisen in other areas.  So, for instance, the narrowing of faculty roles in academic administration has left a gap for new academic administrators in assessment, teaching and learning, student support, and governance work. Faculty play a smaller role in admissions than they once did.  The same is true for academic and career advising at many institutions.  These changes in faculty roles may have been wise and healthy for the core purpose of a college–student learning. But they are also places where administration has grown as a result. Reconsideration of faculty work may yield reduced administrative costs.

Senior staff: The increasing complication of educational institutions, the professionalization of education leadership, and the changes/problems listed above, have expanded the size of senior staffs. The difficulty of finding good senior leaders (and in the face of the vexing work, the difficulty of keeping them) has increased the compensation of senior administrators. This is particularly true for small colleges and universities, where the size and cost of a senior staff is proportionally closer to that at larger universities than is enrollment or revenue. A key measure of an effective administrative prioritization process, then, is whether the cost of the senior staff has shrunken.

A final word: as I’ve written elsewhere, efforts to reduce cost can lead institutions to become more efficient but less coherent.  Incoherence is particularly a problem in administrative areas. So even more than in academic program review, administrative review must start by building a shared mission and shared operating values before the redesign begins.  To fail to do so will either result in unwise, ineffective cuts or an institution that is perhaps cheaper to operate, but almost certainly less effective. But to establish a clear purpose, clear goals, and clear values will result in a less costly and more effective institution.

The weak can help the weak; or how small colleges, small towns, and small churches can help each other

The closure of Wells College is not just the closure of a small college, but also a blow to Aurora, New York, and the small Finger Lakes towns that surround it. The financial and accreditation challenges that St. Augustine’s University faces are, secondarily, evidence of the Episcopal Church’s weakened education mission in the United States.  Many small and shrinking colleges are affiliated with small or shrinking churches. Many are located in small or struggling communities. This coincidence seems an example of exponentially worsening luck–the one smallness multiplying the other(s) to make things all the more difficult. Historically, the response has been to disaffiliate, formally or informally. So the college and the church unhitch, the college happy to give up a bit of money in order to appeal to a broader audience, the church happy to keep that money for its own constrained budget. The community and the college look away from each other, the college seeking to provide its students with a more exciting experience than they can have in town, the town seeking bigger and richer partners for economic and community development. 

There is a certain logic here–that smallness neighbors weakness, and that weak entities need the help of strong ones to survive. It is rarely in the interest of large, strong institutions to help small, weak ones, though unless the small ones have resources which will make the large institution larger. 

So, while it is counter-intuitive, this seems a time for small, struggling institutions to help each other out.  I’ve written elsewhere about how small schools can support each other in becoming more efficient and effective. But it is also the case that schools, churches, and communities have interests in common, interests which can lead, through cooperation, to sustainability. The forms of cooperation will, of course, vary by place, denomination, and college. It is simple, though, to imagine shared facilities, shared systems, and shared staffing--all of which might reduce cost and improve quality.

As importantly, though, this is the time for these entities to acknowledge that their existence has long owed itself to their members believing that there are things more important than size, wealth, or location; that their struggles have common causes; that their assets are more valuable combined than they are separated; and that their future flourishing will depend on interdependence with each other, not independence from each other.

Inefficiency and incoherence in higher education

Hardly a week passes without a story about a college or university discontinuing academic programs. The discontinuance is defended in the language of efficiency: by not offering certain programs the institution will reduce costs and use its resources more efficiently.  This is almost certainly true. But it is also true that becoming more efficient by itself won’t help an institution flourish in the future.  This is because inefficiency is a symptom of a deeper problem:  institutional incoherence.

Most colleges are incoherent.

They are incoherent in two ways. Their programs, founded at different times by different people with different philosophies of learning, pull in different directions.  In this they are incoherent because they do not support each other. Thus the institution’s offerings lack structural integrity.

Because their programs pull in different directions, the institution cannot tell a story that says, “because we believe in these things we do these things but not those.” In this sense they are incoherent because they are unintelligible—they do not make sense when looked at whole. Thus the institution lacks narrative integrity.

Students experience both kinds of incoherence. The first leaves them wondering why one part of the institution works one way, while another works in an entirely different way. Students find this in the classroom, when one professor permits late work while another does not. And they find it in the day-to-day life of the institution, when, say, one office bends over backwards to accommodate them, and another does not.

The second leaves them wondering what it all means.  Why should I choose one college over another when they all say they can help me become whatever I choose? Why is general education the way it is? Why does my major require a certain number of credit hours and my roommate’s requires a different number?  What is the purpose of getting a degree that does not point me in a clear direction in life?

While no college creates itself to be incoherent, their incoherence is no accident.  It is born of three commitments that made sense at one time, but may no longer.  The first is a commitment to curriculum and program autonomy.  As faculty have freedom to design academic programs and courses in keeping with their best lights and the practices of their disciplines, academic programs will move without reference to the movement of others. The second is a commitment to student autonomy. If an institution tells students they can study what they wish, or have the experience they desire, or become whatever they want, the institution will offer the widest possible range of activities in hopes of fulfilling their commitment to students. In so doing, student services and experiences will diverge widely. The third is a commitment to following the market, so that if a program or office or service or piece of software becomes attractive, an institution will add it.

When there was a growing number of college students, firm trust in the value of a college education, and a strong economy generating disposable income for families and disposable revenue for governments and donors, these commitments could live side-by-side within an institution. In fact, together these commitments could help an institution grow as measured by enrollment, or visibility, or revenue.

Now that the number of college students is declining, fewer families trust in the value of a college degree, and the revenue available to colleges is shrinking, these commitments no longer lead to the health of an institution. Instead, an institution may offer many options to students which are neither attractive nor profitable.  Or in the effort to attract and retain students in a difficult market, institutions may be tempted to become even less coherent in hopes of finding new sources of students and income.

In this environment, colleges are turning to measures of efficiency to determine which programs to keep, which to adjust, which to expand, and which to discontinue. Doing so makes sense, for it at least helps institutions understand which things are so unpopular that they could be let go of. And it helps institutions understand how by changing certain policies, the institution could realize the same revenue at lower cost.

Colleges should be careful, though, in thinking that efficiency alone is the answer. Once efficiency is requested of one part of the institution—academic programs, say—it should rightly be expected of the entire institution—including in administrative functions, athletics, and student programming, for instance.  To fail to do so is to expand the fractures in an institution that already does not cohere.

And, an institution can become more efficient without becoming more coherent. To discontinue a few academic programs may still leave programs pulling in different directions and the institution unable to tell a clear story about itself.

Faculty opposition to efficiency-driven reductions in academic programs is based in part in their desire to maintain faculty autonomy. But it also points directly at the failure of efficiency by itself as a measure of the well-being of an institution. This is not to say that coherence should replace efficiency. An institution could be coherent and unattractive to students, or coherent and undesirable to work for. It is to say, though, that any effort to respond to market challenges by seeking efficiency should be concerned both with dollar savings and in creating a more coherent institution. 

Imagining the accreditors that small colleges deserve

I argued recently that small independent colleges must help create the environment in which they can flourish.  This essay takes up one portion of the environment in which small colleges work: accreditation. For most of my career, accreditation was a given: you took the accreditor in your region, and you accepted the standards it put forward.  That is no longer the case, and so it is worth wondering: If an accreditor existed to help small colleges flourish, what would it look like?  Here are six principles which, if embraced by an accreditor of small schools, would make both accreditation and the schools better.

The accreditor should expect small scale

Small schools often run afoul of accreditation standards because they are unable to demonstrate the existence of comprehensive policies or compliance with those policies. That inability often turns on employees with a wide range of responsibilities who are unable to generate the data and reports necessary to show compliance with the policies.  Or it is due to the inability to demonstrate that the institution has sufficient resources to maintain buildings, acquire library holdings, or hire specialists in the academic programs offered at the institution. Even when small schools do successfully meet the expectations of accreditors, they do so by adopting systems, tools, and practices which are not well-attuned to them.

So, an accreditor that assumes small scale would expect structures native to small institutions. Schools might have fewer policies, based on a set of values rather than rules, and applied with wisdom rather than automation.  They might expect employees to be generalists rather than specialists, both at the faculty and administrative levels. They might have less concern about facilities and other wealth-associated measures of campus quality. In turn, accreditors would design an accreditation process that did not require the allocation of large amounts of institutional time and money in order to demonstrate compliance.

The accreditor should expect particularity

Small scale is often the result of an institutional commitment to particularity either in mission or in the students it serves. Most small schools, though, have acted like universities in the past few generations–building out academic programs, services, offices, and amenities that mimic those of much larger institutions. 

This is not to say that accreditors today reject particularity.  It is to say, though, that in the absence of encouragement to focus, schools default to following practices created by larger, more well-resourced institutions. And the financial challenges small schools face are, in part, due to these behaviors. Small colleges are as much a speciality as business schools or nursing programs.  They should be accredited by organizations that encourage their speciality, not assume it to be inadvertent.

If our imaginary accreditor were dedicated to the preservation of small schools, then, it should expect particularity. The curriculum  should be idiosyncratic–dedicated to a particular version of general education and to an array of majors sufficient only to meet the mission of the institution. Pedagogy should be consistent across the curriculum. Services to students and student activities should be narrow, particular, and excellent. In short, small college accreditation should assume that small schools are intentionally so, and assess their effectiveness based on their ability to achieve this intention. 

The accreditor should be designed for innovation

Among the most frequent complaints I hear on small college campuses is that innovation is slowed by accreditors.  This is demonstrably true.  (It is also true that other bodies– faculty, administrators, state governments, the Department of Education, professional organizations–also slow innovation.) Accreditors give significant and slow scrutiny to new academic programs. Major changes to governance structure, the addition or closure of a facility, the establishment of educational partnerships are all heavily regulated by accreditors.  That regulation takes time, and thus innovations are slowed or impeded by the regulatory regime.  And the slowing of innovation at small schools takes away their key competitive advantages–the ability to move quickly and act flexibly.

This is not to say that institutions should be able to do whatever they want whenever they want.  It is to say, though, that innovation should be considered the norm, not a deviation, and that the accreditor should support it rather than impede it. Doing so is particularly important at a time that is ripe for small-scale entrepreneurship.  Accreditation standards designed for innovation should expect curricular change rather than stasis, for instance. They should welcome brief, failed efforts at improvement. They should embrace experimentation in how long it takes students to learn and the conditions under which they learn best. And they should remove the barriers to inter-institutional affiliation and cooperation.

The accreditor should take instructional quality seriously

For at least a generation, accreditors have focused on outcomes as the key measure of educational effectiveness. And in the past ten years, that focus has landed on a narrowing set of outcomes: retention rates, graduation rates, and (increasingly) post-graduation employment and compensation. These are important indicators of educational quality, to be sure. But overwhelming attention to them ignores two facts. First, students as well as their schools have significant influence over these outcomes. Second, employment and compensation have as much to do with a student’s field of study, the economy of the school’s region, the prestige of the institution, and the socioeconomic status of students as they do with the work of the educational institution. To measure the quality of a school by these outcomes, then, ignores key factors that influence them.

Given these challenges, accreditors of small schools ought to give as much attention to instructional inputs as they do student outcomes. To do so is to acknowledge that rigor and quality instruction are in decline, and more importantly, that student learning depends on excellent teaching, clear student expectations, and a level of rigor that urges students to grow. Further, a focus on inputs requires schools to develop and implement a consistent understanding of the classroom factors that lead to student learning in the fields offered at their school. Institutions hold plenty of data on these matters: syllabi, exams, reading lists, and student reports of the time they spend studying, the amount they read, and the number of papers they write, for instance. And they hold data on student use of educational supports–tutoring centers, mentoring, office hours, and the like.  These factors, in addition to key educational outcomes, need to be at the center of the accreditation of small institutions. Failure to place them there puts small institutions and their students at a disadvantage.

The accreditor should share their expertise

Today’s accreditors have access to a tremendous amount of data, and employ people with long experience in higher education.  They are also remarkably reticent about sharing that expertise.  Accreditation staff are happy to give guidance on the technical, procedural components of the accreditation process but rarely on the specifics of compliance. Instead it is teams made up of peers who render decisions about compliance. Peer review has long been the norm for most evaluations of academic quality. But it has significant flaws in accreditation. Review teams are often reluctant to call out obvious weaknesses in the campuses they are reviewing. And when they do, the result is often that behavior at one institution is given a pass while at another it is sanctioned.

My point here is not to criticize review teams. I’ve been a reviewer and I’ve been reviewed and in both roles I’ve been grateful for the members of the review team.  It is to argue, though, that an accreditor dedicated to a particular sort of school develops expertise in what works for that sort of school.  It should be forthcoming about that understanding and aggressive in sharing that information, both outside and through the review process.

The accreditor should advocate for its schools

Accreditors have never been in a more difficult position than they are today. They stand between hundreds of varied campuses and regulators at the federal and state levels.  Because they control access to federal funds, they have the power of life or death for individual schools. They work in a time of significant mistrust of higher education. And they touch on issues–class, race, educational attainment, economic inequity, the difficulty of provoking and measuring learning–that are vexed. The result is that accreditors seem to be working for and against their members depending on the issue and the moment.

Should accreditors become more specialized and serve more coherent categories of schools, one would hope that the ambiguity of the accreditor’s position would diminish. In the case of small colleges, one would hope further that the accreditor would work on behalf of its members, both to improve their practices and to join with them in creating the conditions in which small colleges and the students they serve could flourish.

Should we worry that college graduates are “underemployed”?

Last week The Burning Glass Institute and the Strada Education Foundation released, Talent Disrupted: College Graduates, Underemployment, and the Way Forward. The report’s key finding, that: “Among workers who have earned a bachelor’s degree, only about half secure employment in a college-level job within a year of graduation, and the other half are underemployed–that is, working in jobs that do not require a degree or make meaningful use of college-level skills,” (3)  was picked up, uncritically, by many media outlets.  Those stories (see here, and here, and here) often cited this story as part of the narrative, beloved by the Biden Administration and the GOP (for different reasons), that the value of a college education is dubious and declining. 

The report is deeper than its coverage, and the statistics about the sectors in which college graduates work, their compensation, and their progress over time, are worth paying attention to. But for all the statistics, the report does a poor job of examining the meaning of its own findings.  Here are some questions it ought to ask:

Is it true that a large portion of college graduates are underemployed? If you accept the definition of underemployment and the methodology that generated the findings (a statistical analysis of job postings, job classifications by the Department of Labor, and generalizations about what is a “college-level skill”) then, yes. 

But if you were to ask college graduates, “Do you use skills you learned in college in your job?” certainly more than 50% would say yes. Or if you asked hiring agents, “Did a college degree influence your decision to hire this person?” again the answer in more than 50% of cases would be yes. On the other hand, if you asked college graduates, “Does your job use all of your skills, training and talents?”  (or, in other words, if you used a common-sense definition of “underemployment”), then certainly more than 50% of college graduates would say no. And if you asked supervisors of college graduates, “does your employee perform at the level you would expect of a college graduate?” the answer would, again, frequently be “no.”   

In short, the level of employment and the role of a college degree in hiring and job performance are much more complicated than the definition of underemployment in Talent Disrupted permits.

Is it bad that a large portion of college graduates are underemployed? The report does point out that college graduates in non-college level jobs earn, on average, 25% more than their colleagues without a college degree.  Nonetheless, the report’s thrust is that college graduates should work in college-level jobs and if they don’t, it is a problem. Its first key finding, for instance, is that “Underemployment is a large and persistent problem.” (6) And the report notes with specificity the sorts of jobs that are signs of “severe underemployment”: “jobs that typically require only a high school education or less, such as jobs in office support, retail sales, food service, and blue-collar roles in construction, transportation, and manufacturing.” (12)

Now if a college graduate wants a job that requires a college degree and cannot obtain that job, it is a problem. And some of that problem may have to do with their college training while some certainly has to do with the industry in which they hope to work, (something that gets almost no attention in the report). But it is unlikely that society would be better off if college graduates worked only in “college-level jobs.” Similarly, if college graduates were excluded from “office support, retail sales, food service and blue-collar roles in construction, transportation, and manufacturing,” (12) or if they systematically avoided the number one field for underemployment “community and social service” (35) one might think that society and the economy were less healthy than they are now, not more.

If it is a problem, can we fix it? The report’s recommendations for responding to the problem seem unlikely to respond to the problem.  Researchers found that students who had paid internships were less likely to be underemployed than those who did not complete a paid internship.  So, their top recommendation is to “enable every student to have access to at least one paid internship.” (42)  This is certainly the case of misunderstanding cause and effect.  Employers that offer paid internships are typically in sectors where a college-degree is de rigueur or are hiring for jobs where a degree is required.  The paid internship does not change the nature of the job. Rather, the job demands a paid internship.  Or put another way, a paid internship for a job in “community and social service” does not make the job a college-level job.  

The other recommendations both seem unlikely to change the current situation, and assume that college students lack access to information that they, in fact, already have.  I suspect, for instance, that few college students would make different job decisions if they had “access to clear employment outcomes by college and degree program, with earnings and occupation data included (recommendation 2)” (43) if only because most students already have a good sense of what people earn in the fields that interest them. Similarly, most colleges offer at least decent career planning support (Recommendation 3).  And few students are excluded from “degree programs that lead to well-compensated college-level employment” (Recommendation 4). 

In short, the report’s recommendations seem unlikely to change the situation that concerns the authors.  And the only recommendation that would change the situation, requiring college graduates to work only in “college-level jobs,” would be both immoral and infeasible.

Should we fix the “underemployment problem”? Working in a bad job is a bad thing. Being overqualified for your job, or being in a dead-end job is both financially limiting and demoralizing. And where those things exacerbate existing inequities in American society, they are bad, too, for the community. If educators and employers can reduce those problems, they should.

It is also true, though, that human beings, including college graduates, choose jobs on the basis of constraints, desires, hopes, values, and relationships that have little to do with whether a job is “college-level.” 

People choose jobs because they are tied to a place, or because they have a talent for certain tasks, or because they know someone at the employer, or because they want to help their families, or because the job popped up at the right time, or because they want time for  experiences that matter more to them than the amount of compensation and the educational requirements of the position they hold.

These are all proper roles for work in the life of human beings. They are not problems to be fixed. An analysis that takes the data sophistication of Talent Disrupted and marries it to a consideration of why college graduates do the work they do would help colleges and employers do better by the students we serve and the people we hire.

A public policy agenda for independent schools

Tree growing near a stone. Grandfather Mountain, NC

Independent schools, from kindergarten through college, flourish in certain environments. If you believe in independent education or think that independent schools respond well to key social and human needs, then supporting the environments in which independent education flourishes makes good sense. Doing so is ever more important today, when traditional sources of support for independent schools are in decline, the  value of independent education is under question, and policymakers in both major parties seem content to think about education largely as job training.

There are many reasons why individual independent schools and their leaders shy away from public policy. Speaking on public policy invites controversy. There are professional organizations that represent us in the educational policy setting. Individual independent schools, unless they are rich or famous, may feel as if they have little chance for influence. 

If the viability of independent education calls for schools to advance a public policy agenda, and the cultural context makes it difficult, what could a public policy agenda for independent schools look like? Here are a few thoughts.

Start local. Since the overwhelming majority of students in independent schools live within 100 miles of the schools they attend, the viability of those schools depends on the viability of the communities in which they are located. Building healthy local public policy, then, is a way of building healthy independent schools. Certainly they ought to attend to town-and-gown relations, but even more importantly they ought to attend to local economic and civic development. This means preferring home-grown economic development over the pursuit of large outside employers. It means that independent schools and their communities should collaborate on building, technology, and infrastructure projects.  It means establishing local preferences for supplies, contractors, and job placements for students. It means supporting a vibrant local political and civic life by opening campus doors to those things. 

Raise the floor. If families are to send their children to independent schools, they need to be able to afford independent school tuition. Independent schools must, of course, set prices for affordability and access more than prestige and wealth. But they must also support policies that ensure a living wage in the homes of young people--first-generation students, students of color, students from low-income backgrounds--who most benefit from independent education. This means getting behind policies that raise the wage floor. It means supporting the right of workers to organize, since unions have historically been a source of wage growth for their members. And it means support for the child tax credit and for policies that support working adults with children. These policies have the likelihood of expanding the number of people who can consider sending their children to independent schools and bolstering the communities they call home.

Defend the first amendment. If independent schools are to provide meaningful alternatives to public education, they must have access to first amendment protections for association, speech, and religion. For many independent schools, first amendment rights are definitional--it is a difficult thing to be a Baptist or Catholic or Muslim school if the values that make up those faiths cannot be expressed. At others, where debate about matters of controversy and import is central to the curriculum, first amendment protections on speech are essential as well.  And for all independent schools, the right to association protects the ability of such schools to define their missions. A defense of the first amendment, then, both preserves the cultural sphere for the flourishing of independent schools and reminds independent schools that they ought to differ from public schools if they aim to provide a meaningful alternative education.

Accept no partisan orthodoxy. Both parties hold positions that support independent schools. Republicans, for instance, are more likely to support vouchers for independent K-12 tuition; Democrats are stronger supporters of expanded Pell grants. Both parties also espouse positions that hurt independent schools. Calls for free public college tuition, for instance, undermine the value proposition of independent colleges. The position on educational outcomes, held by both parties, that education is essentially job training to be measured by the earnings of graduates, hurts all schools, but especially independent ones. And the willingness of both parties to turn education to partisan ends means that independent schools need to be independent of partisan orthodoxy in order to flourish.

Reform the system of accreditation. The principle of accreditation--that peer review can ensure quality education better than the government, on one hand, or the market on the other--is mostly true. It is also mostly true, though, that the system of accreditation (particularly at the college level) slows innovation, supports uniformity, and builds campus cultures focused on compliance rather than excellence. That so many schools maintain their accreditations under this system is testament to the potential of accreditation and the fear that direct government oversight would be worse. But the system would be much better if accreditors were organized by size and type of institution rather than region; if they analyzed and shared data much more broadly; and if they advocated for the removal of the biggest barriers to innovation. I have argued elsewhere that this is a moment ripe for school-planting. That so few new schools (especially at the college level) are founded is due in no small part to the barriers to entry inherent in accreditation. No one I know at an independent school believes that, unchanged, the independent school sector will flourish in the future. This alone is reason enough to push accreditors away from their status-quo approach to education.

Return the focus to education. Recently, several presidents of high-profile independent universities have lost their jobs, in part because of their public statements on political matters. And school leaders at all levels find themselves encouraged to speak out on a wide range of social and political issues. It may or may not be wise for a particular school leader to speak on a particular matter at a particular time. But the focus on those instances obscures a more important point: school leaders lead schools. As such, their primary policy focus should be on issues, like those above, that directly influence the school’s ability to fulfill its mission. 

Those policies are likely to be smaller, more local, and less visible than the topics that roil global politics and light up social media. But the well-being of students and schools depends on a public sphere that works in particular ways. Independent school leaders are failing them, then, if they do not advance public policies that support excellent independent schools and strengthen the communities that they serve.

Small-scale education entrepreneurs

A tree growing from the tower of a baroque church—Coyoacan, Mexico.

For more than a generation, the narrative about higher education entrepreneurship has focused on scale. Think about the efforts that spawned Western Governors University or that triggered the astonishing expansion of SNHU, Liberty, Grand Canyon, or Arizona State.  These efforts relied on services, systems, technology, marketing, curricula, and pedagogy that could expand rapidly and that would look the same to students regardless of discipline or location. They were perfectly matched to a time when enrollment growth was among students who desired low cost and convenient online education.  They set the tone for thinking about innovation in higher education (perhaps epitomized by the brief, widespread vogue of MOOCs). Many other colleges and universities mimicked their efforts, some succeeding, most failing.

The demographic conditions that fueled large-scale entrepreneurship in higher education no longer exist.  It is not just that the number of high school graduates has fallen, but also that college-going rates have declined, enrollment in professional masters degree programs has stagnated, the online market is saturated, mistrust of higher education is widespread, capital is flowing to other industries.

Now is the time to pay attention to education entrepreneurs who prefer specificity over scale.  This week Inside Higher Ed ran an article on new Catholic technical schools. Several young traditional Catholic colleges (Wyoming Catholic, Ave Maria, John Paul the Great) are flourishing. So are at least three new sustainability-focused colleges–Thoreau, Flagstaff, and Outer Coast.  The liberal arts are getting renewed attention, whether at the University of Austin, Ralston College, or Thales College. And training for particular professions, like teaching, is a focus in several new enterprises, like Thales College and the dozens of school districts now delivering programs leading to the teaching credential. Entrepreneurship in K-12 systems is small-scale now too, as borne out by the flourishing of tiny classical schools.

The colleges created by “specificity entrepreneurs” share several characteristics.  Their curricula are focused, not broad.  They offer a limited number of degrees.  They are organized around a particular orthodoxy or identity–shared by students, faculty, and the institution as a whole. They’ve chosen missions and values that are marginal in the broader society, but which have powerful support among those who hold them dear. Their offerings are consistent with those values. They aim to make their mark by influence not size. They are intentionally very small and also inexpensive to operate.

It is too early to know how these schools will do, and with tiny enrollments and limited resources they are potentially quite fragile. The apparatus of higher education–accreditors, professional organizations, policy-makers–seem skeptical of them as well. But they are attuned to the current cultural and educational environments, and need only modest numbers of students to break even and to meet their missions.  Other schools, seeking their ways through the current educational landscape, would be wise to look to them.

Do we need more schools or more school leaders?

All the behaviors of higher education today suggest that if we were to ask, “Do we need more schools or more school leaders?” the answer would be “school leaders.”  In an ideal world, the answer would be "both." But in today's world could it be true that we actually need more schools than leaders? Here are four reasons to think the answer is yes:

1. Places need schools more than school leaders. If the future is truly one where colleges are regularly faced with closure, then the well-being of many towns, neighborhoods, and communities is also threatened. Preserving schools by nearly any means, then, requires creativity in how they are run, not just for the school and its students, but the people around it.

2. Leaders are expensive, especially at small schools. And it is at small schools where limiting overhead is essential if the school is to balance its budget and ensure student learning.  Or, put another way, fewer leaders leave more revenue to direct to students and the things that help them learn.

3. Leaders lead best at scale. The communication, management, assessment, and policy skills of most leaders are based on regularity, repetition, systems, and statistically reliable data.  With access to these things, leaders can put in place policies and practices that improve schools, and they can choose strategies that inspire students, staff, and faculty alike to improve their work. Without them, their impact is limited. Small schools tend to have unpredictable data, weak systems, idiosyncratic practices, and policies that welcome exceptions.  In such settings, leadership struggles.

4. Important parts of schools run themselves.  Faculty oversee the curriculum, and within constraints, govern themselves. Most student services come from line staff. The deepest relationships students have are with the teachers, staff, and coaches they see nearly every day. Many functions of the school year are dictated by policy or calendar or regulation and would happen even if leaders were absent.  This is not to say, of course, that leaders are useless in day-to-day operations of a school.  It is to say, though, that much of what takes place at school takes place without leaders making it happen.

These things suggest that it is wise to sustain or increase the number of schools while limiting or reducing the number of leaders.  How to do this?

Make sure that the leaders you have are right for the school’s situation.  If enrollment is declining, enrollment leadership is necessary.  If fundraising is essential, then dedicate resources to leadership there. If your school is distinctive in some way, make sure there is clear leadership in those distinctive areas.  But don’t imagine that your school needs a full slate of leaders in the roles that typically exist elsewhere or that they must be paid at market rates.

Investigate leaderless or self-governing models of management.  There are many, from the version favored at W.L Gore and Associates to the town-hall practices of many small colleges and towns. 

Ensure that leaders are also teachers.  A colleague of mine who is a fine CFO routinely says that colleges should have all of their vice presidents teaching classes.  His point is a good one–both to reduce the school’s overhead and to ensure that leaders are intimately involved with the most important work of the school.

Share leaders across several schools. If leadership today relies on scale, then one way to get to scale is to have a single Provost, or CFO, or Registrar for several analogous schools. Those schools could still maintain their distinctive natures, faculty, and campuses. But their operations and strategies might be sharper because they are based on better data and deeper analysis.

Build a culture that does not rely on leaders. I know many campuses where leaders are essential because no decision is made or action taken without a leader (or several leaders) being involved. No improvement comes about if it isn’t suggested by a leader.  If your school will have fewer leaders, then people on the front lines must trust each other, hold each other accountable, find repeatable solutions to real problems, and carry the emotional and moral burden of keeping the school running.  These practices do not emerge by themselves. They must be built.

What if students actually learn the liberal arts well in high school?

Today in colleges, the number of liberal arts majors and programs are in decline. At the same time more students are enrolled in high schools that take the liberal arts seriously than at any time in a generation. This paradox offers high schools and colleges real opportunities to rethink their approach to the liberal arts together.

There are at least three movements deepening the liberal arts knowledge and orientation of high school students.  The spread of STEM education has expanded high school students’ access to and understanding of science and mathematics–core liberal arts disciplines.  The classical education movement–growing in independent, charter, and magnet schools–helps more students than ever before understand core texts in the liberal arts and also develop the skills of classical learning.  And, top independent schools and public schools provide a learning experience modeled on that of liberal arts colleges, so that their graduates will have engaged in service-learning, traveled abroad, written theses, and done faculty-mentored research before arriving at college.

There are, of course, all sorts of reasons to not overestimate the importance of these trends.  While high schools may have good science equipment, their STEM curricula are sometimes poor.  The liberal arts of classical schools is not the liberal arts of the higher education mainstream. The liberal arts experience offered by independent schools and elite public schools is not available to most high school students. The power of these movements is outweighed by the deadening power of social media, pandemic-era education practices, and high school ennui such that upon entering college, students may still benefit from a basic liberal arts education.

Still, a re-emergence of the liberal arts in high school while they decline in higher education raises interesting questions for educators.  Here are a few:

• Does understanding the liberal arts depend on student maturity, or do the liberal arts help mature students?  If the latter, then colleges should encourage deeper engagement with the liberal arts in high school in order to ensure that students who come to college are ready to do deeper, more mature work across the disciplines.

• How do colleges translate STEM learning in high school into liberal arts outcomes?  It isn’t a given that high school STEM curricula advance critical thinking, teamwork, moral reasoning, creativity, and other liberal arts outcomes. But STEM courses are more likely to advance those outcomes than a curriculum without them.  Colleges, then, would be wise to build their curricula assuming the presence of these outcomes, not their absence. 

• How can the different political tendencies of high school and college liberal arts lead to liberal learning? If a student graduated from a classical high school, their framework for the liberal arts is likely to be traditional.  The liberal arts courses they will encounter in college will likely come from a progressive frame.  This tension can be used for learning, if it is acknowledged publicly and addressed directly.

• If students engage the liberal arts in high school, when should they engage them in college? The liberal arts are front-loaded in most college curricula.  Students take the bulk of their courses in the first and second year.  But if high school graduates have a rigorous exposure to the liberal arts, then it may be that they are ready for courses in the major upon matriculating in college.  This provides colleges with the opportunity to put the liberal arts at the end of their curricula, as a capstone to learning not an introduction.

• How can the liberal arts help high schools and colleges work together? In American education, high schools and colleges tend to move independently of each other, even in state education systems.  But the flowering of the liberal arts in some high schools offers an opportunity for real collaboration between institutions–in curriculum, learning outcomes, faculty sharing, and admissions.  Colleges would be foolish to miss this opportunity to build bridges with the high schools whose dedication to the liberal arts is as intense as their own.

Growing smaller

A tree along the walkway to Castillo de Chapultepec, Mexico City

A decade from now some universities will be significantly larger–flagship universities, big football schools, institutions that dominate low-cost online education.  Others, mostly wealthy ones, will be the same size because they can afford to be.  There will be many schools that are no longer in operation.  And there will be many more that are smaller in the future than they are right now.

In this last group, most smaller schools will have become smaller accidentally.  As enrollment declines they will shed positions and programs, sometimes opportunistically, sometimes intentionally.  They will adjust their budgets, restrict their spending, find partnerships to reduce cost and bolster revenue, add programs in growth areas to offset declines in others. They will have backed-in to a new operating model. It may be a good one, it may be good enough.  But it is likely to be incoherent, with inequities, inefficiencies, and variations from the institution’s mission lingering, or with an operating model out of alignment with campus rhetoric about growth in the future.

It is possible, though, to prepare to shrink–to grow smaller on purpose. There is little glamor in this approach, it is true. But it is an honest approach, one that accepts the current demographic, political, and educational conditions and seeks to live in relationship to them. It can live together with intentional efforts to grow in certain areas. And it is better than clinging to a self-image and a vision based on little more than the hope that an institution will be bigger, richer, and more prominent than it used to be.

Let me suggest a few commitments that might pave the way for schools to grow smaller, wisely and well.

1. Make long-term commitments, not long-term obligations.  Most colleges have long-term obligations and short term commitments.  Both endowments and debt covenants are long-term obligations, for instance.  Come what may, schools must meet those obligations–dedicating endowed funds to donor purposes, meeting financial ratios in order to please lenders.  To meet those obligations, schools often give up on their commitments: they shift missions, drop programs, pursue new markets.  If schools, however, made long-term commitments and eschewed long-term obligations, they would have the flexibility in times of difficulty to adjust their obligations while maintaining their core commitments. And they would be careful before taking on obligations that might threaten their viability in the future. 

2. Commit to certain students, not all students. Small schools that flourish do so in part because they know their students. Military academies don’t recruit pacifists; elite liberal arts colleges don’t enroll C students.  For decades, though, colleges have tried to grow by serving any student who wished to attend.  Poor retention rates, under-enrolled majors, and incoherent co-curricula are in part the results of these efforts.  If a school is intentionally growing smaller, a way to do it is to offer only those programs and activities that meet the needs of the students the school intentionally enrolls. To take that step, the school must know its students and know how to serve them well.

3. Every employee does more than one thing, every job can be done by more than one employee. Most small institutions are organizationally fragile. If demand grows in a certain area, they cannot adjust to meet it; if they lose an employee in a certain area, no one else can step in; if something breaks, almost no one can fix it. A commitment to flexibility and redundancy forces schools to be organizationally simple. It limits administrative overhead. It guarantees that if one part of an employee’s job goes away, the employee is still needed. And it ensures that the institution can respond well to unexpected threats and opportunities.

4. Understand your particular past. Nearly every shrinking school was once successfully smaller than it is today.  To be successfully smaller again, schools need to understand their pasts.  What programs did they offer to a smaller number of students? Which offices did they have (and not have) at that time? What has successfully endured to the present? What was the surrounding community like? What were the social, economic, and educational conditions of their students?  The purpose of understanding the past is not to replicate it, to be sure.  It is, though, to re-establish a self-understanding grounded in reality and a hope for the future based in something the institution has once already achieved. 

Curb appeal is not hospitality

If you have sold a house recently your realtor has instructed you about curb appeal.  To sell it quickly, and for the highest price, you must heighten its curb appeal, you will have heard.  This means uniformity in the yard–cut grass, trimmed bushes, discreet flowers–and simplicity inside.  You will have been told to reduce clutter, remove quirky things, and eliminate any evidence of your specific presence there: no family photos, outre book choices, or colors that fall outside of this year’s palette.

The purpose of curb appeal is to invite people to buy your house by imagining that it can serve whatever purpose they bring to it.  To do so, they must feel like the house is attractive but bland.   Stylish without being trendy. Upscale but (just barely) affordable. The aesthetic is “nice hotel lobby.” 

Colleges and universities have been focused on curb appeal for years, with the same goal: getting people to purchase their product, the same approach: making people feel like the school meets whatever desire they have, and the same style: upscale blandness, that realtors and hotel chains prefer. 

Improving the attractiveness of a campus is a good thing. But the implications of curb appeal are problematic, both for students, who cannot actually do whatever they want at your school, and for schools, for whom the cost of keeping up curb appeal is ever increasing and hardly affordable. The commitment to ever better curb appeal risks conflating fancy lobbies and well-cut grass with things of actual meaning.

A week ago we visited a winery in rural North Carolina. It was a family-owned producer, the tasting room was in the basement of a house.  The wine was decent, but what made the experience meaningful was hospitality.  The owners made the wine themselves. We learned their particular story. The wine had the quirks of place and time. You couldn’t buy it anywhere. They did not invite us to imagine that we were wherever we wanted: Napa or Bordeaux.  Instead, they invited us to join them briefly in their project–making decent wine with family and friends from the fruits of western North Carolina.  They welcomed us with hospitality, not curb appeal. We bought a case of wine.  We will go back.

My point is not to tell schools to abandon curb appeal. Don’t stop cutting the lawn, updating buildings, and staying up on higher education trends.  It is to say that those things, alone, do very little of real importance.  They indicate that your school is a possibility. But they do not convey what makes your school meaningful.  Nor do they offer hospitality.  That comes from welcoming students to join you and your school in a shared, personal, particular project.  

If you face tension between spending on curb appeal, or spending on the things that make you distinct, pick the latter.  Choose hospitality over curb appeal every time.