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.
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.
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.
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.
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.