Dustbowl Thinking

Ken Burns' new documentary tells the story of the Dust Bowl blow after body-blow: the brutally unrelenting natural challenges, the grim perseverance and astonishingly unfailing hope of Depression-era farm families, and the glimmers of actual relief that are quickly followed by even worse calamities.

Staring straight at the camera, one stoic survivor states the prevailing frame of mind with blunt candor. "We figured if we failed, we didn't try hard enough. We didn't do anything different the next year, we just tried harder."

When you only know one way – when you can only envision one way – then failure (or success) must be simply a matter of effort.  If innovation is any measure, until recently much of higher education seemed stuck in Dustbowl Thinking.  The good news is that seems to be changing.

In late September, President Raynard Kington wrote Grinnell College alumni saying “I think everybody realizes that something has to change or that we'll have to face even tougher choices down the road.”

Swarthmore’s President Rebecca Chopp, in a speech on her campus last October, acknowledged the changing landscape and the challenges to liberal arts colleges and suggested fresh approaches to engaging what appears to be a dwindling audience.

A worry that lingers is whether reframing the liberal arts’ value proposition is dangerous… or insufficient. Adherents long for the indemnification of the liberal arts but some push back with ambivalent cynicism, happy to see the effort but skeptical whether deep appreciation and commitment can be sparked by mere marketing communication campaigns. “Have You Driven the Classics…lately?” may receive (muffled) applause but will it reverse troubling trends?

Paying serious attention to change and looking outward are good starts, but the prevailing consumer culture has shifted over time.  New audiences in new markets invited to college are pragmatic and hugely practical, and arrive with an under-appreciation of classical academic values.  And the words “liberal arts” probably create confusion, assuming they receive attention at all.

I haven't polled any but I think it is safe to assume that few students select a liberal arts college for the liberal arts.

I do know many select college for prestige, perceived value, cost (tuition freezes and no-loan policies help), and campus facilities. And I believe most of those who attend liberal arts colleges develop an appreciation for this education during and especially after their time as students. 

Recently Cappy Hill, Vassar's president and an expert of the economics of highered, shared her worry that the liberal arts were heading back to their elite roots. My "back to the future" reply was that, perhaps, the liberal arts model might become more like European monasteries, with devotees attending to illuminated manuscripts and deliberately-paced contemplation inside the drawbridge surrounded by a brutal and chaotic world outside....

Having had the good fortune to be immersed in the higher education environment for most of my life – I grew up on the Haverford College campus and then did my undergraduate and graduate studies at Amherst and Harvard – I, well, I think I “get it.”

Also having the great good fortune to spend the past thirty-five years working in an usually wide range of types of colleges and universities, and being privileged to counsel families that represent that diversity, I think Presidents Hill and Chopp are both right. I believe the liberal arts' shrinkage will continue and I hope its champions will begin to rethink its value – "compelling narrative" – in a modern context that takes into account the lack of awareness, understanding, and appreciation in the market.

It won't do to either dismiss public disinterest or pine for the recent good old days. The future of the liberal arts and highered is important and unknown. It will be significantly affected by environmental factors beyond the control of academe but influenced by leadership from within academe.

• I know a college that introduced an honors program named the “Renaissance Baccalaureate.”  Despite decent promotion, it drew little attention… and lots of misspellings.  It was re-launched as the “Discovery Degree” – with the exact same features – and was an immediate hit.
• In response to public concern over price, a number of colleges have adjusted family expense through combinations of freezing top-line price (in some cases even cutting it) and reducing family cost through financial aid discounting. 
• Similarly, acknowledging the mounting worry about ROI and jobs, colleges have beefed up career services, alumni networks, and internships.

Proactive, market-sensitive tactics like these have yielded positive results, making their institutions stronger with no sacrifice to integrity or dignity. Prosperity and – outside of monasteries – currency are good brands in highered!

Taking an audience-eye-view is fundamental to successful communication.  Instead of sticking with words we know and are comfortable with, how about deconstructing the constituent elements of what makes a liberal arts education so compelling?  Let’s see what emerges and use those discoveries to try and find ways to break down the language and values divide.   

Whether through price, product, or name, a part of our challenge is to make a fresh case for the liberal arts, in-and-of-themselves and as a means to a fulfilling end.  If I’m right, and deep appreciation of the liberal arts comes during or after the partaking, we better define, articulate, and deliver in methods that will be received and appreciated compelling new “now-reasons” to consider our institutions.

Dangerous Band-Aids, Part I:

The Legerdemain of Modern “Enrollment Management”

 

Q: “When can apparently good news be bad?”  

A: “When it provides a false sense of security.”

 

A growing number of college presidents are acknowledging the higher education operating model has to change (though if TIME magazine’s reporting is to be believed, a startling number are not of that opinion, in direct contrast with their customer base).

One hopes these presidents are listening to their in-house market experts, the admissions and financial aid staff whose work bridges the gap between important on- and off-campus constituents.

Modern admissions marketing communication wizardry, global-reach recruiting campaigns, and sophisticated cost leveraging schemes continue to salve fears that change needs to come soon.  Recruiting and financial aid packing tactics at many colleges seem to be masking an “it’s later than we think” reality, making practitioners in those fields increasingly concerned.

I hosted or was part of three standing-room-only sessions at NACAC and at the New York State financial aid association meeting the following week.  In every setting I sensed an odd mixture of pride-of-accomplishment, guilt, and concern about the future.  The pride comes from making an increasingly difficult (juggling mutually-exclusive imperatives) job look too easy.  The guilt and concern come from making a tough job look too easy, thus blunting effectiveness of delivering messages many on campus don’t want to hear.

Reporting from The College Board Forum, The Chronicle’s Eric Hoover cites Pomona’s Seth Allen’s concern:  “It’s a prevalent notion in academe that recruiting more students from faraway shores can fix a college’s revenue problems. Foreign students, Mr. Allen said, are the latest incarnation of the ‘next great thing’ that promises to solve enrollment challenges. He warned his audience, however, that such thinking could distract college officials from frank discussions about their rising costs.

“’When are we actually going to have this conversation?’ Mr. Allen asked. ‘Because I don’t think the next great thing is around the corner for us.’”

Seth’s is one of a growing number of voices from the admissions and financial aid world whose embedded “market readings” urge intelligent action, sooner rather than later, as they see their tactics’n’tricks diminishing.

Across the country from Pomona, Pennsylvania’s Albright College is doing away with one such tactic, the practice of financial aid gapping.

Kevin Kiley of Inside Highered shined a bright light on the all-too-often overlooked flip side of college cost, financial aid gapping in a story this summer and recently followed-up with a report on Albright College’s eyes-wide-open, pragmatic approach to weaning itself away from gapping.  Albright’s Greg Eichhorn has succeeded in helping his college take a longer view: by “managing down” the gap, Eichhorn figures, Albright will be able to grow headcount (through improved admissions yield and subsequent retention) and increase the lifetime value of a customer, with financial and student satisfaction benefits that will more than offset the anticipated increase in discount rate (arguably one of the most dangerously misused metrics in higher education).

Professionals in the enrollment field – admissions and financial aid staff – are in an increasingly difficult position.  Trained to serve both their college and their families, many are finding what was once a normal complimentary practice is becoming untenable.  As committed, intelligent highered stakeholders, one hopes campus leaders recognize their credibility and seek their insights, soon.

ELEPHANTS CAN DANCE

In the "lessons from other worlds" department, we have seen the near-bankrupt Dayton ballet, opera, and orchestra do the unthinkable and merge and survive. With more foresight, an Albany, NY healthcare "behemoth" decided not to wait til the 11th hour and three separate (and disparate) entities are successfully merging.

An acquaintance who works in the premium spirits (that's expensive alcoholic beverages) business tantalized me with a thumbnail of part of his job: because it takes 20+ years for Scotch to mature-to-market, he tries to envision the market -- economy and demand, pricing and quantity -- twenty five years in the future, today, so production can begin.

As they famously learned at IBM, ELEPHANTS CAN DANCE. And Professor Sternberg’s excellent article will reremind us, and urge us on. He tells us waiting to see does not work, and reminds us that highered must look outward rather than exclusively inward: though we are experts, value is "in the eye of the beholder." 

Highered, the music has already begun!

Dan Lundquist

 

Lessons From Swiss Watch-Makers  by Robert J. Sternberg

Today, nonprofit higher education is under threat like never before. Costs for higher education are rising at a rate that simply may not be sustainable over the long term. For-profit universities have provided platforms that enable individuals, especially those in the work force, to obtain degrees with an ease and convenience formerly not possible. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are looking for ways to provide quality online education at a fraction of the current cost. Some of them even question the value of a college education: One entrepreneur (Peter Thiel) is actually paying students not to go to college and to start businesses instead.

As costs to colleges and universities rise, state legislatures have been cutting allocations in the public sector in a way never seen before, while at the same time constraining the rate at which tuition may rise; low interest rates reduce returns on endowments; newly limited funding of grant proposals reduces income through indirect costs; and philanthropy is constrained in many cases by flat or even falling personal incomes. What’s to be done?

We in the higher-education sector can learn a lot from the Swiss watch-making industry. In the 1980s, the Swiss watch industry was in serious trouble. The Swiss watch-makers — who had dominated the industry for decades and, in some cases, for centuries — were being routed by Japanese watch-makers who were producing watches that could do much more than the Swiss ones, and at a fraction of the cost. Why pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a Swiss watch that told the time and possibly the date when you could get the time, day, and date from a Japanese product, not to mention additional features such as stopwatch, alarm, and multiple-time-zone features, and sometimes more? Even worse, the Japanese quartz (battery-operated) watches often were more accurate in telling the time than were the Swiss hand-wound or self-winding models.

The Swiss watch-making industry might have gone bust — in much the way some of us fear for the newspaper or magazine industries today — except for their creative redefinition of what it means to own a Swiss watch. Recognizing that the Japanese were out to capture their market, the Swiss watch-makers set out to redefine what it meant to own a Swiss watch. The Swiss watch was to become what a classical stringed instrument had become — the symbol of quality. Research suggests that it is difficult if not impossible to distinguish the sound of a Stradivarius from that of a well-made modern instrument, but musicians are willing to pay a huge premium for the perception of quality in the classical instrument. Swiss watch-makers similarly capitalized on their brand equity, knowing that they had only a limited amount of time effectively to do so before becoming irrelevant. They needed users of their products personally to identify with their products — to see their Swiss watches as extensions of themselves.

Different watch-makers emphasized different images. For example, Rolex Oyster watches present a bold image of luxury and privilege. Patek Philippe watches, generally even more expensive than Rolexes, tend to present an image of the highest quality accompanied by understated elegance and durability of a single watch over generations. Blancpain watches typically are even more understated, with an emphasis on each being handmade by a single maker. Tag Heuer has become a symbol of the young achiever on the way up. Longines offers quality at a more modest price, while Swatch watches are funky and relatively inexpensive.

What are the lessons in brand equity to be learned for higher education?

1. Waiting to see what happens does not work. The Swiss watch-makers could not tarry or their market would have been gone for good. Neither can higher education today wait around and hope for the best. Some newspaper and magazine publishers waited; you can see how well it worked out for them! There are too many threats to nonprofit higher education to adopt a stance of wait and see. You can’t wait to change while your market share steadily evaporates.

2. Quality institutions will survive only if they effectively market their brand. The Swiss watch brands had (and still have) a worldwide reputation for superiority. The watch-makers, however, needed to persuade their customers that quality matters. This was no easy task. Many products today, such as personal computers, have become largely mass-marketed products of generic quality. Some manufacturers, such as IBM, left the business, recognizing that relatively few PC customers would pay a premium for quality. With a cheap watch, you can buy hundreds of them before you reach the cost of a good Swiss watch. Moreover, all the watches tell time. The Swiss watch-makers, therefore, needed to persuade customers that their product was a statement about the wearer — much like a piece of jewelry. (Indeed, some non-Swiss brands, such as Cartier and Bulgari, are known primarily for their association with jewelry.)

You may be thinking that you would never seek to purchase a premium watch. But how about some other product that is more luxurious than you really need — a premium car, bicycle, house, home appliance, television, cell phone, garment, or even branded rather than generic food or drugs? Most of us seek a premium product for something because for, whatever that thing is, we want better quality, or at least, our perception of it. With higher education, students often feel their choices are limited, relative to their resources, when it comes to price.

When students pay the high and, in some institutions, astronomical costs of a college education today, they understandably feel like they are paying a premium price, whether they want to or not, and they expect to get their money’s worth. You might think that the premium branding strategy applies only to elite institutions. But today, because students perceive almost all of higher education as commanding premium prices, they want a product that delivers. Having a strong value proposition applies to all institutions, not just elite ones. Thus, institutions of higher education need to market their brand to bring pride of ownership and belonging to their students. They need to develop personal identification with the brand. Generic institutions without a clear and differentiated value proposition are the ones most likely to be hurt.

3. Quality is, in part, in the eye of the beholder. How does one actually know that, say, a Rolex or a Patek Philippe is a superior watch? For the large majority of buyers, that knowledge is gotten through the superior functioning and durability of the watch and through the watch-maker’s reputation. It is not enough to be good: The customer must be persuaded, as Detroit automakers are learning today after many lean years in which they saw their brand equity decimated. You not only need to excel, you have to be recognized for your excellence. Good marketing and good public relations are necessary but generally not sufficient to persuade stakeholders of quality. Thus colleges and universities need transparent systems of accountability that will persuade stakeholders of the quality the institutions claim.

 4. Institutions will succeed to the extent that they identify, pursue, and market their unique niche. Institutions at the top of the reputational heap — the Yales and the Stanfords, say — have marked out their niche, trying to be the best possible in a wide variety of disciplines. Most institutions of higher learning, however, have neither the financial resources nor even the will to become the best across the board. Instead, they need to do what the Swiss watch-makers did — find a niche in which they excel and then sell themselves as powerfully as they can to those who identify with what they have to offer.

At Oklahoma State University, for example, our brand derives from our land-grant mission — that we seek to educate ethical citizens and leaders who will make a positive, meaningful, and enduring difference to the world. As part of our value proposition, we have a Center for Ethical Leadership, leadership-related courses and student activities in all colleges, a popular leadership minor, and an ethos of developing servant leaders. We are in the early stages of planning to start an "ethical leadership track," to be administered jointly by academic and student affairs, to be readily and freely available to all students — undergraduate and graduate. It will combine the study of ethical leadership in the academic sphere with activities developed by student affairs that immediately apply what one learns in the classroom to one’s activities on campus.

In this way, we hope better to integrate the academic and student-affairs sides of our university, a task that is not always easily accomplished. In particular, certain courses will be identified as participating in the track, and will include within them principles and case studies in ethical leadership as applied to the particular discipline being studied. Thus, students will not have to take additional courses, but rather will elect courses and course sections relevant to the track. They will see directly how ethical leadership cross-cuts academic disciplines. And through their student-affairs activities, such as community service, student government, athletics, journalism, or whatever, they will apply what they learn. They then will be accountable in the academic work for showing how they applied what they learned on the academic side to the student-affairs side.

Other institutions might brand themselves differently. What is important is that the brand identification accurately and excitingly reflects both the mission of the institution and the graduates it produces.

5. You need consistency in quality and in messaging. For the best watch-makers, every watch is of superb quality. There are few or no duds, and if there is a dud, it is quickly replaced, no questions asked. Moreover, the watch-makers deliver on quality: There is an active market for quality Swiss watches dating back to the early 1900s. If the old watches are serviced, they still work and keep accurate time. And they bring high prices, even a century later. Similarly, colleges and universities need to produce graduates who show to employers and other stakeholders in the higher education system that they have the skills and work ethic they need to cope effectively with the work demands of the present and the future.

Similarly, messaging has to be strong and consistent. In earlier times, it was relatively simple to make different pitches to different audiences — to try to be everything to everybody. But with the advent of the Internet, information spreads around the globe literally at the speed of light. As some political candidates have discovered, whatever you say anywhere to anybody is fair game. You can’t afford to be indecisive about what you stand for. Some institutions cannot decide who or what they are: They have too many messages, too many logos, too many moving parts working at cross-purposes to each other. The Swiss watch-makers that have succeeded have been consistent in producing high-quality products and have carried a distinctive and unified brand message, sometimes offering diverse options (models) within the context of that overall message.

To some readers, it may seem offensive to think of a college or university in terms of a construct of brand equity. But in an age of rapid advances and intense competition, institutions of higher learning can no longer afford to be quixotic or otherwise naïve. Enhancement and effective communication of brand equity is what saved Swiss watch companies. It is what will save quality institutions of higher education.

 

Bio: Robert J. Sternberg is provost, senior vice president, Regents Professor of Psychology and Education, and Kaiser Family Foundation Chair in Ethical Leadership at Oklahoma State University. He is on the board of the Association of American Colleges and Universities as treasurer and is president of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences as well as past president of the American Psychological Association. The opinions in this article, however, are exclusively his own.

 

The March to the Elephants' Graveyeard?

"Fresh" from two professional conferences -- admissions in Colorado and financial aid in New York -- where I had many opportunities to be re-reminded that there is unanimous agreement that highered will change and, in fact that it IS changing (by drift and reaction rather than intentional leadership, now).

When queried about this presidents, provosts, and pundits cite cognitive dissonance, collegiality, and many of the other situational and "cultural culprits" Professor Kilbourne mentions in his excellent article (below, reader comments are very good too at http://chronicle.com/article/Moving-at-the-Speed-of-Academe/134890/).

We all know leading change is difficult and that failure to lead is a demurral of responsibility that will only put highered in a more constrained, reactionary position.

 
Dan Lundquist

Moving at the Speed of Academe

by John Kilbourne, professor of movement science at Grand Valley State University

Last year I met with a former student whom I had mentored during his early years in college. Today he is the founder and chief executive of one of the largest and most successful fitness-and-wellness programs for children in the world. As many children practice his programs as watch the popular television program SpongeBob SquarePants.

During our meeting he shared with me the speed at which his company acts and responds to ever-changing trends in technology, business markets, and health and fitness. He said, "John, if I have an idea on Friday, we implement it on Monday." Sadly, I shared my frustration at being, in higher education, on the opposite end of that continuum. I replied to him by saying, "If I have an idea on Friday, I consider myself lucky to have it approved by the first of what might be three separate committees during the first year."

The importance of my friend's comments came into clearer focus shortly afterward with the attention given to the death of the Apple co-founder, visionary, and entrepreneur, Steve Jobs. It seems that much of Mr. Jobs's success was a result of what co-workers at Apple called his "reality distortion field," or RDF.

The RDF was Jobs's intense enthusiasm for convincing others that the task at hand was doable, often within very short periods of time. What's more, much of the current literature on the best ways to prepare college students for careers shows that taking risks, thinking creatively, and moving swiftly are key, affirming Mr. Jobs's formula.

It is unfortunate that many colleges, which are charged with preparing the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators, embrace a culture of time-consuming, unhurried progress when it comes to curriculum, personnel, and governance. Nowhere is this more evident than in their committee structures.

For example, at my university, to make any changes to existing courses, propose new courses, or make program changes, faculty must navigate through three separate curriculum committees. Too often the members of such committees have zero connection to the subject area or content of the proposals under consideration, yet they are free to voice their concerns, objections, disapproval, or approval.

A few years ago, I proposed content changes in a course I teach that is required of all majors in my department, to reflect current trends and practices in the field. The changes I proposed were the result of my consulting with several department faculty members over an entire semester.

After my home department's curriculum committee approved the changes, and after I received the support of the department faculty, the proposal went to the college curriculum committee. It took nearly a year for that committee to approve it. It then moved to the university curriculum committee, where it was approved and sent on to the provost for final approval.

The entire process took nearly three years of time and effort¬—time I feel would have been much better spent on what I and others do best: teaching, providing meaningful service, and contributing to our fields of study. By the time the course received final approval and was ready to appear in the university catalog, I had to revise it again to keep up with recent changes in research and scholarship.

As a professor, I often feel that I live a divided life. On one side of the divide I am engaged with students in and out of class, sharing with them information from a rapidly changing world, hoping to keep them up to date and informed so that they might somehow use this information to follow and achieve their dreams. On the other side of the divide, I face a world consumed with sluggishness, personified by committees and committee structures at the department, college, and university levels.

At my university there have been several actions in my department—curriculum proposals, sabbatical applications, contract renewals, tenure and promotion decisions—that were unanimously approved by the department faculty only to be denied or rejected by a college committee. One rejection letter said, "While your current proposal has not been approved, we do encourage you to revise, strengthen, and resubmit a proposal for the following academic year."

The following year! One entire year gone, and the efforts of the department faculty wasted.

What's to be done? Colleges can bridge the divide and promote more efficient use of people and resources by putting greater trust in faculty at the department or unit level. After all, these are the people who know the subjects and content best. Let's work to remove the unreality distortion field of higher education. If faculty have an idea on Friday, let them put it into effect on Monday.

Right-Pricing Higher Education... for Everyone's Sake

In the late 1970s the sticker price of college education became detached from the indices it had generally tracked up until then.  The ‘80s were a go-go time that, in retrospect, somewhere between 99% and 100% of Americans would say resembled nothing so much as the beginning of a Ponzi Scheme.

Let’s toast to that!

Chivas Regal is a very good blended Scotch whiskey that has been around about as long as most of the American Ivy League colleges. The Seagram family took Chivas corporate and masterfully marketed – branded and priced – the spirit.  Chivas was viewed as special: exclusive, expensive, and prestigious.  Seagrams discovered that, along with image management, they could increase its price and increase sales.  During the 1980s over 1.2 million cases of their most popular 12-year-old bottles were sold in the United States annually.  What an era!  What a beverage!  (US sales stand at approximately 450,000 cases these days.)

Drawing on thirty-five years of experience as a college administrator, I recall the phrase “Chivas Regal Effect” entering the lexicon in the 1980s when I worked at the University of Pennsylvania.  Back before the Federal government busted the so-called Overlap Group (the Ivies and MIT) for collusion and price-fixing, we in the admissions office would compare prices and financial aid offers with our core overlap group (AKA “competitors”) in hopes that we could minimize the role the cost would play in college choice.  But there was another result; one that I honestly believe at the time was unintended.  Penn’s president Martin Meyerson said it best: "We were building up a kind of notion about colleges and universities that the higher the price, the better they were."  (Stanford’s finance vice president Bill Massy was blunter: "The theory was, basically, we will increase tuition as much as the market will bear.”)

We all know the rest of the story.  Up to now that is. 

Massy, meet Bennett

College rankings gained prominence, money was easy to come by, the Massy Theorem took hold, and with no end in sight many colleges invested in quality high-overhead infrastructure and programing… as the economy iced-down the Bennett Hypothesis (“increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase”) gained ascendency as the cocktail party gave way to the tea party, and even a portion of the State of the Union Address was a softball warning about cost that most of highered felt they, sadly and reluctantly, had to ignore.

College tuition has outpaced general inflation by ten times since the ‘80s and its trajectory has not even been blunted by the Great Recession:

 

Behind the scenes “doing less with less”

Barring the most resource-rich college brands (ironically), research has shown that family willingness and ability to pay is declining.  Families will try harder to meet the bill if their child is talented enough to be admitted to an Ivy League school but they are also looking at “financial aid safety” colleges in greater numbers.  More research indicates that the number of students turning down their top-choice pricey school in favor of a more affordable option is sharply on the rise.

Seeking a middle way, some highered advocates have begun looking at the dilemma differently.  Rather than focus on top line price – and the amount of financial aid “discount” that colleges “spend” – why not look at 1) what your families can pay, 2) what it costs to run your college, 3) revenue from all non-tuition sources, and 4) add #1 and #3 and subtract #2 and charge as close to THAT as possible.  Might, so goes the reasoning, a customer base committed to your product but stung by financial uncertainty, might these families be willing to pay less for less?  Let someone else pay for those electron microscopes!  First Edition Audubons, not on my dime!

A Radical Departure: the Concordia “Right Pricing” Experiment

This morning Concordia University in Minnesota announced a $10,000 price DROP: “In resetting our tuition to a price last seen a decade ago, we are responding to the concerns of students and families who feel our nation’s colleges have become unaffordable,” said Rev. Tom Ries, president of Concordia. “We hope that other private colleges and universities will soon be able to follow our lead.”

Operating from a position of relative strength and a keen sense of market sentiment, Concordia is branding the price cut as a “reset,” a disciplined, no smoke-and-mirrors anti-Chivas moment that has “the phone ringing off the hook” in their admissions office and has already garnered a mixture of “RIP, we hardly knew Ye,” to quixotic admiration in the highered community.

I think Concordia intends to be in the human capital business to stay, and I’m betting on their math.  For the sake of higher education and future generations of college students.

 

Can We Afford Our Values?

LIBERAL ARTS: SHRINKING, NOT "OBSOLETE"

In the Spring, 2012 edition of Liberal Education, Pomona President David Oxtoby raises the bar on the definition of "preaching to the choir" in his essay on the place for arts in a liberal arts education.

His words resonated with me (at age 60) but made me pause and wonder how much that had to do with my exposure to the arts (good, bad, or indifferent) as an Amherst undergraduate decades ago or my experience since.

I am sure that – then as now – there are a few teenagers with sufficient sophistication and sensitivity to recognize and appreciate what he and others describe... and that there are others who, like me, will grow into appreciation. Most will do neither, alas.

Higher Education is in a period – the so-called New Normal – where the luxury of "purposeful inefficiency" [Sorum, Winter, 1999 Daedalus] is well past us. Pomona's Oxtoby and Princeton's President Shirley Tilghman (in commencement remarks on June 5th) are powerful advocates for an educational experience that many of us value but that many institutions can simply no longer afford to retain as they could in the past.

Unlike SUNY-Albany and the University of Northern Iowa – where huge budget gaps forced elimination of academic programs – Pomona, Princeton, and Amherst literally have the great good fortune to be able to afford their values: providing and very rich educational experience for their students and a bully pulpit for their leaders.

President Tilghman is right to “reject the notion that a liberal arts degree has suddenly become obsolete." In many ways a liberal arts education has never been more relevant and important but sadly – realistically – demanding and depressing economic times will simply reduce its availability. 

COMMENTS:

"Thanks, Dan.  And, not only will they shrink, but they will be reserved for the elite."

-- Catharine P. Hill, president, Vassar College

Smart Strategy or Delay Tactic?

Wanted to introduce an article from Inside Higher Ed.  Once again writer Kevin Kiley expertly zeros-in on poignant and telling symptoms that urge those who care about higher education to move more quickly past palliative tactics and come up with sustainable alternatives for the future... lead, or wait and see.

I believe it represents a case study of part of the "cross roads crisis" that highered is in (and in deeper than we may realize), especially relevant to private liberal arts colleges, in this case.

In some ways the bottom-line is "What do you do when you've run out of 'next tricks/tactics'?" Is using innovative recruiting a smart strategy to buy time or a cop-out to postpone looking hard at the toughest questions?

 
If "peak oil" has passed for liberal arts colleges, are you we ready with Plan B...?

------------------------------------------------

From "The Final Frontier"

"...liberal arts colleges may be getting to a point where marketing efforts -- such as targeting new geographic regions or adding new sports or academic programs that appeal to full-paying or high-achieving prospective students -- might not be enough to keep the colleges financially viable."

“'The reality is that the type of students that most colleges want to recruit doesn’t go that deep,' Hatch said....

"Right now such short-term moves [looking for new sources of students] are holding off a significant change in how liberal arts colleges operate....

"Over the next few years, Augustana is planning to undergo a significant strategic planning initiative that will confront some of the major challenges Bahls and others believe will affect colleges like theirs over the next few decades. Among them: how to incorporate technology into the curriculum, how to address declining interest in traditional liberal arts programs, and how to change the financial model to make it more sustainable.

"The goal of the recruitment expansion is to buy the time to get that process completed."

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/25/denver-and-phoenix-could-be-last-new-hotspots-college-recruiting-then-what#ixzz1vslpLBM4 

Mea Culpa Sparks Needed Dialogue

"I readily admit it," said E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State University, who has also served as president of Vanderbilt and Brown, among others. "I didn't think a lot about costs. I do not think we have given significant thought to the impact of college costs on families." 5/13/12, NYT

From the “Turning Points” Archive comes this 2010 post…

Paraphrasing the Clinton White House: “Lower Your Overhead, Stupid!”

High education is on high alert but taking very few proactive steps to address its deepening crisis.  All of the warning signs are there.  Outcries over price, uncertain funding (from all sources), and faltering demographics add to the din: there are fewer affluent families able or willing to pay.

Growing skepticism over the value of most private colleges’ education (relative to what families think they will have to pay), is driving record numbers of students to public institutions at the same time those schools budgets are being gutted, lowering the number of students the public sector can accommodate and leaving those who are enrolled with a diminished educational experience, albeit with the perception of affordability.

Community colleges, proprietary institutions, and on-line programs seem to be in the best position if enrollment growth is any indicator – although class selection and parking availability plague many two-year colleges – and they all have a common attribute: low price and low operating expenses.

In the simplest terms, college leaders can look at income and expense.  In the past much “planning” in higher education began by looking at mission, current business procedures, and then adding the occasional exciting new initiative… and then looking at known and anticipated revenues… and then raising student fees to cover the inevitable gap.

A hot economy – families feeling flush, buoyed up with ready access to private and government credit – allowed that model to flourish.  And colleges flourished with rich curricular growth and stunning expansion of facilities. 

Now the high overhead of maintaining that which grew out of a different, departed world is threatening legacy employee benefit programs, trimming back athletics, shuttering eco-friendly vegan dining halls.  Even academic programs are disappearing (these days “we can’t call ourselves a college without a philosophy department!” is countered by “we won’t be a college if we keep it!”). 

As colleges are being challenged to assess whether they can afford their values, the planning paradigm of the past has to be flipped around and managed.  Colleges have to forecast revenue first and then make expenses fit, and no matter how painful they have to do this intentionally and collaboratively, and begin doing it as soon as possible. 

No other enterprise would protect “sacred cows,” be timid about exploring all options, or wait to let market or regulatory forces drive them.  Higher education is too important to run on cruise control any longer.

“The Power of Strategic Thinking”

The Best First Step Yet

Retiring Smith College President Carol Christ leaves a legacy of exceptional scholarship and leadership in her years at Berkeley and Smith. 

In the aftermath of the economic collapse of 2008, President Christ sensed a growing disconnect between internal and external audiences, and forces.  Some on-campus partisans felt defensive and un- or under-appreciated as off-campus groups – some trustees and the media – seemed to goad with provocative questions like “are ‘purposeful inefficiencies’ outmoded” and “can you afford your values?!”

Guided by her passion for academe and a powerful practical sense that proactive steps needed to be taken – earlier rather than later – Carol launched the “Futures Initiative” at Smith.  Designed to be a candid educational exploration and dialogue, the project engaged all stakeholders and asked them to test their assumptions, be open to learning what they didn’t know, and come together with a shared sense of purpose, specifically Smith’s prosperity but more broadly the future of higher education.

What follows is President Christ’s conclusion to article “The Power of Strategic Thinking,” which was published in the Spring, 2012 edition of AGB’s Trusteeship magazine and is offered as a model of modern college leadership and responsible stewardship.

“The final test of the success of the initiative, however, lies in the future – in whether the project has begun to build a culture of strategic thinking and a willingness to experiment with pilot projects that are, in some sense, bets about the future. There is already some evidence that this is the case; several experiments with summer programs for high-school girls and an online course for alumnae on financial independence, adapted from our successful undergraduate program, are already in development. We will know more when the working groups involved in followup projects report at the spring board meeting.

“Whatever its concrete results, the project has taught us a number of important lessons. Smith, like many colleges and universities, can tend to live in a bubble. We all cultivate a kind of exceptionalism; we believe that our own institution, whatever it is, offers a uniquely enriching experience to its students. Many faculty and staff members, who, for the most part, spend their careers at Smith, know surprisingly little about other colleges and universities, particularly those outside their academic sector, and the primary expertise of most board members is not higher education.

“It is therefore salutary for both boards and campuses to take time to think systematically about trends affecting higher education institutions. We currently live in a period of greater change in higher education than any since the immediate post-World War II years. In such a context, colleges and universities will be well served by developing a culture of strategic thinking – asking, with a sense of curiosity and adventure, how we can best avoid the risks and take advantage of the opportunities in our rapidly changing world.”

Welcome to the Party

I was so impressed by Kevin Kiley's reporting on this important thread that i wanted to include his recent article in its entirety:  thank you Kevin and Inside Higher Ed!


Welcome to the Party, by Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed

Small private liberal arts colleges with a regional orientation, such as the University of Charleston – a 1,339-student college in West Virginia with an endowment of about $30 million – have historically looked to the elites in the field, such as Williams and Swarthmore -- institutions with similarly sized student bodies but more than $1.5 billion in endowment funds -- as the trend-setters.

But, to use a phrase that’s popular in education these days, maybe it’s time to flip the classroom.

At a conference at Lafayette College last week, a group of about 200 administrators from some of the top residential liberal arts colleges in the country – those with national reputations, significant financial resources, and high demand, particularly among students and families with the means and willingness to pay full price – discussed challenges facing the liberal arts sector and how they might confront them.

Those challenges include a changing college-going demographic that will result in fewer upper-class students, the traditional pool for a residential liberal arts colleges; increasing skepticism among the public about the value of a liberal arts degree with no direct ties to a profession; the rising costs of educating a student, which will likely result in even higher tuition; and a changing understanding of technology that might require greater inclusion of technology in the curriculum, both as a tool for learning and a subject.

It is only in the past few years that much of this group has engaged in a national conversation about these issues. But to say the questions are new might overstate the situation. “Some of these issues might be new for them, but they’re not necessarily new for small privates,” said Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, a group that represents the more than 600 small private colleges, including many that were present at last week’s conference. “It’s just that more of them are having to contend with these issues than in the past.”

Organizers of last week's conference invited only a small portion of the residential liberal arts sector – those that are ranked highly in U.S. News and World Report’s ranking of national liberal arts colleges -- to keep the conference small and focused on institutions with similar concerns.

The colleges that make up the rest of the sector, most of which don’t have the financial cushion of the elites, have confronted these issues over the past two decades. In that time, many have made significant changes to how they operate, from both administrative and curricular perspectives. Administrators at many of these colleges say the elites, which are now starting to consider these fundamental questions, might benefit from exploring how the rest of the field has adapted.

Administrators from such institutions also express more anxiety about the next few years and the challenges that lie ahead than do their elite counterparts. At the same time, they note that the anxiety and pressure can make them more open to experimentation and change than institutions that don’t feel as much heat. “If you’re enrollment-driven, you have to be open to change,” said Duane Bonifer, director of public relations for Lindsey Wilson College. “Either you’re open to change or you close.”

The conversation at the Lafayette conference had a more measured tone than the general conversation that surrounds liberal arts colleges. In general, the presidents at the conference said that while they plan to tinker around the edges and make some curricular and operational changes, they didn’t think the current challenges would lead to a fundamental revision of their model of education, which emphasizes face-to-face interaction with faculty members and a residential experience.  

But that confidence might be limited to the top of the pack. Bonifer from Lindsey Wilson said that while his college has never been in a stronger position with regard to enrollment and finance, he and other administrators are anxious that changes in the higher education landscape could make their current model irrelevant. “We all know that higher education is going to be different 10 years from now, we just don’t know what it will look like,” he said. “And that makes everyone so anxious.”

 
Bonifer said he could easily see a world where, in two decades, Lindsey Wilson looks significantly different in how it operates than it does today. That new model could include more distance education programs, more courses taught online by faculty members at other institutions, or more professional and graduate programs. The big concern he said he and other administrators have is that nobody knows exactly what changes might be required, so adopting any solutions right now could be counterproductive. Most of the presidents at the Lafayette conference wouldn’t share that view about their own institutions.

While some small college administrators are afraid of what they see on the horizon, others say they’re facing very real challenges right now. “When you have for-profits, distance education, a national emphasis on community colleges, and on the other side you have economic challenges that have a real impact on what families do and the decisions they make, you better be looking at innovating,” said Edwin H. Welch, president of the University of Charleston. His institution made headlines in November when it announced a 22 percent cut in tuition. “We’ve got to be thinking, ‘How can we deliver the same level of quality at a lower cost?’ ”

The fact that such colleges are worried is not something the rest of higher education is celebrating, but that pressure can drive such institutions to experiment, which will provide examples for others to learn from.

“Don’t take anything off the table,” Bonifer said. “You have to be able to consider every opportunity. You can’t outright say no. The question should be, ‘Why can’t you do something?’ ”

Lindsey Wilson, which has an endowment of about $50 million, has made some significant changes in the past few years, including opening the college up to more transfers from community colleges. And it is not alone. Many colleges that for years taught a traditional liberal arts curriculum have in added professional and master's programs, such as nursing and business. Others have changed their orientation to try to tap into new markets and reach certain demographics.

G. T. (Buck) Smith, president of Davis & Elkins College, another small private institution in West Virginia that traditionally taught a narrow liberal arts curriculum, said in recent years his college added programs in environmental and sustainability studies, hospitality management, and Appalachian studies, and is considering adding programs in early childhood learning, clinical psychology, and religious studies. "We haven’t survived with a silver spoon," he said. "Rather we know what it means not to rest on our laurels, but to scrap for every dollar, and then spend it wisely."

At the Lafayette conference, presidents noted that they probably have something to learn from what has been happening among lower-ranked colleges, and several presidents said they would like to expand the conversation. Ekman said there is a role for his organization to play in facilitating that discussion. At its annual presidents' institute next January, the council hopes to hold a workshop that brings together liberal arts colleges across the spectrum to tackle some of these issues. “Everybody needs help thinking about these issues,” he said.

One of the major themes to emerge from the Lafayette conference, pushed heavily by representatives from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which helped support the conference, was that liberal arts colleges need to do a better job collaborating, not just with one another, but also with other sectors of higher education and beyond.

Presidents and other administrators said that, in general, there has been some reluctance among national liberal arts colleges – which often compete in admissions – to get together on academic matters. But there’s nothing like a crisis to make you rethink who your friends are, which was evident in the conference itself and organizers’ calls for further discussion about these issues.   

It is also evident among those institutions that have had a longer and deeper struggle, which have begun integrating in significant ways. The Independent College Enterprise, a group of nine small colleges in West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Massachusetts, has been collaborating on administrative services since the late 1990s. The group pooled resources to purchase shared administrative software, which the presidents in the organization estimate to have save each campus millions of dollars since it was purchased.

Sharing the service also allowed the consortium to share the employees required to service it. The consortium has seven staff members, all of whom are specialists in some area of the software, such as a database administrator and a student systems coordinator. If the campuses still ran their own system support, they would each have three staff members who were generalists in the software. As a result they get better service, Welch said.

The group is also starting to share some academic programs. Despite stretching a geographic area of more than 300 miles, five colleges in the consortium -- University of Charleston, Bethany College, Davis & Elkins College, Emory & Henry College and West Virginia Wesleyan College -- are launching a shared remedial math program next year. In the program, funded through the Teagle Foundation, a faculty member hired jointly by the consortium will teach a course through distance education technology to students on the five campuses. At each campus, local facilitators will help students learn the material.

“If there is some way we can save institutional dollars while delivering the same educational experience, that could be both better for the school and better for the students,” Welch said.

Michael P. Mihalyo, chancellor of Davis & Elkins, said the consortium chose to start with a remedial math program because the institutions faced a growing number of students requiring remediation.

The University of Charleston is also putting together another shared course with West Virginia Wesleyan, wherein a faculty member at West Virginia Wesleyan will teach American history courses to students on both campuses. That professor will also occasionally travel back and forth between the two campuses.

Charleston and its partners are hardly the first group of institutions to collaborate in this way. Small colleges across the country have formed several partnerships to share faculty in certain fields. Languages have proven particularly popular. This week a group of five liberal arts colleges in Texas announced that they would be teaching languages across the institutions using video conferencing software. The Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, many of which are regional in orientation and don’t show up high on the U.S. News rankings, also has some resource sharing programs in place.

 
Welch said the college is working to balance the financial challenges it faces with trying to maintain the identity of a college known for face-to-face interaction. “The challenge for residential liberal arts colleges is that, understandably, there is a great commitment to face-to-face interactions,” he said. “At the same time, can we take advantage of efficiencies of technology and distance learning?

“We can experiment with blended learning without endangering the fact that students need residential experience and talented mentors in learning.”

But the proliferation of such groups likely provides good fodder for places that are looking to integrate in deeper ways.

Bonifer said the country’s top liberal arts institutions aren’t likely to get knocked out of their positions any time soon. The larger threat, he said, is that the world will continue to change around them. “These schools that are good schools are still going to be good schools,” he said. “But they’re not going to be the only good schools.”

Has Private Higher Education Hit the Price Ceiling?

Is “college wasted on the young?”

When I was Admissions Director at Penn I remember dreading when the annual cost of attendance would begin with a “2.”  About twenty-five years ago, when Penn crested the $20,000 annual tariff, I hosted an admitted student reception in Chicago and, after the opening remarks pivoted to the meet-and-mingle, a dad accosted me by the podium.  His remarks presaged the ensuing, ongoing dialogue: “$20,000 a year!?  That’s ridiculous!  I’d never pay that much for Penn – Princeton maybe – never Penn!  This is ridiculous!” As ridiculous as a $20,000 per year price tag seemed, this dad did bring his son to the session (I do not remember where the boy ended up). 

Many have been wondering when higher education will “hit the ceiling,” what price point will roil the markets?  I may have some answers.

We hit the ceiling about 25 years ago but haven't been spanked hard yet because enough parents seem to continue to care more about educating their kids than insuring their own retirement.  But that has been changing, and it seems the pace of attitude change is accelerating.

I recently polled my Amherst College classmates.  Most have sent their kids to college and shared the refrain “I am glad that is over.”  When asked if college is worth $60,000/year the vast majority said “no,” unless 1) it is a truly resource-rich, prestigious institution and 2) their child was smart/ambitious enough to take full advantage of the experience.  Their replies suggest a new view of expensive colleges as an intellectual and cultural Disneyworld that turn Shaw’s suggestion that “youth is wasted on the young” on its head: “college is wasted on students!”

(That same group of Lord Jeff alums unequivocally said that they "hire performers not colleges names," so the residual value of the Old Boy/Girl Network has quickly waned.)

Taking a broader look I gathered information from the parents of students applying to expensive private colleges this spring.  The results would surprise anyone who has not spoken to a parent recently:  there are fewer wealthy families out there and those who are looking at pricey colleges agree with my classmates, they are willing to pay much less than stick price.  In fact, the most affluent indicated they would pay about a quarter (24% to be precise) of what the national financial needs-analysis suggests they can afford.  This data display was called “eye popping” at a recent gathering of college officials:



As good a job as colleges do identifying and articulating their Value Propositions, that won’t be enough.  One college president recently made the comparison to luxury car sales, and the audience appreciatively got the metaphor.  Walking home two things occurred to me: parents are “sold but not buying…” and almost 150 colleges charge as much as four luxury cars for a degree.

In addition to the job of recruiting and selecting a class, admissions directors are also a great source of market intel.  We have been watching the price ceiling for a long time, and have seen it is more elastic than brittle.  But that is changing and our message to our colleagues in the most senior leadership positions is “pay attention.”  Very soon a rebalancing of overhead expense and revenue will occur.  It is not too early to begin comprehensive examinations of ways that might most successfully work.

The Hot New College Amenity: Affordability

A lot is going on in and around higher education now.  Politicians pontificate, trustees debate tuition increases, parents worry about tuition increases, and kids are swamped with recruiting material.

When colleges discuss tuition pricing there can be a disingenuous "this is going to hurt me more than it will you" undertone to the dialogue. Disingenuous because colleges have been rolling up price with abandon, and been rewarded for it.  But now the unrelenting pattern of price increases, the current economic straightjacket, and some pundits identifying a link between increases in government assistance and further price spikes are combining to turn the tide.  Colleges do face the very real possibility of feeling the hurt more than families.

Mt Holyoke College is perhaps the most high-profile college to realize that, as tough as it will be to leave money on the table now, it might be even tougher not to: by deciding to hold next year's tuition at this year's level, Mt Holyoke signals it "gets it" and positions itself in a potentially stronger position in the long-term... which is the way leadership is supposed to think.  Last year Sewanee reduced tuition by 10% and the Sage Colleges have held tuition constant for the past three years, both colleges have been rewarded for their stance, with enrollment up 24% at Sage.

 Most parents (80% in a survey of the Class of 1976 at Amherst College) feel modern amenities – attractive as they may be – are the main culprit in pushing price past a point they can or will pay.  And those who cannot pay state in no uncertain terms that there is a clear outside limit to the amount of future earnings (AKA loans) they are willing to garnish.  It seems affordability is the most desirable amenity this season.  (That same group of Lord Jeff alums unequivocally said that they "hire performers not colleges names," so the residual value of the Old Boy/Girl Network has quickly waned.)

Yes, the wealthy are willing to pay more, but... other information shows that the least affluent are willing to pay close to what the common financial aid formulas suggest.  That same analysis showed, staggeringly, that with each tick up the affluence scale, the ability to pay quickly and far outpaced the willingness to pay: if the poorest would offer 88% of their expected family contribution, the wealthiest would offer 24% of their fair share.  It seems questions about the value of an expensive college education are pitted against lifestyle concerns here-and-now and in retirement.

The Mt Holyoke story is newsworthy because of the oddly contrarian nature of the decision.  When an institution with a $600 million endowment and a robust applicant pool takes the long view and decides hitting the $75,000-a-year mark on annual attendance isn't a net positive, we know the days of the "Chivas Regal Syndrome" – when price was a proxy for quality – are over and, according to parents and pundits: good riddance.

Four years ago a dad from California wrote "Colleges have to learn to operate more efficiently. Maybe the answer is a 'no frills' education: forget palatial grounds and touchy-feely 'campus life'; just bare-bones classrooms, virtual libraries, and dedicated instructors (not researchers)."

 In January a group of private college presidents met at Marco Island, Florida.  The topic of the sustainability of the status quo came up repeatedly.  In the Q&A of one session a president offered this view as to why the wake-up call hasn't been heeded: most colleges "haven't gotten to the point of desperation" that would encourage a different approach.  Many parents have gotten to that point and they may be applauding Sage, Sewanee, and Holyoke.

We are reminded that there's always more room to maneuver, to be thoughtful, and enjoy a broader range of options earlier rather than later.  Why wait to get to the point of desperation?

The value of a college degree has never been more important nor has the value of an educated citizenry.  That is why the issue of college access and affordability is so hot.  All stakeholders have a role to play, and leaders on the provider side need to make some difficult and forward-thinking decisions as responsible stewards of an important national resource.