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.”
