No, It’s Not Just the Enrollment Crisis—It’s Also Time to Modify Our Learning Paradigm

Those providing leadership for colleges and universities in the United States are facing increasingly complex and unrelenting challenges that stretch their capacity to understand fully and to respond effectively to what the future may hold. Trustees, presidents, and faculty can be so focused on implementing “best practices” in operational processes or governance that they fail to step back to ask overarching, complex, strategic questions that in many cases will determine their institutions’ long-term success, or survival. We have entered a period of necessary systemic change in higher education institutions overall—and in private liberal arts colleges, in particular. The urgency and magnitude of these external forces require holistic, well-informed, strategic thinking, and decision-making by trustees, administrators, and faculty—collaborating together—that can produce truly innovative solutions.

Two Complex and Intertwined External Forces

Of the many external forces higher education must address, two in particular interact to create an urgent and compelling need for colleges and universities to engage in a systematic assessment of their enrollment/financial (i.e., net tuition) model and the effectiveness of their traditional teaching/learning paradigm. Today’s challenges may seem daunting, but they also represent compelling opportunities for institutions to reimagine their futures in a rapidly changing world.

Enrollment/Financial Trends. Overall enrollments at small colleges and universities have been declining for more than a decade and a precipitous enrollment decline for all sectors will begin in 2026. Current revenue strategies that presume continued enrollment growth and untethered tuition discounting are unsustainable. Some salient markers of this complex enrollment/financial challenge are as follows:

• There will be a small increase in high school graduates between 2020–2025 after which there will be a precipitous 9 percent drop in 2026 that won’t bottom out until 2031.¹
• In the Northeast and the Midwest, the number of high school graduates peaked in 2010, and starting in 2026 there will be 12–15 percent fewer graduates each year until 2032.
• Even with an average 52.2 percent tuition discount rate for first-year students, only 34 percent of private colleges and universities poled met their enrollment targets in 2019.²
• A 2019 survey found that 79 percent of colleges said they intend to increase their enrollment to make their budgets balance.³
• Moody’s expects 4 percent operating-expense growth this coming year with 50 percent of public university and 40 percent of private colleges falling below 3 percent revenue growth—hence, Moody’s “negative” financial outlook for all of higher education.
• Seventy-one percent of chief financial officers at colleges and universities agree that the educational delivery model of higher education institutions in the United States is in financial crisis.
• The late 2019 consent agreement between the U.S Department of Justice and the National Association for College Admission Counseling that permits colleges to recruit students after they declare their intention to enroll (or already are enrolled) elsewhere will intensify competition for students and predictably decrease already low net tuition.
• About a dozen private colleges have been closing or merging annually and some higher education insiders who have seen “stress tests” of a considerable number of small colleges say 20 percent or more are in danger of closing in the next two decades.

To this overall unsustainable enrollment and budgetary picture for many colleges and universities, increasingly negative public sentiment adds an additional headwind. With American college student debt now above $1.6 trillion, we should not be surprised by a 2018 Pew study that reports that 61 percent of Americans say higher education is “going in the wrong direction because tuition costs are too high (84 percent) and students don’t get the skills they need to succeed in the workplace (65 percent).” This sentiment is leading many students and their families to make their final college choice based on cost alone.

Questions for trustees, administrators, and faculty to ask together include:

1. Have we studied the impact of the precipitous enrollment decline in 2026 on our college’s admissions territories and adjusted our enrollment/revenue projections accordingly?
2. Have we performed an inclusive “financial stress test” for our institution that includes data from both internal (e.g., net tuition/income trends, discount rate, etc.) and external (e.g., endowment market projections, Moody’s rating, etc.) sources?

Challenges to Our Current Teaching/Learning Paradigm. If the first major challenge to many higher education institutions is the increasing unsustainability of their enrollment-based financial model, the second threat strikes at the heart of higher education’s traditional teaching/learning paradigm. The traditional liberal arts learning model of “general education breadth plus disciplinary depth” typically takes institutional form in the myriad academic disciplines, departments, and majors on college campuses, plus a general studies program. The rise of land grant and public universities during the previous century added professional and graduate programs to this liberal arts education paradigm.

With 7,418 different disciplinary PhD programs now being offered by universities around the world, the increasingly narrow specialization of faculty makes it difficult for the current disciplinary teaching/learning paradigm to provide the holistic and integrative problem-solving skills college students need to live and work in the 21st century. Some markers shaping the world in which our students currently study, live, and work include the following:

• Two recent decades of digital innovations—public Internet (1994), Google (1998), Wikipedia (2001)—have provided virtually unlimited access to information previously available primarily in the classroom and the library.
• Other digital innovations like Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006), and Instagram (2010) have created not only instant communications and strong affinity groups across the globe, but also multiple claims of what is “fact” or “true.”
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) plus big data have created what some call the “robot economy” that has already displaced many blue- and white-collar jobs and require response by our colleges’ current teaching/learning paradigm, and the displacement is expected to increase exponentially in the years ahead.
• The digital revolution has transformed the teaching and learning environment in positive ways with digital tools like virtual reality applications across the whole curricula.
• AI plus big data have also made possible competency-based online education and digital tutors that enable students to learn at their own pace and for less cost.
• With 70 percent of high school graduates seeking a college education, we should not be surprised that students focus on work-place skills in their college choices.⁴
• A total of 1,694,229 exclusively online students studied at public and private colleges and universities in 2017, reducing the potential for new on-campus enrollment markets.⁵
• Complex and persistent global issues like climate change, gender inequality, radical religious conflicts, economic inequality, and polarized politics around the world do not lend themselves to single disciplinary solutions.

A 2018 Chronicle of Higher Education report says current GenZ’s digitally native students “are accustomed to learning by toggling between the real and virtual worlds….[and] prize project-based learning and undergraduate research that will hone crucial, marketable skills for life after college.”⁶ This description effectively represents the expectations of many student and adult learners in our 21st-century learning environment. Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s 2011 book title, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating Imagination for a World of Constant Change, names this digitally infused environment. This “new culture of learning” aligns well with the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ (AAC&U) notion of the “practical liberal arts” that “seeks to empower individuals and prepare them to deal with complexity, diversity, and change.” AAC&U’s leadership has claimed that “integrative learning is the new frontier for 21st century learning,”⁷ and a good number of faculty and deans of colleges and universities are using “active learning” and/or “integrative learning” as an organizing principle for their general education programs or overall student learning goals.⁸

Using AAC&U’s “practical liberal arts” as a baseline, I have argued that the battle between providing students with a “liberal arts” versus a “professional” education is a false dichotomy.⁹ Furthermore, the AAC&U’s “practical liberal arts” focus seeks to provide a student/learning/outcomes driven paradigm instead of the typical faculty/teaching/inputs model. Some universities like Carnegie Mellon University have for decades included liberal education with professional education in a technology-rich learning environment whose main focus is to enhance student learning.

Questions for trustees, administrators, and faculty to ask together include:

1. Do our current academic structures, curricula, and learning goals provide our students not only depth in their liberal arts or professional majors but also holistic, multidisciplinary, integrative problem-solving skills that we assess?
2. What is the best way for us to organize our teaching/learning resources (i.e., curricula, faculty, student support, etc.) to enhance student learning in a financially sustainable way?

Strategic Thinking and Planning Move beyond Best Practices

Mary Marcy provides an excellent illustration of the difference between best practices and strategic thinking in her 2017 AGB white paper, The Small College Imperative: From Survival to Transformation. Most colleges and universities are responding to significant external and internal challenges in episodic and partial ways that often become “best practices” emulated by others. New on-campus or online academic programs are added to attract new enrollment cohorts. Faculty incorporate new materials or technologies into their classrooms or laboratories or add “active learning” components (e.g., undergraduate research, case-based projects, study abroad, etc.) to some students’ college experience. As important as these best practices are, what is often missing is a systematic effort to focus these many good practices around an agreed upon, holistic, strategic vision for the institution that provides integrative learning and complex problem-solving in both the disciplines and general studies programs for all students—and in a financially sustainable way.

Marcy describes the landscape for small colleges in five operational financial/academic models:

1. Traditional Model: The private, traditional liberal arts college model is where most private colleges began but is now sustainable by only a very few elite colleges with very large endowments and robust application pools. Marcy cites Amherst, Pomona, Swarthmore, and Williams as examples.
2. New American College Model: Marcy says that this group includes the “vast majority of nonelite small private colleges in the country” that maintain their liberal arts core and residential experience but add undergraduate (e.g., nursing or engineering) as well as master’s (e.g., MBA) programs. Marcy says of this group, “So many colleges and universities have now added graduate and professional programs that there is no longer any market distinction in doing so.” While important to institutional effectiveness, “best practices” like these typically lead to what Harvard’s Michael Porter calls “competitive convergence”—that is, a loss of any competitive distinctiveness.
3. Distinctive Program Model: Typically, such colleges add a signature academic program to the new American College model. Here, Marcy includes Agnes Scott College, whose Summit Program focuses the college’s whole institution on providing women students with global awareness and leadership abilities in an attempt to improve enrollment and to enhance learning for all its students.
4. Expansion Model: Marcy describes such colleges as having “limited remaining liberal arts commitment [with a] focus on additional and professional and graduate programs and enrollment growth” to provide more income. Marcy offers Utica College and Drew University as examples of this model though neither school was founded as a liberal arts college and both schools currently have traditional liberal arts general education requirements for their undergraduates. This model might best be included as a subset of Marcy’s fifth model.
5. Expansion and Separation Model: Such colleges add branch campuses or online students to expand their programs and enrollments beyond their home campuses. Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) is a pertinent example given by Marcy. Using AI plus big data to provide an interactive online student learning environment, SNHU has added a separate, competency-based, self-paced online college to its 3,500-student main campus. With more than 130,000 online students and more than 2,700 part-time faculty in 2019, SNHU’s online college has become a primary “resource engine” for the whole university.

Marcy’s models are appropriate starting points for trustees and administrations to assess where their private college or university fits into the current educational landscape. Any thorough strategic planning process would consider all of Marcy’s models, plus additional models, by placing them in the external context described above and developing an institution-specific vision.

My book, Strategic Thinking and Planning in Higher Education—A Focus on the Future, provides specific examples of how different modes of strategic thinking (e.g., design thinking at Arizona State University, scenario thinking at Smith College, etc.) have been used to provide a holistic institutional vision (or alternative visions) that engage contemporary external challenges. Henry Mintzberg of McGill University equates strategic thinking with “seeing” from multiple perspectives:

• Ahead and behind: “Any good vision of the future has to be rooted in an understanding of the past.”
• Above and below: Holistic, big-picture thinking has to be supported by exhaustive “deep digging” into relevant internal and external data and information.
• Beside and beyond: Lateral or unconventional thinking seeks to construct a new future, but it is only strategic “if it gets done!”,¹⁰

Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great and the Social Sectors, says that the difference between failed nonprofit institutions and enduring ones (from orchestras to private colleges) is that the successful ones based their strategies “on a deep understanding along three key dimensions: (1) What are you deeply passionate about? (2) What can you be the best in the world at doing? (3) What drives your resource engine?” Collins calls his threefold strategic thinking process the “Hedgehog Principle.” These three strategic questions parallel Mintzberg’s three modes of “seeing” but specifically include the interdependence of mission/vision, select program excellence, and financial viability.

Collins says that strategic planning is efficacious only if it helps an institution determine not only what it does (or could do) best, but what it should stop doing—a real challenge for higher education’s “add-on” without “stop doing” cultural expectations. Strategic thinking can be utilized to conduct a specific academic program review or to direct a campus-wide strategic planning process. One way to compare traditional planning processes with ones that use strategic thinking can be summarized this way:

Strategic Thinking vs. Other Planning

Strategic Thinking vs. Other Planning

Strategic Thinking                                           Long-Range/Other Planning

>Future/Vision oriented                                 >Mission/status-quo oriented

>Focuses on environment                              >Focuses on institution

>Oriented toward change                              >Oriented toward stability

>Develops Integrated actions                         >Develops segmented actions

>Creates synergistic outcomes                       >Creates individual outcomes                   
Goal: “Sustainable Distinctiveness”             Goal: “Institutional Excellence”

Most “strategic plans” are not strategic because they too often promote necessary “best practices” in five-year time frames without asking more fundamental/systemic questions that could reorient the whole institution. Best practices are intended to improve current governance, enrollment, curricular, and operational practices. A successful strategic planning process should provide an institution with a strategic vision that generates passion, programmatic distinctiveness, and results in sustainable financial resources over the long term. As important as best practices are, by definition they do not typically provide a college or university with a competitive edge.

Strategic thinking and planning are best accomplished in what the AGB Board of Directors’ 2017 white paper on Innovation in Higher Education calls “a culture of innovation” that supports “bold responses and creative solutions.” The paper rightly notes that an institution’s “culture determines and limits strategy,” since innovation requires “stakeholders who recognize the need for change to be engaged in that process.” The AGB paper provides six principles for innovation that suggest that building a culture of innovation requires presidential and board leadership as well as collaboration with faculty. This paper’s list of innovations includes both best practices (e.g., the creation of flexible faculty reward systems) and strategic direction for the whole institution (e.g., SNHU’s transformation through adding a national online college).

The culture of shared governance on college campuses can be the facilitator or, too often, the impediment to both innovation and strategic planning. Marcy agrees when she says, “Actually transforming an institution around a common vision is a challenging objective because it demands that shared-governance models focus on the needs of the students and the sustainability of the institution.” These observations make clear why faculty must be at the table with trustees and presidents and administrators in understanding and responding to current higher education challenges in ways that expand traditional notions of shared governance for all involved.

Questions for trustees, administrators, and faculty to ask together include:

1.  Is our current strategic plan strategic and, if not, how best can our institution’s leadership create a strategic planning process that will address in innovative ways current external challenges to our institution’s sustainability?
2. What issues in our institution’s shared governance and decision-making culture do we need to address to enable real innovation in our strategic thinking and planning?

The Intersection of Shared Governance and Leadership in Thinking Institutionally

Steven Bahls, in his book Shared Governance in Time of Change, provides a useful summary of three types of shared governance models that exist on college and university campuses and advocates for a new, fourth model that says presidents, trustees, and faculty “should seek to align institutional priorities”—together.¹¹ This view of shared governance dovetails well with AGB’s notion of “integral leadership” by presidents and trustees “which links the president, faculty, and board in a well-functioning partnership devoted to a well-defined, broadly affirmed institutional vision” as described in The Leadership Imperative.¹² However, the actual governance culture and strategic planning processes on many private college or university campuses are far more complex, and messy, than these recommendations for collaborative constituent roles recommend.

First of all, on virtually all college and university campuses there are positive core values that are in tension within and among trustee, administrator, and faculty constituencies. These tensions include: teaching vs. research; liberal vs. professional education; undergraduate vs. graduate education; tradition vs. change; transparency vs. confidentiality; authority vs. participation; and faculty-centered vs. student-centered decision-making. These and other competing values form a key part of the cultural context on most college or university campuses and often result in passionate disagreements in any strategic thinking process that recommends substantial change—even when all parties agree that change is needed.

Second, there are nearly immutable lines drawn on most campuses between the “authority” and final decision-making responsibility of trustees and administrators who oversee financial matters (e.g., budgets, endowment management, etc.) and of faculty who assume primary responsibility for academic matters (e.g., curriculum, student learning goals, etc.). With major changes needed in both the financial and academic areas, this division in responsibilities can be a huge impediment in collective decision-making on most campuses. The combination of disagreements about which core values support which decisions and who should make the final decisions complicate “shared” governance even more in tough financial times.

A recent example is the charge by the faculty senate at Tulsa University that the strategic planning process led by the provost violated shared governance practices in finalizing the “True Commitment” plan that cuts approximately 40 percent of the university’s arts and sciences programs and reorganizes the rest into divisions. The faculty have now gone to court to ask the attorney general of Oklahoma to overturn the administration’s and board’s repeated decisions to move forward with the plan. A counter example is the innovative Summit Program at Agnes Scott College. Questions about the financial viability of the 600-women Agnes Scott College were ultimately engaged by the president, board, and faculty together. Through leadership by the president and regular collaboration between all three constituencies over more than a year’s time, the Summit Program that focuses on leadership and global awareness for women students is now infused in a thoroughly revised curriculum, a four-person advising board for each student, a study abroad or off-campus experience for each student, and a revitalization of campus life programs. In the fall of 2018, Agnes Scott had its largest enrollment ever at 1,040, with nearly 90 percent of new students saying the Summit Program played a significant role in their enrollment decision. However, the typical cultural tensions may have expressed themselves, Agnes Scott’s reconceived institutional vision is a good example of why strategic planning participants—trustees, administrators, and faculty—must rise above their constituency roles to “think institutionally.”

In his monograph called Thinking Institutionally, Hugh Heclo says that individual and constituent disagreements and distrust can be healthy if they are grounded in a sincere commitment to an institution shared with others. Processes of strategic thinking require participants to reflect holistically and comprehensively about their institution and its future instead of thinking out of their institutional roles as a member of “the faculty member,” “the trustees,” or “the administration.” Heclo concludes, “To think institutionally is to stretch your time horizon backwards and forwards so that both the shadows of the past and future lengthen into the present.”¹³ That, in essence, is what trustees, administrators, and faculty are asked to do in Mintzberg’s or Collins’ “strategic thinking” questioning.

Such collaborative, holistic, and innovative thinking can only occur if there is courageous leadership within each major constituency. Strategic planners Joanne Soliday and Rick Mann have concluded that leadership in thriving colleges must be both collaborative and courageous. They conclude that colleges that are the best at confronting their challenges have “strong leadership teams, engaged and strategic board members, and courageous presidents who stay.”¹⁴ Such leadership is critical in today’s supercharged shared governance environment where it is too common to assign blame about who is responsible for an institution’s particular threat rather than focus on the crisis itself.

In today’s world, effective, change-oriented, strategic planning can occur only if all three major constituencies together take responsibility for understanding and systematically addressing the complex and interrelated external forces of the current enrollment/financial crisis and the inescapable challenges to higher education’s traditional teaching/learning paradigm The Summit Program at Agnes Scott College is not only a good example of shared governance but also one that has addressed its significant enrollment/financial challenges by creating integrative learning goals, curricula, and programs around leadership and international awareness for women that its applicants and current students find compelling. Such strategic thinking and planning essentially requires of all three groups of institutional leaders the kind of integrative and holistic problem-solving for our higher education institutions that the 21st century’s communities and workplaces expect of the students we teach.

Endnotes

1. The enrollment statistics and projections in this essay come from Nathan D. Grawe’s excellent book, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018 or his essay in the list of Recommended Common Readings. The sources for the remainder of the bullets come from articles, surveys, and reports published in the past three years by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, AGB’s Trusteeship, and online data bases.
2. Regarding the 52.2 percent discount rate see: “A Turbulent Future for Enrollment.” The Looming Enrollment Crisis. Washington, D.C.: The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2019. p. 14. Regarding 34% see: Carlson, Scott. “At the Precipice: Six in ten college missed their fall enrollments.” Washington D.C.: The Chronicle of Higher Education. March 20, 2020. pp. 42–45.
3. “The 2019 Inside Higher Ed Survey of College and University Admissions Officers: A study by Gallup and Inside Higher Ed.” Washington, D.C.: Inside Higher Ed and Gallup, 2019.
4. National Center for Education Statistics, Immediate College Enrollment Rate, February 2019, online at https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cpa.asp
5. “How Far Do Colleges Go to Reach Exclusively Online Students?” Washington D.C.: The Chronicle of Higher Education. October 18, 2019, p. A27
6. Selingo, Jeffrey. “The New Generations of Students: How colleges can recruit, teach, and serve Gen Z.” Washington DC: The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018.
7. Schneider, Carol Geary. “General Education 1.0: An efficiency overhaul for the Cold War Curriculum.” Liberal Education, 96(4), p. 2.
8. Association of American Colleges and Universities. LEAP Vision for Learning: Outcomes, Practices, Impact, and Employers’ Views. Washington, D.C.: AAC&U, 2011.
9. Shinn, Larry D, “Liberal Education vs. Professional Education: The False Choice.” Washington DC: Trusteeship. January/February 2014. Pp. 45-48.
10. Lampel, Joseph B., Henry Mintzberg, James Brian Quinn, and Sumantra Ghoshal. The Strategy Process: Concepts, Context, Cases, 5th Ed. New York: Pearson, 2014, pp.197-99.
11. Bahls, Steven C. Shared Governance in Times of Change: A Practical Guide for Universities and Colleges. Washington D.C.: The AGB Press, 2014, p. 27.
12. Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. The Leadership Imperative: The Report of the AGB Taskforce on the State of the Presidency in American Higher Education. Washington D.C.: Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. 2006.
13. Heclo, Hugh. On Thinking Institutionally. Boulder, Colorado: Paradiigm, 2008, p. 109.
14. Soliday, Joanne and Rick Mann. Surviving to Thriving: A Planning Framework for Leaders of Private Colleges & Universities. Whitsett, North Carolina: Credo Press, 2013, pp. 18ff.

Larry D. Shinn, PhD, is an AGB senior consultant and a former president of Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, and a trustee emeritus of the University of Mount Union in Alliance, Ohio. 

Recommended Common Readings for Trustees, Administrators & Faculty

Association of American Colleges and Universities. LEAP Vision for Learning: Outcomes, Practices, Impact, and Employers’ Views. Washington, D.C.: AAC&U, 2011.

Association of Governing Boards. “AGB Board of Director’s Statement on Innovation in Higher Education.” Association of Governing Boards, 2017.

Bahls, Steven C. Shared Governance in Times of Change: A Practical Guide for Universities. Washington, D.C.: The AGB Press, 2014.

Blumenstyk, Goldie, and Lee Gardner. The Innovation Imperative: The Buzz, the Barriers, and What Real Change Looks Like. Washington, D.C.: The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2019.

Grawe, Nathan. “Advancing the Liberal Arts in the Face of Demographic Change.” Liberal Education. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges and Universities, Vol. 104, No. 4, Fall 2018.

Kelderman, Eric, and Lee Gardner. The Looming Enrollment Crisis: How Colleges are Responding to Shifting Demographics and New Student Needs. Washington, D.C.: The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2019.

Marcy, Mary B. The Small College Imperative: From Survival to Transformation. Washington, D.C.: An AGB White Paper, May, 2017.

Shinn, Larry D. “Liberal Education vs. Professional Education: The False Choice.” Trusteeship. January/February 2014, pp. 45–48.

Shinn, Larry D. Strategic Thinking and Planning in Higher Education: A Focus on the Future. Washington D,C.,: AGB Press, 2017.

Zemsky, Robert, Susan Shaman, and Susan Campbell Baldridge, “Will Your College Close?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 6, 2020, pp. 27-31.

TAKEAWAYS

• Holistic, well-informed, strategic thinking is needed when trustees and their institutions make decisions about the future. There are many external forces putting pressure on higher education institutions today. Two include acute enrollment/financial pressures and necessary revisions of the current teaching/learning paradigm.
• Enrollments have declined in most higher education sectors since 2010 and all colleges and universities will see precipitous declines in high school graduates starting in 2026. The current teaching/learning paradigm and narrow disciplinary specialization for faculty makes it difficult to provide students with holistic and integrative problem-solving skills they need to be effective workers and citizens in the 21st century.
• Strategic thinking is seeing from multiple perspectives in order to really understand the whole picture, according to Henry Mintzberg. Jim Collins agrees but includes the interdependence of mission and vision, select program excellence, and financial viability. Collins says strategic planning must help an institution learn what to do and, also, what to stop doing.
• Shared governance should consist of a well-functioning partnership between the president, faculty, and the board working together to align their institution’s priorities. Governance and strategic thinking can be messy on campuses because of the division of responsibilities leading to disagreements in decision-making. Instead of these divisions, strategic thinking requires participants to reflect holistically about their institution and its future.

 

 

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