
- It is critical for that institutions examine mission statements to make sure they are current, relevant, and effective in charting a course for the future.
- Universities cannot be everything to everyone. Too many strategic goals can undermine a core strategy.
- Boards may need to realign their internal structure to enable strategic change.
- If innovation is important, it needs a place within the institutional structure and
support from the highest levels. - To retain students, colleges and universities need to align educational programs,
counseling, and student support services. - Improving transfer pathways between two-year and private four-year institutions could enhance the financial health of four-year colleges while raising baccalaureate attainment for community college students.
Twenty years ago, Michael Crow joined Arizona State University (ASU) as a new president committed to creating the âNew American University,â as he termed it in his inaugural address. That new pedagogic model would move toward accelerated and continuous innovation, would embrace egalitarian higher education and eschew exclusionary admissions practices, and would match technological advancements in STEM subject research with corresponding liberal arts advances.
That vision has largely been realized, Crow says. ASU has 140,759 students (total) this Fall, up from 55,491 in 2002, including 61,572 online students. In particular, STEM subject graduates have skyrocketed, with engineering graduates increasing from 4,799 in 2002 to 30,000 last year. In fiscal year 2020, the university ranked sixth for research expenditures among institutions without a medical school, according to the National Science Foundation Higher Education Research and Development rankings. The percentage of minority students enrolled has increased from 20.7 percent of all students in fall 2002 to 40.5 percent fall 2021. And ASU has topped the likes of Harvard, Stanford and MIT universities to secure the most innovative university in the country designation eight years running from
U.S. News & World Report magazine.
But the quest to build the university of the future should never end, Crow says. Now ASU is integrating virtual reality into learning, with, Crow says, early signs that this will prove a game changer by making difficult STEM subjects learnable for average learners and by opening up higher paying professions that require more technical degrees to a vastly increased pool of college graduates.
âWe have found ways to teach and enhance learning for those students,â Crow says. âWe just finished last semester with our first virtual reality-based labs with several hundred of our biology students taking labs off the earth in a virtual reality environment built by Steven Spielberg, as designed further by us and a company in Los Angeles called Dreamscape Immersive. Itâs a learning tool that is designed to take the biology curriculum and tutor you individually in a manner unique to your learning pathway. And weâve had kids with low science aptitude coming out with 35 percent improvement in their science aptitude, which weâve never seen before. We are getting higher science literacy and more people who want to become science majors.â
Crowâs point, however, is not that most higher education institutions should emulate ASU. Rather, it is that many more colleges and universities must innovate and evolve more aggressively to a more diverse and powerful set of value propositions.
â[In American higher education], we have too little diversity, too few institutional methodologies, and too limited a pedagogical design to address the complexities of what lies ahead and to really fully realize the opportunities that we have in front of us,â Crow says. âEach university should strive to be less and less generic, more and more unique, more and more special, and more and more focused on the way that they think they need to do things. And that means having your own unique aspirations.â
This story, the second in a series examining The College of the Future, examines strategic planning, leadership, and programmatic alternatives for colleges and universities. It also examines the related issues of experimentation, innovation and flexibility; alignment, transitions and counseling services; and equity and civil discourse.
The Strategic Imperative
The need for higher education institutions to determine their core value proposition is hardly a new one. Arthur Levine, a professor at New York University and author of a book examining the future of U.S. higher education, The Great Upheaval: Higher Educationâs Past, Present, and Uncertain Future, notes that there is a long history of evolutionary developments at inflection points in education that have created more higher education models, as documented in his book.
He says it is critical that institutions examine mission statements to make sure they are current, relevant, and effective in charting a course for the future. Levine notes that university boards should be focused less on degrees and creditsâthe means of deliveryâand more on addressing the core issue of what business they are in.
Western Governors University determined that its North Star was to be responsive to student educational demands, says WGU President Scott Pulsipher. âOur vision is to be the most student-centric university on the planet. Our perception and our belief is that education is a means to an end, and is the primary wayâor the single greatest catalystâfor people to change their lives for the better,â Pulsipher says. âThat includes things that are not really academic endeavors.â
Joshua Wyner, founder and executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute, says that too many strategic goals undermine a core strategy and that it is instead best to pick two or three key objectives at a time and try to obtain those.
âThe vision that presidents have canât be in 20 parts, which is why many strategic plans donât lead to substantial change. Plans canât simply be an aggregation of what different parts of the institution already aim to do and how to make those parts better,â Wyner says. âIt has to reflect a vision of the two or three big moves every couple of years that the institution is going to make so that every part of the institution is instituting reforms with a clear and limited set of priorities in mind.â
That involves making choices. Bev Seay, immediate past board chair of the University of Central Florida and board chair of AGB, says universities cannot be everything to everyone. âFor universities like UCF, in a large metropolitan area, itâs going to be important that we focus on the areas of our core academic strengths, where we see the future, and specifically, the future of change in our industries. We canât be dependent on any one industry, because you have different business cycles, and the work weâre doing must apply across multiple industries,â Seay says. âI was very pleased with the strategic plan that we recently crafted as it focused on understanding who we are and who we will be. For example, Iâm impressed with the way it identified medical and tourism together as a focus. I think thatâs innovative. Also, there is a focus on the space industry, given our proximity and our deep history in that sector. There was discussion of emerging technologies and national security, but the plan focuses on our students, who are my priority.â
In the case of North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (NCA&T), the largest HBCU in the country and a strong research institution, there was a strategic need to recognize that its nature and competition had changed over time to include non-HBCU peers, says NCA&T Chancellor Harold Martin.
âWe had to develop a different peer group where we were competing on those things that matter to parents of well-prepared college students and faculty, who are being recruited by lots of universities,â Martin says. âAnd so our peers today include only one HBCU but are comparable in Carnegie class and mission. Deciding to do that was a very difficult discussion that we had in the early years of my tenure as chancellor, with our board and with our alumni in particular, because they were afraid that we may be stepping into a space where we lose what has been good to us about being an HBCU, including losing connections with our heritage, shared history, and traditions. And so weâve had to be very inclusive in those discussions as we have framed our posture for the future.â
NCA&T has been vigorously managing its programmatic offerings to better align them to student needs, he adds. And those programmatic changes resulted in, with the help of consultants, large structural changes, including the disposal of two colleges and the creation of three, Martin says.
Board and Executive Structural Changes
Boards may need to realign their internal structure to enable strategic change, says David Rowe, practice area leader for private higher
education and foundations at AGB.
âAt most institutions, the traditional governance structure typically extends the stovepipes of the administrative cabinet up into the boardroom,â says Rowe. âAs a result, you donât have any entity that looks across the institution as a whole and thinks strategically, five and ten years out. Increasingly, youâll see boards that are more aligned toward consistently evaluating and anticipating the evolution of the value proposition; on resource alignment, rather than accumulation of resources, making sure that youâre scaling up and scaling down to meet demand; revenue generation, rather than simply providing the funds for the next good idea that comes along; and increasingly focused on processes that are growth-oriented as opposed to fundamentally selective, exclusionary, and meritocratic.â
Trustee selection is also important. Angel Mendez, a board member at both AGB and Lafayette College, a senior IT executive, and a Lafayette graduate, says it is important that boards of trustees develop a system to cultivate and groom a larger pool of volunteers to help institutional missions and to develop future boards that are effective and diverse.
At Lafayette, in addition to a 35-person board, there are more than 200 volunteer members of non-board committees, Mendez says. âWe supervise, if you will, the process of nominating and selecting the leadership and membership of these committees,â Mendez says. âAnd we observe future leaders and see how strongly they volunteer, advocate, donate and get involved with career services and recruitment of students and so on. And then once a year we bring the chairs of all these councils to the board as well. It is almost a minor league that feeds into our major league, the board. My fear is that at many other institutions people are more reactive than proactive in constructing their boards, or traditionalist in the sense of, âI know a guy we can add to the board.â Because of our committee system, we have probably four or five candidates at least every time a seat opens up whom we can consider. The research is pretty clear, the more diverse the group, the more innovative it is and the less inclined to live on tradition or be enamored with single class solutions or what weâve always done. Our committee system gives us a chance to have a diverse, qualified slate.â
It also is critical to hire presidents, CEOs and chancellors who are visionary, Wyner says. But often board dynamics impede such hiring, he adds.
âIf they want change, boards have got to hire visionary presidents who are willing to take risks,â Wyner says. âWhen weâve done research on how community college presidents are hired, we’ve found that boards often do not spend enough time asking what the big goals of the institution are, for the next five to ten years, what the strengths and challenges at the institution are in meeting those goals, and then the attributes they need in a president to capitalize on strengths and overcome the challenges toward achieving those goals. Furthermore, many trustees donât value risk taking and strategic vision as much as they value relationship building and fiscal conservatism. If you think about those two qualities, a focus thatâs about fiscal conservatism and stewardship, and relationship building, are you likely to find a strategist whoâs a risk-taker? Even when they hire a strategic risk-taker, presidents sometime fail because the board doesnât understand that change is hard. Boards need to very intentionally support bold leaders in making the big changes needed and overcoming the temporary setbacks and challenges that any major change will bring.â
Lafayette Collegeâs current president, Nicole Hurd, was previously assistant dean and director of the Center for Undergraduate Excellence at the University of Virginia, where she launched what became College Advising Corps (CAC) as a pilot program in 2005. She led CAC until joining Lafayette in 2021. CAC has helped more than 525,000 low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented students enroll in higher education by placing more than 800 recent college graduates each year as near-peer advisers in 795 high schools across America. She is applying that work to recruiting at Lafayette.
âTalent is everywhereâtalent is not bound to zip code and is not just in urban areas or rural areas,â Hurd says. âAnd I think Iâve been
challenging my colleagues here to start getting much more aggressive about how we recruit talent. I think I learned through the work with CAC that we have to be out there, we have to be proactive, we have to explain to families what our cost structure really is because people get very scared of the sticker price, which is not what low income families will actually pay; the value of instruction by faculty who are teachers and scholars; and what it means to have a personalized experience and to be a small liberal arts college that has strengths in the traditional liberal arts and engineering, all of which makes us much more attractive. We have to tell that story.â
One way to instantly diversify and increase the robustness of institutional offerings is through combinations. Combinations between for-profit institutions and traditional higher education institutions are one example of mutually beneficial structural change, Levine says. âLook at Purdue Globalâs acquisition of Kaplan in 2018,â Levine says. âThey took an open admission, for-profit and they brought it to a public not-for-profit. And what happened was that Purdue, which has been a highly selective institution, gained access to underenrolled students, such as older students and students of color. It also raised academic standards of the for-profit unit. Itâs now public and anything they do is publicly viewable. So it established a minimum standard.â
Building Upon Competitive Edges
Many join ASUâs Crow in stressing the importance of schools building upon their comparative advantages and decisive edges. For Cornell College of Mount Vernon, Iowa, one such advantage is its One Course At A Time block system program, a pedagogic structure followed by only a handful of colleges and universities nationwide, under which undergraduate students take only a single class at a time for each three-and-one-half-week increment, says Cornell College President Jonathan Brand.
âWe get to do something that basically no other school does, which is our students get to start walking their path multiple times over the course of four years,â Brand says. âAnd so we have students who after four years might study abroad four different times. We can do that [on the block system] because students donât have four or five classes they have to juggle, they just have that one class. And if theyâre a serious pre-med student or a serious athlete and they have a season on campus that they donât want to miss, which would prevent them from studying abroad at a semester system school for a semester or a year, the block system allows it to fit into their schedule without missing their commitments on campus.â
Now Cornell has launched a core curriculum called the Ingenuity program that expands and formalizes efforts to encourage and enable students to take advantage of the block structure by encouraging more meaningful extracurricular, enrichment, and vocational experiences. That includes a requirement that students engage in at least two experiential learning projects, such as an internship, academic research, civic engagement, creative endeavors, or off campus study, and by supporting such endeavors with financial support of, on average, $3,500 per student, as well as seminars on writing and civic engagement and a capstone portfolio in which students reflect upon their time at Cornell by pulling their experiences together and expressing what they have learned about themselves and where this is pointing their post-college plans.
The block system and a student-teacher ratio of 13 students per faculty member enable great depth of instruction, particularly in
STEM subjects, Brand says. âOur students overwhelmingly report when they go to grad school that it is not as hard as they thought, and our med school acceptance rate is nearly twice the national average, as the block system makes our students so much more comfortable with in-depth research,â Brand says.
Flexibility
Levine notes students are increasingly demanding flexibility as to when and how they receive higher education, and he also notes that online providers are better able to offer such flexibility. WGU takes this even further with its competency-based model, which ties degree progression to demonstrated mastery of a subject rather than semesters, quarters or units. This allows flexibility in progression and allows students to tailor education to their needs.
âGrades are simply a function of how much we as different individuals are able to learn in a set amount of time, right?â Pulsipher says. âThat is a nice comparative tool, but not very effective when it comes to the differences by which individuals approach learning, such as varying competencies they bring or their capability for mastering certain subjects, which varies a lot in our case, where youâre serving working learners who have a lot of non-academic experiences from which they can draw knowledge. The way weâve approached that is we have a subscription-based consumption model where you pay a subscription tuition for each six-month period and complete as many courses as you want as you earn credits.â
Some WGU students have finished a bachelorâs degree in one term, Pulsipher says. âThis may be someone, for example, whoâs already been working as a software developer for 10 years in the industry,â Pulsipher says.
In some cases the educational product is becoming inverted. âMany students are entering the workforce early with the hope of pursuing education down the road,â says Brandon Busteed, chief partnership officer and global head of Learn-Work Innovation at Kaplan. âThere are 18-year-olds going straight to work at Walmart because they know they can get their college degree for free with Walmartâs support. And theyâre making a tradeoff, thinking âIâm not going to do the residential college, Iâm going to live at home and make some money and get a degree.â Itâs a debt free college modelâwhy not consider it?â
Innovation
Fostering innovation is another area where institutions will need to improve, many interviewed noted. Boards need to become more involved in strategic decision making, Busteed says. One way to foster this is to structure board components that address this.
âBoards need to ask the question: where does innovation live?â says Busteed. âHas it been given a name? Has it been given a purpose? Is there a reason to think that weâve institutionalized it as a behavior as opposed to just an accidental occurrence? One thing Iâve always admired about Wake Forest University that I use as an example is that when [former President] Nathan Hatch got there, he established a board committee on innovation. And so innovation became a focal point at Wake Forest, including through creation of a VP of innovation role in his cabinet. And this wasnât just to handle the tech transfer function. This was thinking about innovative moves of any kind, such as new revenue sources and new types of students.â
It may take experimentation before individual institutions find their way in the new, more complex landscape, notes Levine. Universities must also embrace institutional flexibility, Levine notes. There is little point in experimentation and innovation if there exists little capacity to change. This may be particularly the case at the departmental level, Levine says, and may require advocacy with often powerful faculty bodies.
âAnd what Iâve told presidents isâand Iâve been very frank with themââscare the hell out of your faculty,â â Levine says. âTell them the truth about the future and the consequences of failing to respond to changes in demography, the knowledge economy, and a technological revolution. And then invite them to join you and plan the future.â
At ASU, innovation includes process innovations. âWe donât just want the faculty member to be innovative in their science or lab or in their creativity in philosophy or whatever,â Crow says. âWeâve focused on the institution being innovative in how do we become of greater service? How do we lower the cost of delivering the degree? And how do we provide people faster speeds to get to their degrees? How do we allow people to double major, triple major, quadruple major, all of which requires us to be innovative. And so we have taken it on at the mission. We and a few other higher education institutions are prototypes of a new type of institution, a national service university.â
Institutions also may engage in innovation through product segmentation to a greater degree than in the past. As noted in a May/June Trusteeship article, Unity College in Maine has reorganized its educational offerings around distinct business offerings and learning modalities aligned with different student demands. The shift has led to increases in enrollment and a strengthened bottom line.
Pulsipher notes online education has highlighted the increased availability of other educational content. âIt immediately exposed the fact that students can access the best content available, just like they can stream Netflix or have a Spotify playlist,â Pulsipher notes. âAt WGU, weâre investing in technology that is sourcing and making available to students all the best learning resources out there. And that is a huge marketplace. Weâre looking at which of that content is going to increase the probability that students are going to master the subject material, so that they can better prepare to actually demonstrate competency on the criterion-based assessment.â
Pulsipher says that additional research into learning effectiveness may further such efforts. âSome faculty at colleges may lecture three days a week, use curriculum they have been using for years, and may not have really assessed whether the lectures fundamentally increased the learning of the student, â he notes. âStudents may have learned the material in study groups or tapped into other online resources like Khan Academy or a YouTube university. Weâre actually specifically identifying whether or not students learned from the learning resource produced by each WGU faculty member and asking what is increasing the ability of an individual student to master concepts.â
More Alignment, Support and Counseling Services
To retain students and earn their support, colleges and universities will need to improve educational alignment, counseling, and support services, several interviewed said.
Many institutions are seeking to ensure pipelines of students by developing precollege programs for high school students, Busteed notes. And, according to Wyner, of the Aspen Institute, dual enrollment in high school and college is also likely to increase.
âFinding different ways of working with K-12 is another huge opportunity that some colleges are taking advantage of,â Wyner says. âNationally, somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of all community college enrollments are their high school students. I was recently with some community college presidents in Texas, and one was telling me that more than 50 percent of their enrollment is high school students.â
And at George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College, students enter the community college duly admitted to both the community college and the four-year institution, Wyner notes. âIf you move towards co-ownership of a student with another educational institution, you are much more willing to figure out what the advising function should be not just at your institution, but throughout the studentâs journey, and then apply responsibilities and resources accordingly,â Wyner notes.
Through a program called Direct Connect, for example, dual enrollment students at Valencia Community College and feeder high schools progress to Valencia and then to a major Florida regional university, UCF. âAt Valencia, 50 percent of students who take dual enrollment courses at their feeder high schools come to Valencia, whereas at many other schools, itâs much lower, around 10 percent,â Wyner says.
Better pathways are also needed between community colleges and private liberal arts institutions. Improving transfer pathways from public two-year and private four-year institutions could enhance the financial health of four-year colleges while raising baccalaureate attainment for community college students, says Loni Bordoloi Pazich, program director for institutional initiatives at the Teagle Foundation, which is supporting efforts to improve such alignment. Such pathways can offer community college transferees soft skills that complement community college technical skills, the well-rounding provided by liberal arts institutions, and a lower cost program (given it is only two years). Liberal arts institutions receive a more diverse student population, more students, and students who on average perform as well or better than ânativeâ four-year students.
âResearch shows that associate degree completers are successful post-transfer at four-year colleges and have rates of baccalaureate
attainment that exceed ânativeâ students,â Bordoloi Pazich says. The Teagle, Arthur Vining Davis, and Davis Educational Foundations have been collaborating to establish transfer admission guarantees across several states.
Counseling is a critical weak point in the entire higher education system, says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Busteed and Levine say that several online educators are focusing on the counseling and other services that students need.
WGU, for example, invests in program mentors who provide one-on-one assistance to students, Pulsipher notes. âEvery student, from the day they start to the day they graduate, has a mentor,â Pulsipher says. âThat mentor has a masterâs degree or higher with eight and a half plus years of experience in their field of study, and they are available to specifically shepherd that individual alongâto help deal with not only academic needs, but also all the life disruptions that tend to be the reason students drop out. This is the most important reason our students stay. They say in our surveys, âI had faculty that encouraged my dreams and aspirations.â â
WGU also invests heavily in program curriculum development. âWe are continually updating and investing in our program and curriculum design to ensure the freshness of our degree programs, and the curriculum that comprise them is holistically revamped every three years or less,â Pulsipher says. âIf you want to ensure that education is a pathway opportunity, it better be timely, relevant, and high quality.â
WGU introduced an education readiness program through the creation of WGU Academy, an endeavor that launched just over three years ago.
âWGU Academy is designed to effectively improve the read- iness of learners, especially those who have never learned at a post-secondary level or who may have previously attempted college but were not able to be successful. It particularly focuses on things like learning how to learn, or efficiency, preparing individuals to apply reasoning and analytical capability to the post-secondary level coursework that theyâll be doing. Through WGU Academy, we found that individuals who actually complete Academy and then matriculate to WGU do substantially better than our student population as a whole. This was simply a recognition that some of the barriers of our students have nothing to do with affordability, or even prior college experience. It was, âdo you have the capacity to learn and, if not, what is required?ââ
Also missing from much traditional higher education is curation of how education relates to advancement in careers, upskilling in professions and career transitions. âMany ed tech providers are working to provide this. It is a large opportunity for higher education and one that, if missed, will be assumed by others,â says Carnevale.
Companies like Naviance, Overgrad, and Xello, big providers of college and career preparatory online platforms in Kâ12 education, for example, have gotten bigger. âTheyâre very much in this game and have moved to selling work-based learning that links high school, colleges, and careers,â Carnevale says. âThe problem for them is that we know that counseling doesnât necessarily work unless itâs face to face, especially with less advantaged kids.â
Such services and alignment can feed into improved retention, which will become more important for colleges and universities as the available body of students declines. âIncreasing student success and retention would allow institutions to maintain more enrollments out of the same numbers of students,â says Carleton College Professor of Economics Nathan Grawe, author of 2018âs Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. âWe see almost embarrassingly high attrition from the first year to the second, and sometimes for the second to the third as well.â Grawe notes retention is particularly relevant for disadvantaged minorities.
Better alignment with long-term student, and not just employer, interests will also become increasingly important, the Aspen Institute’s Wyner says.
âThere are lots of examples where industry, once theyâve got people in entry level jobs, want to keep them there as long as possible,â Wyner says. âBut community colleges and universities can, and should, ensure that students have both the technical and adaptive skills to move ahead over time, and ideally stay in touch with students to help them obtain additional higher education if needed for career advancement.â
Equity
As noted in the first College of the Future story (Trusteeship, Septe./Oct. 2022), the higher education student body of the future will be less affluent and more diverse. The stakes are enormous for the country. Raising educational attainment among lower-income and minority adults to equal the attainment distribution of middle- and higher-income adults, and simultaneously raising educational attainment among racial and ethnic groups to match attainment among White adults, would result in annual public benefits of more than $950 billion, Carnevale says.
Addressing equity is a logical subset of an enlightened universityâs attention to problem solving, says Freeman Hrabowski, III, until recently president of University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), a state university in Maryland that has transformed into an R-1 research institution while educating a high number of disadvantaged minorities in STEM fields.
Generalizations of all sorts should be replaced by data, Hrabowski says. âThereâs no such thing as âthe studentsâ at a university. They are all these different ethnic groups, they are different racial groups, they are different ages, they are from different parts of the world. And so disaggregating the data can stop the generalizing across the board and can help institutions become more effective in working with different types and groups of students. We try to understand the background of a student of any race, who has a reasonable chance of succeeding at UMBC. We look at everything from test scores and grades to attitude and rigor of high school work. And weâve done that over three decades now.â
Hrabowski says, for example, that analytics can help identify, beyond the top-performing minority students that are coveted by every institution, those students who have a greater chance of success at UMBCâand those who do not. âWe found, for example, that minority males who had very high test scores, even perfect test scores, but who had mediocre grades in high school tended not to do well in engineering and science, because they are accustomed to being super-high achieving on tests,â Hrabowski says. âThey got 800 math SATs, but they donât work hard. And they have an attitude problem.â
On the other hand, children of immigrants of all races do better. âThe international influence at UMBC is very strong: 60 percent of our students of all races have at least one parent from another country,â Hrabowski says. âThe point is, thereâs an intensity that first generation Americans have.â
That leaves the challenge of the mass of disadvantaged minority students who are not immigrants, high performers, or affluent. Succeeding with this group of students takes effort, Hrabowski says.
Part of the work involves developing pathways for Kâ12 students from inner city Baltimore âby having well qualified teachers and Sherman STEM Teacher Program scholars who will prepare them for places like UMBC,â Hrabowski says. âBoard members and donors have donated more than $38 million over the years, focused on producing first rate math and science teachers for those schools.â
UMBC has also redesigned coursework so that more and more diverse students can succeed in science and engineering courses. The model is being nationally replicated through similar programs at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Pennsylvania State University, and UC Berkeley, with foundation funding.
Reducing the debt burden upon lower income and disadvantaged minority students is critical to enable them to buy homes, marry, and pursue graduate education that will further their development, NCA&Tâs Martin says. âWe have an investment strategy to support our students so that they have less need to borrow funds and we manage our costs to attend by controlling tuition increases and fee increases,â Martin says. âThe debt of our students at graduation has been declining every year for the last eight years. Thatâs because weâve raised more money, weâve managed costs, and weâve limited debt burden of the university and passed on costs to our students. But that also means that we have had to be much more proactive in pushing our legislature and our governor to use the system to fund the important aspects of the needs of our university, as we look to the future.â
Ultimately, equity may mean meeting each student where he or she is in terms of learning needs.
âSome people need more input than others,â says Aaron Thompson, president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education (Ky CPE). âWe are working within the schools and are targeting communities to get them to a point where they understand they can go to college and they can afford to go to college.â That has included increasing scholarships and financial aid to minority students so that they do not run out of money once they enroll.
The Ky CPE also has worked since 2016 to reframe remedial education so that students receive credit for [those classes] and can see progress toward a degree. âIn addition, the council has supported such classes with wraparound services, tutoring, mentoring, all of those pieces, and we have also said, âwe have a high expectation of you that believe you have the knowledge to do college work, and you can do these courses,â â Thompson says. Those steps have helped increase the completion rates of minority students compared to the overall population of students, Thompson says.
Equity and social progress alignment is also receiving the official imprimatur from a joint collaboration between the American Council on Education (ACE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, for a new set of classifications that recognizes equity issues. To be launched in 2023, the Social and Economic Mobility Classification will reflect an institutionâs commitment to success in enabling social and economic mobility nationwide while effectively serving a diverse, inclusive student populace.
Equity also means ensuring key college experiences are enjoyed by all. âAt Simmons University, we want to ensure experiential equity, that is, ensuring all students at Simmons are taking advantage of the resources and the excellent education provided, not just those at the top or at the bottom, but all students from diverse backgrounds,â says Lynn Perry Wooten, president of Simmons, a Boston-based liberal arts institution, that provides undergraduate education to students who identify as women but graduate education to all genders. âWe also look at how we can help women address the special challenges many face, such as COVID, which has been called the she-cession, rather than recession, given the way it set back many women because they had to leave work to care for others and because of COVIDâs disproportionate effect on careers in which women are concentrated.â
Wooten, Simmonsâs first African-American president, aggressively uses data to address equity and inclusion issues of all types, she says. âFor example, the data told us that we had a diversity problem in nursingâthere are not a lot of nurses who are people of color,â Wooten says. âWe have implemented a Dotson bridge and mentoring program that identifies students who need to belong to that community.
Itâs coaching and mentoring with nurses who look like them. And it is additional academic support, especially for the science classes in the heart of nursing labs, so that we can identify which classes are harder and which ones they need academic support for and provide that extra support as well as mentors and counselors.â
Public Discourse
A need that colleges and universities will have to address mentioned by many interviewed is increasing public discourse and social cohesion. To work on improving public discourse, institutions will have to practice such traits at home, Hrabowski says. He notes that UMBC operates under a shared governance model, âwhich means âitâs not us versus themâ at the system level or at the campus level,â Hrabowski says. âFaculty and staff and students and administrators are working together to solve the problems that weâre talking about. Thatâs very, very important. We weaken ourselves when itâs us versus them. We work to have governance where we share the responsibility and then the buck stops with the president. We are also fortunate that our University System administration and our Board of Regents are very supportive and enter into the discourse with us.â
Campus culture and cohesion will be critical ingredients in higher education winners, Cornell Collegeâs Brand says. âThose will be the schools that have the most motivated alumni and friends to invest in those institutions,â Brand says. âI think the schools with the healthiest cultures are going to do really much better, whereas schools that are angrierâwhere thereâs warfareâI think that culture will be very detrimental for those schools. Thatâs why weâre so focused on culture at Cornell, because schools where people feel connected and where faculty, staff, and students find meaning and satisfaction in their work and studyâstudents know that connection, and I think it makes a difference in those who come and then the quality of the experience they have when theyâre on campus.â
Preserving education in the humanities in the face of a shift toward STEM and professional instruction will be important to maintain democratic and civil discourse, Bordoloi Pazich says.
âThe future of the humanitiesâwhich are so important for preparation to participate in our democracyâlies in general education as students increasingly turn to pursuing professionally oriented programs of study,â Bordoloi Pazich says. âWe have seen tremendous promise in revitalizing the role of the humanities in general education using the âCornerstoneâ program model at Purdue [to make the humanities an integral aspect of a coherent general education program]; [the Teagle Foundation is] now supporting adaptations nationally through our Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative co-sponsored with National Endowment for the Humanities.â
The Time is Now
If there was a single theme that came through from higher education leaders interviewed for this story, it is that after COVID forced higher education institutions to do more than many trustees would have thought possible and as the demographic cliff of declining undergraduate enrollment looms only a few years away, the time for pedagogic reexamination and reinvention is now, and there is no time to spare.
Lafayetteâs president, Hurd, who joined the college last year, âis upping the tempo on everything in the place,â says Lafayette trustee Mendez.
âIn the pandemic, we went through a massive disruption and adapted successfully,â Hurd says. âThen you realize that part of what we built and the muscle that we donât want to lose after the pandemic is the ability to really listen to each other well and be able to be nimble when needed. If we donât continue to be nimble, and frankly, both communicate well and be inclusive at the same time, then weâre not going to make the best decisions for our community. Iâm a big believer, especially on issues such as our budget, that the budget is a value document and if we donât actually have conversations with our community about it, then weâre not reflecting those values the way that Iâd like us to.
âThis past summer, we formed our first ever community-wide diversity, equity, inclusion committee and we put in place for the first time in a long while a community-wide budget committee,â Hurd says. âAnd I know when I say âcommitteeâ, people are going to think, âOh, thatâs not effective or efficient.â But when I got here, we had many different diversity plans, including at the departmental level, often done, I gather, in silos. There was definitely not a common vision, or a common strategy for doing really important work on our values and how we show up for each other. And now we have four faculty member colleagues, four staff member colleagues, and two other staff members providing important support looking at the budget and diversity, equity, inclusion issues, in a much more synergistic, holistic, and, frankly, much more nimble fashion.â
Trustees in particular should work with university executives and other stakeholders to examine such issues now, Crow says.
âThe trustees have got to demand change and to stop accepting things as they are,â Crow adds. âEvery time the administration says something like, âthe faculty wonât do this, they wonât do thatââthatâs not true. Our faculty have voted for 35 new schools and initiatives, theyâve eliminated 85 academic units, theyâve changed the curriculum, theyâve changed the design, and thousands of our faculty members have been trained in advanced, technologically based learning and thousands of courses have been built by our faculty members. And so this notion that somehow the fact that culture is a fixed thing, and the trustees are just supposed to accept it…well, they donât have to accept it. Trustees need to drive innovation. Or if theyâre not going to drive innovation, they need to not block innovation.â
David Tobenkin is a freelance writer based in the greater Washington, D.C. area.
RELATED RESOURCES
Trusteeship Magazine Article
The College of the Future, Part One
Reports and Statements
AGB Board of Directorsâ Statement on Innovation in Higher Education