The Things We Think and Do Not Say

The writer is a current president.

The business model of higher education is fundamentally and irreparably broken.

The cost to educate a student far exceeds the amount people are willing or able to pay. This is largely true in all sectors, but some sectors rely on state subsidy, some rely on endowment subsidy, and some rely on a budget subsidy, largely forcing them into structural deficits and outsized endowment draws.

This will get worse and not better. Inflationary costs, increased compliance obligations, and investments in deferred maintenance will exceed the increases we can pass on to students each year. We need to reduce our costs through strategy, efficiencies, changes in delivery methods, and a break from unfettered and uncontrolled offerings across multitudes of majors, minors and subdisciplines.

Boasting about “record enrollments” is an incomplete story.

For many institutions, the more students they enroll, the faster they go bankrupt. The national discount rate for first-time students at private nonprofit colleges now exceeds 56 percent, yet headlines revolve around “record-breaking” class sizes and “record first-year enrollments.”

An episode of The Office shows the main character starting his own paper company and not understanding variable costs. He learns that the more paper he sells at a rate that increases his overall costs, the faster he goes out of business. We are currently trapped in the same reality. Filling classes with 60, 70, and 80 percent discount rates, record enrollments accelerates a path out of business.

We told a generation that college degrees = success.

Young people got a message that not enrolling in a four-year institution meant you were a failure and a loser. This lie doomed a generation to following the only presented path for them and forced them into debt. Too often they leave without a degree and an even greater sense of loserdom. We moved many good crafts- and skilled tradespeople away from their true interests. Imagine a world where we embraced people doing what they were passionate about and used higher education not as a status symbol, but rather as a skill builder? How much more impact would we have on lives across a wide variety of disciplines and areas?

Institutions cannot and should not be everything to everyone.

The term “comprehensive university” only works for those with unlimited resources. For the rest of us, it means spreading ourselves thin and leaving behind a wake of incomplete or inadequate investments, a lack of strategy, a lack of focus, and a load of disappointed customers. (Except we’re not supposed to think of students as customers.)

In health care, the differentiation of hospitals in a health system is a model to emulate in higher education. Imagine within a “system” a hospital that specializes in orthopedics, another that specializes in cardiology, and another still that specializes in pulmonology. Now apply the same principle to colleges within a quasi system, where a core was offered by all, but differentiation was found in differing areas of identity and focus. This is easier done in public university systems than among private colleges (which generally have no formal connection), but there can be movement in that direction in both segments.

Universities are the only businesses that can leave behind vast amounts of “paying customers” and be unaccountable.

Any business that left roughly 40 percent of its customers with a full bill for services and without a product would struggle to survive past its first year in business. Higher ed has this as its legacy. This isn’t to say that we should all become diploma mills and graduate everyone who enrolls. But what have we done to truly monitor, evaluate, assess, and remove barriers to success? 

Or have we embraced these barriers as the bar to jump to keep prestige at the expense of true student success? We brag about high numbers of Pell-eligible students and stay silent about how many of those students we actually graduate. How do we prove what we actually do what we say we do?

The measuring stick of universities is actually the exception and not the rule.

Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and the like are the headline grabbers, and often how higher ed is presented in media, movies, and the public mind. They are the truest form of outliers that exist, with a completely incomparable experience for faculty, staff, and students. Yet, when the story of higher education is told, we don’t hear about the places where most American students are educated.

Two-year colleges, four-year colleges, publics, privates, and trade schools are not competitors, but should be part of a comprehensive higher education ecosystem.

If we want to get education right, we should think of a K-20 model, where students begin college long before they arrive, have logged credits toward their degree in high school, have viable and affordable options at the pipeline into a two-year college, and have accelerated paths toward combined bachelors/master’s pathways. And, for those who choose trade schools, apprenticeship programs, or other paths, have options that create certificates, credentials, degree completion, and other components to provide upskilling and education on demand.

Many institutions have waited too long to invoke change and have gone belly up.

How do you go bankrupt? Gradually, and then suddenly. Maybe Hemingway foretold the higher ed story. Our industry moves slowly, but we don’t have an eternity to evoke change. There comes a point where strategy is no longer relevant, and desperation and survival become the play. As the enrollment cliff, public skepticism about higher education, the changing regulatory landscape, and governmental issues intensify, the window for strategic change is slamming shut, and the chance for real innovation becomes more difficult with each passing day.

Ph.D.-trained scholars are educating students unlike us.

We think a student selected our 18th-century poetry course because they share a deep passion for our subject. No. Most selected it because it checked a box and the time was free on their schedule. Except in rare instances, the people we educate share none of our hopes, dreams, and aspirations. For them (and their families), a college degree is a means to a next step.

Providing students with durable skills (gasp!) to apply (gasp!) their learning and prepare them for what they want and need—a career and meaningful earning attainment (gasp!)—becomes more important than declaring, “How could a student ever graduate college without X!” Faculty need to stop clutching their pearls and meet students where they are, rather than directing them where we think they should go.

We are not a lost cause.

When we get higher education right, we do transformational things and change lives and generations. We need to do that more often, for more people in a rapidly changing world. We can transform higher ed into the thing that continues to realize this goal for new generations.

But first, we must acknowledge the problems and take responsibility for our part in it and come together to begin discussing solutions that preserve our joint and larger mission, and not our traditions.