by Robert A. Scott
Pixabay/Pexels
Introduction
In my conversations with university leaders, the top strategic priorities can be summarized as ensuring institutional viability, longevity, and integrity. By viability, I mean being able to survive successfully in a challenging environment, including an increasingly partisan political climate. By longevity, I mean governing and leading for the long term. By integrity, I mean being true to the institutional mission.
Colleges and universities have evolved over time due to challenges, demands, and opportunities. They have advanced from institutions organized to prepare students for the clergy and the classroom to those generating the knowledge that inspired the industrial and information revolutions.
The Current Scene
American colleges and universities enroll about 19 million students. There are 1,660 private nonprofit four-year and two-year colleges and universities, 1,624 public four-year and two-year institutions, and about 700 for-profit colleges. Nearly 75% of undergraduates attend public institutions, and one-half of them enroll within 50 miles of home.
Some 40% of full-time students at public colleges live on campus; 64% of private college students do. One-quarter of students at private colleges and nearly two-thirds of those at public institutions are adults studying part-time.
Between 2019 and 2021, there was a decline of 12% in undergraduate enrollment and 61% in net tuition revenue. These declines were due largely to the COVID-19 pandemic, demographic forces, and changing college-going patterns. These challenges affected different types of institutions in differing ways.
The most vulnerable colleges are the approximately 800 that are largely tuition-dependent, located in less populous regions, with enrollments under 1,000 students, limited name recognition, and small endowments. Most of these are private. Because of these conditions, some 70 colleges have closed or merged since 2016. While private colleges are more likely to close than public campuses, we have seen mergers of public institutions, such as the state colleges in Pennsylvania.
Larger regional colleges and universities, whether public or private, typically have a broader reach and deeper population bases from which to draw. Nevertheless, they are susceptible to the same demographic and financial challenges. Only institutions with significant name recognition, highly selective admissions, and major financial assets are the least vulnerable to these forces for change.
Ensuring Institutional Viability
Ensuring institutional viability is a serious challenge. Declining numbers of high school graduates, especially due to the “birth dearth” following the Great Recession; the cost to families due to increasing tuition and fees and their concerns about student debt; and limitations on the enrollment of international students all threaten viability.
Another threat to institutional viability is the erosion of public trust. This happens when the public, often prompted by politicians, thinks colleges and universities are elitist and contribute to social and economic inequality instead of being engines of upward mobility.
Too often, the fundamental purposes of collegiate education, the preparation of informed, reflective, and productive citizens, get short shrift. Campus leaders can contribute to these shortcomings when they give more attention to institutional autonomy and self-preservation than to the social contract that benefits higher education with tax breaks and public support.
An erosion of trust and support also occurs when the competition between institutions is given more resources than cooperation between them in serving the public good. A focus on reputation management instead of transparency during a scandal — and prestige-seeking in athletics instead of support for student success — also lead to declines in public respect and support.
Ensuring Institutional Longevity
American institutions of higher education have evolved in type and program mix over the past 380-plus years. Ensuring institutional longevity requires innovation in meeting enrollment and net tuition revenue goals, achieving desired retention and graduation rates, fulfilling goals for student outcomes, and engaging in mutually beneficial partnerships with schools, businesses, and community organizations. Challenges to institutional viability and longevity can result from political interference in matters of curriculum and hiring.
Institutions taking a long view have plans for trustee and leadership succession; effective human resource policies; managing institutional debt; and being stewards of institutional assets, including the physical plant. Leaders acknowledge the problems to be addressed, especially graduation rates, preparation for citizenship and careers, and governance, and promote strategies for addressing them.
Ensuring Institutional Integrity
Fundamental to both viability and longevity is integrity. Faced with declining admissions applications; increased demand for financial aid offered by means of tuition discounting; and increased costs, many campuses have sought new ways to increase revenue. Pressures to add career-oriented programs can challenge an institution’s allegiance to its state-approved charter. Not only new programs but also new forms of academic certification can disrupt the traditions of a “liberal arts” college.
The competition for students can lead campus leaders to fudge the numbers used to calculate rankings information and publish misleading images to portray the campus and the student body. Transparency about graduation rates, the net price charged, student loan debt, and tuition-sharing agreements with third parties are among the topics to be monitored by boards.
A college or university relies upon its reputation for alumni and community relations and fundraising. Its reputation is based on the degree to which others trust it, and trust is built on integrity. Boards of trustees are obligated to follow the duties of care, loyalty, and obedience, the building blocks for effective governance and fundamental to public trust.
Conclusion
Ensuring institutional viability, longevity, and integrity requires a commitment to institutional mission and continuous innovation. American higher education started with Harvard as a college for young men of privilege preparing for the clergy and classroom. Over time, Harvard evolved into a world-class university; new two-year and four-year public and private institutions were started; new degree programs and levels were created; and new expectations for quality control and student access and success were codified, all through a continuous process of creation and evolution.
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