The Curious Case of Declining Community College Enrollments

According to an article in today's Chronicle, community college enrollments declined 16% between 2010 and 2015.  More jobs, as well as four-year colleges, are credited with causing the decline.  In other words, those prospective students who would have done a two-year degree and then go to work were able to find satisfactory jobs without the AA degree.  Those who wanted a four-year degree apparently discovered they could swing a four-year institution.  Here's what EAB says about this:

"Since 2002, we’ve seen a real increase in the sophistication of marketing, recruiting, and enrollment management among four-year colleges. It’s not the for-profit sector that was increasing its share — that’s a classic competitor for many of our community colleges. It was actually the four-year publics and privates.
"Because discount rates are increasing, the price gap between two- and four-year colleges is narrowing. Private colleges have extraordinarily robust career services, experiential and cocurricular learning, internship placements, and smaller class sizes. If you’re a parent or student looking for the opportunity to be job-ready on Day 1, that’s an extremely valuable opportunity."

This should give those of us in private higher-ed cause to cheer.  However, in speaking with a very experienced and knowledgable consultant the other day, he observed to me that the deepening discount rates and sliding yields, that many non-profit privates are experiencing, present the picture of a trend that cannot continue indefinitely and a business model that cannot succeed in the long run.

Already in 2010, when the community college slide reported above began, the discount rate hit a record high.  As the rate nationally tickled the 50% mark in 2014-15, pundits cautioned of its unsustainability.

A possible win-win solution may be closer cooperation between the community college and the private sectors of our industry.  Consider New Jersey for example.  Rowan University, a public institution, has announced its intent to grow its student body from 15,000 to 25,000 in the next several years.  Montclair State University and the College of New Jersey, two other burgeoning public schools in the Garden State, have been building and beautifying their campuses and aggressively grabbing up students.  This signals a paradigm shift for the handful of private NJ schools --- Princeton U. excepted --- who traditionally have ridden the demographic wave.  Privates can no longer rest assured they will get their fair share of high school grads, in competition with their big and beautiful --- and cheap --- public rivals.

Partnering with the community colleges in New jersey and neighboring states might enable the privates to be more financially competitive.  And, indeed, many of NJ's private universities and colleges have actively sought such relationships.  But, the public four-years play this game too, as witness Rowan College at Burlington County.

But never mind... a combination of two years at a community college, then two years at a four-year private university can still be a win-win-win:

1.  Community colleges reverse their enrollment trend.

2.  Private non-profits reverse their discount trend.

3.  Students get an affordable education with a university diploma and little or no debt at the end of the road.

Guns on Campus: A Plus or a Minus?

      If 2015 was the year of the weed — aka marijuana — on college campuses (and I think it was, given the momentum of the legalization/decriminalization movement), then 2016 will be the year of the gun. Colleges and universities across the country, but most especially in Texas, will be wrestling with what their policies should be concerning firearms on campuses.

      The issue seems urgent. In 2015, more than two-dozen campuses were the sites of shootings, many of them resulting in fatalities. Educational institutions at all levels from K through college logged more than 50 such incidents last year. In one of the worst, ten people were killed when a gunman opened fire at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College in early October. Seven other people were injured, and at the end of the day the shooter was dead too.

Concealed Carry Coming to Your Campus?

      Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the gun-debate spectrum, on December 12th, the University of Texas released the recommendations of a working group, instigated by the institution’s president, to the effect that concealed carry will be allowed in the Texas flagship’s classrooms. The slick 25-page report offers 25 recommendations. [University of Texas at Austin Campus Carry Policy Working Group, Final Report,December 2015,

      “When it comes to offices, the Working Group gave the occupants control over whether or not they will be gun-free. Any university staff or faculty must provide oral notice that concealed carry is prohibited in their office if they choose to keep the space gun-free. The Working Group added that if an office’s occupant regularly meets with concealed carry holders they should make arrangements to meet at a different location.” [Brendan Krisel, “UT-Austin Panel: Allow Guns in Classrooms,” Austin Patch, December 10, 2015]

      Reportedly, all 19 panel-members reluctantly voted in favor of the classroom-carry rule, considering themselves bound by Senate Bill 11, enacted last June oby the Lone Star State’s legislature. The statute forbids public-university officials from banning concealed carry by licensed gun owners on their campuses.

      Meanwhile, a growing list of other Texas schools, led by Rice and SMU, have decided to exercise their option under the new law to ban guns from their campuses.

What does all this mean to the rest of us in higher ed?

      The response to marijuana legalization in Alaska, Colorado and Washington has been an almost unanimous banning of recreational pot from university campuses in those states.  As noted above, the reaction of most Texas colleges to the state’s new concealed-carry law similarly has been a rejection of firearms on their campuses.  We higher ed professionals would appear to be a cautious bunch when it comes to “reforms” that might bring dangerous commodities — be they grass or guns — onto our premises.

       Expressing exasperation with the Congress, President Obama earlier this year issued an executive order aimed at controlling gun sales to the mentally disturbed by tightening background checks.  Meanwhile, some Republican presidential candidates are espousing the “arm the good guys” approach reflected in the Texas legislation.  This promises to be a core issue of this year’s national elections.

Thus far, all indications are that the higher education industry falls firmly on the side of greater gun control over countering guns with more guns.  But, as with the halls of government and the campaign trail, the issue is far from settled in our ivory towers. In February I participated in a forum at the Case Western Reserve Law School, sponsored by the Student Federalist Society there, which debated the question.   Expect more of the same sort of questioning across our campuses as 2016 rolls forward.  With no clear national consensus and no “silver bullets” in sight, we university leaders largely are left to figure this one out for ourselves.

A peak inside one private college's politics points up the pros and cons of being a college prez

This story, from today's Chronicle of Higher Education, makes us the proverbial flies on the wall.  Hope College is a religiously affiliated school in Holland, Michigan.  My memories of Holland go back to my days in the U.S. Coast Guard.  As Admiral's Aide I journeyed each August to another little town (Grand Haven) along Lake Michigan's east shore for its Coast Guard festival.  We passed by Holland, which had its tulip festival, along the way.

But I digress...

This story recounts how the president's decision to remove the provost led to the board's decision to remove him.  This led to campus protests and a petition from 75% of the tenured faculty in strong support of their chief executive.  How many other college presidents do you think could garner anything like that kind of support from their faculties?

Indeed, presidents appear to be particular targets this spring.  We saw a few fall in the face of the new African American activism on campuses across the country.

The challenges for presidents of private colleges and universities are particularly acute these days.

On the other hand, the rewards can be substantial.  Boards of Trustees staffed by wealthy donors from corporate America see nothing incongruous about paying the CEOs of non-profit institutions comparable salaries.  A case in point is Drexel University, where I am an adjunct professor law, and where President John Fry reportedly is paid $1.2 million annually.  Fry's background also is telling: an MBA (not a PHD nor a scholar), coming out of the higher ed consulting practice of a major accounting/consulting firm.  As VP at Penn, which lives cheek to jowl with Drexel in University City on Philly's West Side, he made his mark by developing the environs.  He did the same for my alma mater, Franklin & Marshall College, as its president, before returning to West Philly a few years ago.

Truth is that private higher education probably must behave more like its for-profit corporate counterparts in the years ahead.  Competition is fierce.  Costs are hard to control.  Differentiation among institutions and individual programs --- branding --- is hard to accomplish, as we all try to be supermarkets of majors, degrees, certificates, etc.  A shake-up, and very possibly a shake-out, are in the cards.  More and more private schools will pay big bucks for presidents who promise to see them through this "rationalization" of our segment of the higher ed industry.

What will the new "university" paradigm look like?

This post is inspired by Christine Ortiz, and MIT dean, who is leaving her prestigious R1 institution to found a new kind of bricks-and-mortar university.

Almost everyone in higher education understands that a new wave is crashing on our shores... to use the metaphor in my article of that title (post number two of this blog).

Harvard Business School's Clay Christensen, the king of the "disruption" theory, sees the internet as the core technology that enables low-priced competitors to enter the higher ed market and topple the traditional players.  But Christensen's disruption theory has come under fire from competent critics in recent times.

What looks most likely to me as this juncture is that:

1.  We will see more restructuring and recombination of institutions than we will see actual closings.  Witness the aborted attempt of Sweet Briar College to close last year.  This announcement by the trustees created an uproar.  Eventually even the Virginia Attorney General and the state's Supreme Court got into the act of keeping the college operating.  Lesson: we can't quit, even if we want to.

2.  Bachelor's degrees increasingly will be cobbled together from combinations of community college credits, AP credits, online classes, life-experience credits, and other sources.  Students will come to four-year institutions with 50% or more of the credits they need.  We here at the four-year schools will take them in, round out their educations and give them diplomas.

3.  As the high school diploma was replaced by the bachelor's degree as the "basic" educational credential of the average working stiff, who hoped to earn a decent living, during the past half century or so, the  professional master's degree  is replacing the BA as the ante needed to play in the increasingly competitive game of professional life in a global arena.

Dean Ortiz is not alone in trying to take this evolving concept of higher education to the next level.  "Her venture is not the only effort to create a new kind of college — there’s the Minerva Project, created by a tech entrepreneur in San Francisco, and MOOC providers like Udacity, started by a former Stanford University professor.
"But those are for-profit businesses. Ms. Ortiz says she plans to create a nonprofit institution so that 'all of the revenue can be reinvested in the enterprise to serve the public.'

 The plan is to begin with a campus in the Boston area that she hopes will grow to about 10,000 students and 1,000 faculty members — about the size of MIT. And her long-term plan is to add more campuses in other cities as well."

It will take some time for all of this to play out.  Speaking personally now, my wish is to hang onto my brains and brawn long enough to play a role in this exciting revolution.  The fourth great wave began about the time I was born in the late 1940s and early 1950s and was marked by the explosion of the megaversities and the infusion of National Defense Loans and other federal investments in higher ed.  Today''s fifth wave is characterized by a much more eclectic set of causes and effects.  Clark Kerr, builder of the Cal State system, is often credited with coining the term "megaversity" and correctly charted the fourth wave's path.  I don't think Christensen or anyone else as yet has accurately charted the path and impact of the fifth wave, even though it is breaking upon us as I write this.

But isn't it exciting to be a part, or even just a witness, of it?

Remembering 1969

In sixty-nine I was twenty-one and I called the road my own
I don't know when that road turned into the road I'm on

Running on, running on empty
Running on, running blind
Running on, running into the sun
But I'm running behind

--- Jackson Brown, Running on Empty

In '69 I too was 21... and 1A, before I had even walked across the stage and received my diploma at Franklin & Marshall College.  By late July, I was in Coast Guard Boot Camp in Cape May New Jersey.  Come autumn, I was stationed in Governors Island, New York Harbor.

Yes, I looked just like one of those guys in the picture... which in fact dates to 1969.

Meanwhile, at Cornell, armed African American students gathered at their society headquarters and the pictures shocked America.  That was 47 years ago this month.

Some four months later came the love fest at Woodstock.

Same generation, three very different experiences in that eventful year:

1.  Those of us who were serving in the military... mostly because we had no great choice.  Yes, we could run off to Canada.  But if you were male and healthy, and wanted to remain an American, your choices were Army, Navy Marines, Air Force and Coast Guard.  I chose Charlie Gulf and it turned out to be a good choice.

2.  Those who were politically motivated and out to end the war, end racism, end inequality.

3.  And the Sex, Drugs & Rock 'n Roll crowd.

If no one has done it yet, somebody should do a study of these three groups to see how on average each one turned out.  Here we are, a half century later, the Baby Boomers, facing retirement, institutionalization and... 

What will we do with our dummies?

This commentator argues that colleges obsess over attracting the best and the brightest.  His book asks, "Are you smart enough?"  His argument: "When the entire system of higher education gives favored status to the smartest students, even average students are denied equal opportunities," he writes. "If colleges were instead to be judged on what they added to each student’s talents and capacities, then applicants at every level of academic preparation might be equally valued."

This leads me to ask, what will we do with our dummies?  The "No Child Left Behind" law has offered one solution: we simply declare that no one is dumb.  Mainstream everyone into our public school classrooms and somehow they all will get dragged along.  (Or could it be the bright kids get dragged down.  Well, no, they go to private and charter schools.)

Back in those halcyon days when Americans still manufactured stuff, an average Joe or Jane could work on an assembly line, belong to a good union, earn a living wage with decent benefits, and hope to retire on a comfortable pension.  Thanks to globalization, assisted by NAFTA and other free-trade agreements, and a willingness of multi-national corporations to exploit cheap labor wherever it can be found, these Joe and Jane Lunchbuckets now struggle to make ends meet in low-wage, lousy benefits retail and other service jobs.

Even college grads are winding up all too often in these kinds of jobs, while living in Dad's basement.

Meanwhile, machines continue to take on more and more tasks once requiring human beings.  Automation eliminates more jobs than it creates.  So said an MIT prof in 2013.  That prof wasn't wrong.

Are we moving to a Player Piano world?  If so, it won't be just our dummies who will be human surplusage.  Even average folks may find themselves superfluous flotsam and jetsam.  That prospect bodes ill for democracy and human rights.

Is the Bachelor's degree obsolete?

My post this morning is inspired by an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that leads off with the story of a New Jersey guy who interned for MTV while still in high school, found college intro courses deadly dull, and dropped out to do a film bootcamp in NYC.

For my father's generation, who had the perfect storm of the Great Depression, WWII and the Cold War, a high school diploma often was a goal beyond their grasp.  A first-generation American, my dad got six years of schooling before being sent out to work.  He worked in the PA coal mines during the Depression and came away with black lung disease.  He served on Saipan with the Seabees and then laid bricks until he retired at 68.

For my Baby Boom generation, a college diploma became highly achievable, what with the vast expansion of higher education after WWII, the availability of National Defense Loans, and the great prosperity that characterized most of the second half of the 20th century in the U.S.  And a college diploma --- no matter what your major --- pretty much guaranteed a decent job... unless you were addicted to drugs or otherwise debilitated.

                                      You don't need a brain.  You just need a diploma.
                                      (Well, maybe that's not the case anymore.)

Today, we all know too many college grads who are working at jobs below their education levels and shouldering mortgages on their diplomas to boot.  On the other hand, we know some startling examples of students who dropped out and succeeded wildly.   The poster child is Bill Gates, the Harvard dropout who became the richest man in the world (or came close, anyway).

One thing is for sure: a BA or BS is no guarantee of a good job or a satisfying career.  Dropping out isn't necessarily the right road to take either.  Most likely, we are entering an age when actual skills, no matter how acquired, will be the decisive factor in future success.  Whether those skills are documented by a traditional credential, like a diploma, or certificates, or badges, or documentation of life experiences, resumes are going to look a lot different going forward.

Resumes may even morph into interactive online exemplars of an applicant's abilities, including artifacts such as videos.

Resumes may still be decorated with degrees.  But those degrees frequently will be cobbled together: 60 credits from a community college, 15 from AP tests, another 15 based on life experiences... and we at the four-year college will sell you the final 30 and award you a bachelor's degree.

This, I suppose, is what Harvard's Clay Christensen means by disruption.  His theories have come under attack in recent years.  But his notion of a new paradigm for higher ed is on the money, it seems to me.  My view of the "Next Great Wave in Higher Education" --- my first posting on this blog --- says some of the same things.

The elephant in this living room is the question of which colleges and universities will survive in this brave new world and which of us will disappear, dinosaurs just like our outdated degrees.