After three years of pandemic-related disruption, most colleges have — out of necessity — drastically changed the way they deliver education and manage their operations. What if they turned those short-term decisions into long-term strategies? How should they decide when it’s time consider a collaboration? What qualities should they look for in a potential institutional partner?
On April 25, The Chronicle, with support from the higher-ed technology company Watermark, convened a virtual forum, “Modern Strategy for Higher Education,” to discuss those issues. The following comments, which have been edited for clarity and length, represent key takeaways from the forum. To hear the full discussion, watch the recorded webinar here.
Liz McMillen: I’d like to start with this very unusual affiliation that Bloomfield and Montclair are doing in New Jersey. Marcheta, tell us a bit about how Bloomfield got to where it was that made you seek this out.
Marcheta Evans: I just became president four years ago. Bloomberg had declining enrollment pretty much for the past 10 years before my arrival, so I knew I had to come in and bring a little different energy. We were honestly expecting an 8-percent increase in enrollment. But we know what happened in March 2020. Instead of an 8-percent increase we had a 15-percent decrease in enrollment, and I knew that this was not sustainable. We were already at the marrow as far as cutting, so there was really nothing left for us on that bone. We had to do something different. I did a call out and said, either I need a major philanthropic supporter to give me millions of dollars, or I really need to find a strategic partner. I put it all over the United States, and we had about 30 institutions that reached out to us. A lot of people wanted to help. We did a formal call for proposals. We had eight institutions put to paper how they could help us. And lo and behold, my neighbor right up the street, about four or five miles from where we are, answered the call, so to speak.
“But we know what happened in March 2020. Instead of an 8-percent increase we had a 15-percent decrease in enrollment, and I knew that this was not sustainable.”
McMillen: Why did Montclair step up? What was your thinking? What was your strategy? Why were you interested?
Jonathan Koppell: We are mission aligned, and it was within the scope of our determined objectives that it was inconceivable to let the state’s only predominantly Black institution simply disappear. It’s worth noting that there was a close-by institution that disappeared 15 or so years earlier, called Upsala College. So we thought it was consistent with our mission to proceed, and then we engaged in the very hard work of figuring out how exactly we would do that, and whether we could do it without jeopardizing our own financial situation and placing the burden on Montclair State University students to make this transaction doable. We wouldn’t have proceeded if we thought it was going to bring harm to Montclair. It’s sort of the Hippocratic oath of mergers and acquisitions. From the beginning, this had to be more than simply a consolidation because the question, if we look at all these institutions, is not, how do you save them, but should they exist? Marcheta and I believed that one of the reasons to proceed down this pathway was that we had the opportunity to create a differentiated learning environment.
McMillen: John, you’ve pursued a really interesting relationship with Antioch University. Can you tell us more about that? And what led you to that arrangement?
John Comerford: We are a traditional liberal-arts college, on the north side of Columbus, Ohio. We’re about 2,400 traditional 18- to-22-year-old undergrads, and a small graduate school of about 300 students in graduate nursing, athletic training, allied health, M.B.A., education, each one being pretty small. Like other institutions whose primary bread and butter comes from traditional-age students, we took it on the chin early in the pandemic. We were already thinking at a board level and strategic-conversation level about affiliations, about how to achieve some scale. My phone started to ring from other institutions early in the pandemic, with a variety of different ideas, and we explored several of those pathways. The reason Antioch University rose to the top in in this whole process was that they are different from us. Antioch University is entirely adult learners, 4,000 adult learners in graduate programs from psychology to environmental science to leadership and change. They were offering a bunch of programs we didn’t have. We had a bunch of graduate programs that they didn’t have. So you can imagine these two institutions quickly scaling into one another to capture the adult-learning market. This is not a merger. We still do the 18- to-22 thing like we have for 175 years. But we share in this adult and grad enterprise that will be known as Antioch University. And so it’s sort of like having your cake and eating it too. You get to keep the distinctive undergraduate, but you get the opportunity to go into the new market of adult education at scale.
“They were offering a bunch of programs we didn’t have. We had a bunch of graduate programs that they didn’t have. So you can imagine these two institutions quickly scaling into one another to capture the adult-learning market.”
Paul Friga: Why aren’t more people doing what you’re doing?
Comerford: You need the sun, the moon, and the stars to line up just so to make this work. You need the right president, you need the right provost and CFO, you need the right board. In our case it was “don’t let a good crisis go to waste.” In the last couple of years, we didn’t have to really convince people on campus that we were standing on a burning platform and we had to do something. And as other institutions have reached out to us, interested in joining the system that we’re building, it’s striking to me that, in a number of those conversations, the president’s gung-ho, and then they call back a couple of weeks later and say, well, I talked to my board chair, and they’re really not excited about it. And so you sort of need everything to line up just perfectly to make it work at the moment.
Friga: How many institutions are really going to change? Are we going to have rapid change?
“The question of whether we need to innovate or whether we can continue to stay on that path is not as debatable as it used to be for most institutions. There is a very large set of institutions that need to change fundamentally, and they know that now.”
Mary Marcy: I don’t know how rapid. But yes, I think we are going to have more change than we’ve had. The question of whether we need to innovate or whether we can continue to stay on that path is not as debatable as it used to be for most institutions. There is a very large set of institutions that need to change fundamentally, and they know that now. Five or 10 years ago I went to a lot of conferences and talked to a lot of colleagues who would say that we’ve been through this before and things always come back. The conversation now is different. The pandemic did accelerate things, but there are a number of other accelerators. The discount rate is about 50 percent at private institutions. That’s not a sustainable model. No one’s come up with a better one yet, but they’re starting to experiment in ways that they didn’t before. Change happens at a more transformational scale when it has to happen, and the reality is that it does have to happen at a lot of places.
McMillen: What kind of advice would you give institutions that are thinking about the kinds of arrangements we’ve been talking about?
Marcy: I don’t think there’s any question that change is going to happen. The question is, do we do it in a way that actually responds to student needs now? Or do we do it in a way that limits the number of institutions and the number of types of delivery, because we’re all jumping on the same bandwagon? It’s about differentiation of the institution, but also differentiation to meet students’ needs.
Evans: Realize that you can’t be everything to everybody. So when you start looking strategically at affiliations, who really are you? And how should you move forward with those affiliations? And don’t wait until it’s too late. Don’t wait until it’s a crisis. This is not rocket science. You can figure things out. Use the data, the numbers, and then respond appropriately.
“I don’t think there’s any question that change is going to happen. The question is, do we do it in a way that actually responds to student needs now?”
Koppell: We haven’t begun to do anything remotely approximating a paradigm shift, but it will be required. We have to ask big fundamental questions. What is the point of a university? What makes a university a university? What makes a college experience a college experience? What value are we offering, not just to individual students, but to society? We then need to reshape ourselves according to the answers to those things.
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