This Week In College Viability (TWICV) Special - Requiem for a College with Jonathan Nichols and ...

Welcome back to another really, really special episode of This Week in College Viability. Hi everybody, Gary Stocker back in front of the blue Yeti microphone. Some people think I'm behind the microphone, but no, I'm in front of the microphone. And today we're doing the third in a series with John Nichols and Kate Colbert on Requiem for a College, the second edition of which came out in July, on July 8th of this year. And it has, and it has, is creating a lot of feedback, a lot of interest throughout the publication industry and throughout higher education. John Nichols, thanks for making time to chat.

Thanks for having me.

Kate, always a pleasure to have you on the show to talk about anything you want to, ma'am.

Nichols.

Well, let's jump right into the questions. John, second edition, what has been the reaction? It's been out for a couple months now. What's been the reaction?

It's been really interesting to see the reactions. There have been emotional ones from people who have gone through small college closures or suspensions of operation who have thanked me for telling stories that were similar to their own. There have been people who've thanked me for drawing attention to the trend that's happening because people who are caught up in it are finally being seen. And others who have said that the research component to the book helped them understand why it's happening and what the different financial forces are that are causing it.

And so, it's been what, John, 5 years that you've been writing two different editions, two different versions of Requiem for a College. And I know you share this in really both editions of the book. But share with the listeners some of what you have learned writing about closures and about higher education in America in the last 5 or so years.

Well, I think the main thing I've learned, and I repeat this several times in the book, is there's no such thing as an institution that's too good to fail or too loved to fail. When I look now at the arguments, including those from my own father, as readers will find out in the book, on the board of trustees on the day when the vote was taken to whether or not to suspend operations, those who voted no, who wanted to keep the college open, their arguments boil down to, but we're good. What we do is good. Well, that may be, but if it's not generating revenue and if it's not something that is sustainable, it doesn't really matter how good you are or how much the alumni and the students and faculty and everybody involved love the institution. There were people on the board who voted to suspend that I know love St. Joseph's College, but it was the only thing left on that particular day to do. So that's something I've definitely learned. And that kind of, um, in tandem with Kate's book, we have to have a new look at higher education. How it's delivered, how it is. We've had this 4-year residential model in a lot of ways for God knows how long. We now in year 2025 have to start looking at different ways to deliver our education. And we have to look at ways that don't include living somewhere for 4 years, that don't include necessarily being in a dorm. A lot of new opportunities that at the same time don't compromise the meaning of college.

And so, you know, that was kind of a question about college leaders, faculty, board members, and those kinds of things. So what, you know, if there are, John, if there are faculty and staff and even students listening to this podcast, and based on your experiences at St. Joseph's College in Indiana, in Rensselaer, Indiana, what guidance, John, would you provide them if they see similarities to what happened at St. Joseph's to their college?

If it's faculty, staff, students, then I would say you have to demand transparency from the board members, and that is easier in certain situations than others. If it's a private college, and most of these are, that's harder to get done, but it there has to be a vehement demand that they be transparent about every single financial figure. For, again, if it's trustees and leadership, that warning that nobody's too loved to fail, that you have to have an honest look at things. And at the same time, if you're there, you may have the time to change things around, but that has to be done judiciously. That means you can't necessarily change every, or excuse me, chase every shiny tiny object. Yes, engineering degrees are in demand, but do you have the infrastructure to offer such an area before you launch a program? Do you have the capital to attract talent to teach in that program that's competitive with, with industry? I mean, that leads to another point that I read in— there's a wonderful Substack out there called Finding Equilibrium. It's by two economists, and they write about higher education. They just had a post about 5 myths of higher education. And one of them is that if we adopt a corporate model, we'll make it. Well, that in and of itself isn't going to save you. And they go on to explain it's not the— I'm using my words here— corporate model isn't the one true ring of power from Lord of the Rings. If you look at the corporate sector, 20% of businesses fail in the beginning. That they also— I'm using their figures here from the Post— that 70% to 90% of mergers of longstanding companies fail, that all, all these product rollouts that are costly and they end up failing. So there's a lot of failure in the corporate model. So that doesn't necessarily mean you're automatically going to be saved if you adopt this profit-centered model. You also have to be aware, I would say, of what comes with it, the unintended consequences. Because, for example, If you start treating everyone there as a fungible employee, well, that has consequences. As a member of Gen X, I can quote the movie Office Space to you and say that that attitude is going to make someone work just hard enough not to get fired. And is that who you want in the classroom? Is that who you want, most importantly, working student support staff? For who are points of contact with your customer base. Is that what you want? So there's a lot that needs to be considered, including what we call ethical shutdown. If it starts to look like that things are heading in a bad direction, in addition to trying to figure out what you can do to turn it around, you have to do what Paul Langtoad did. At Presentation College and figure out also how much money and time we need to shut down ethically if we have to. And that means paying out the best possible severance to all employees, give enough teach-outs to all our students, and just have time rather than it being abrupt. Dr. Malik Khouri said something, as Kate likes to say, he's eminently quotable. And he said, these closures aren't sudden, they're decades in the making. That's something I have in Requiem for College. This was decades in the making. So it needs to be looked at also for the sort of doomsday scenario. If it has to happen, how can we do it in the most painless way possible?

And John, you were quite gracious in Requiem. You both quoted me and cited my work many, many times in the book, and I'm touched, I'll be honest with you. But more importantly, my family has asked, who is going to be playing my role in the movie version of Requiem for College?

Okay, I've actually given a lot of thought to this, probably more than I probably should have, but it's been fun. So, My choice, honestly, is Ed Harris. I'll tell you why. Because of the film The Truman Show. Because of how much time you see him in the different shots staring up at screens. He's analyzing things. He's taking everything in, trying to figure out what the next move is for this production company filming Jim Carrey's life. And I just sort of see you— I mean, I don't know what your home office looks like, Gary, but I see this kind of NORAD vision of all these screens, all this data, and you're just watching it all and you're saying, okay, they're in trouble. Oh, they might make it. Oh, who you kidding? You're screwed.

And this is just kind of knowing everything before it happens.

And a lot of times not able to say anything due to legal matters. But, uh, but that's what I see anyway.

Yeah.

Oh my God. I know.

That comment is so perfect.

Yeah, thanks.

You know, Ken, this question for you real quickly is, I liked higher education NORAD. I'm thinking I'm going to steal that. What do you think?

Please.

I love it.

So, John, you know, in Requiem, you really write that it is, the book is a love letter to St. Joseph College. It is a reckoning that its destroyers are due. And a warning to other small struggling colleges. So really it's a book for 3 audiences. Can you briefly characterize how the book addresses each of those 3 audiences?

Well, I think the first thing is that when it first happened, meaning the suspension of operations, the end of St. Joseph's College as we knew it, there was as I express in the book, a lot of anger, obviously. And what I came to find by researching the facts was the anger was in many ways misdirected. And there were a few people, namely the chairman of the board of trustees, the vice chairman, and a couple other players that were singled out as the, the bad guys, so to speak. And that simply wasn't true. This was, this was a failure with many fathers. This was involving, I said earlier, people from over decades. So I wanted to sort of do justice to that and broaden the light, if that phrase makes any sense, rather than focusing a spotlight on just a couple of people. Take a look at how many hands there were in this failure and this inability to see a lot of signs and symptoms until it was absolutely too late. So, uh, and make people sort of realize that, that there's plenty of blame to go around and that I could get this message out there, this story out there to help other people. I hope, as I mentioned, all these other colleges and all the other people, all the individual lives who have been affected. By the aftershocks of this trend and make them feel seen and to draw attention to their plight. And the students who we know from the data that about 50% of the students who go through a college closure don't complete their degree. And that's an important point for us to take a look at, that the whole reason higher ed exists those people aren't getting the care and attention that they need, and they are innocent victims in the poor planning, or sometimes just the economics, natural economics of these closing institutions. So that's— I just wanted to sort of raise a warning, uh, to show everyone what's happening, why it's happening, and for those who still have time to change course, hopefully. And at the same time, I have a section towards the end of the book that we can't lose sight of what college means and to try to be, keep that meaning, that core meaning while at the same time adapt for the 21st century.

And Kate Colbert, you're the founder of SilverTree Communications and you spend a lot of time interacting with higher education leaders. In your experience, how have John's books, really the Requiem, both editions, how John's books impacted their thinking?

So here's the truth. John's book, especially the second edition of Requiem for a College, is a lot like Fifty Shades of Grey in that— Whoa, hey, let me finish. Let me finish this. And that a lot of people are reading it, but very few people will admit that they can relate to it.

Interesting.

So John's gonna forgive me. You can tell I can already hear John like he's laughing, coming out of his shoes. So John's gonna forgive me this comparison because it's actually complimentary. Obviously John is a brilliant writer and the Fifty Shades books were so horribly written that I was actually convinced that my master's degree in comparative literature was going to get rescinded if anybody found out I had read them, right? So, but in seriousness, the similarity is in the shame the secrecy, the refusal to admit that what is happening all around you might have something to do with you personally, right? So college closures aren't a dirty little secret, right? They're an ugly, obvious trend that nobody likes to talk about and nobody likes to look at. And I had a university president recently tell me, quote, "No president wants to close a college." And he's right. But the way in which he tried to then immediately shut down the conversation because it's uncomfortable to think about your beloved college closing, and when you're one of the leaders, the very possibility of closure is a reflection of your own leadership failures. That showed me that he lacked the moral courage to confront difficult realities. And I think that's what's happening in leadership in higher ed right now. We've actually talked to some consultants who specialize in college closures, and they tell me that the mere presence of their company's name on an invoice that gets processed by a client university's business office can set off a big rumor mill among the staff and faculty about whether the sky is falling. Like, oh my gosh, the board just hired that college closure expert. What does that mean? Right? And holy cow, the president is reading Requiem for a College by Jonathan Nichols. Should we be worried? Are we shutting down? Is it the debt? Is it the deferred maintenance? Should we find new jobs now, or do we risk going down with the ship?

Fascinating.

Right? And because college and university presidents by and large prefer smooth waters, and blissfully ignorant employees, they pretend, or at least publicly, that the college closure trend is not happening. Or at the very least, that, well, we're not like those other colleges, we're fine. And as I've heard you say, Gary, the common refrain is often, we're fine, we're fine, we're fine, we're closing. Right? And that's exactly, that's what happened at St. Joseph's College for John. That's what happened at Cardinal Stritch University, my husband's alma mater. So this is a real challenge for the higher education industry right now, that there are books like Jon's and like mine that shine bright lights on the risks and the future disasters in our industry, but the leaders capable of mitigating those problems, those risks, and those future disasters in our industry, they're afraid to talk about it. But if you could show me a leadership team at a small private liberal arts college doing a book club. On Requiem for a College, I will show you a school that's open-eyed enough, that's smart enough and humble enough that they might actually innovate their way into another 20 years in business. So it's my hope that conversations like the one that we're having right now will remind college and university leaders that they must be reading Requiem for a College and heeding its lessons. And by the way, as Jon's publisher, it's okay to read the Kindle edition where it's easier to hide it from your students and your colleagues. So if it's laying on your desk, nobody will know it's in your Kindle device. So, so that's fine. Buy the Kindle edition, but by God, please read it because you need to.

And I guess my next question kind of ties in with that. Again, I'm looking for an opinion here. Does, does this book serve more as a historical reference as to what happened at St. Joseph's College in Indiana, in Mitzvah, Indiana, or is it more of a warning for struggling colleges in general, specifically the struggling colleges in general?

You know, it's both. As they say, past is prologue. And I think there's a reason why people were clamoring for John to write this second edition, because they had heard the St. Joe story when he wrote the first edition of this book and when he first told it, and they knew they needed a roadmap for how to save their school. It's what John delivered this time, though, is really interesting, right? It's a sneak peek into what causes colleges to fail. And so the book is also, I think, really heartbreaking and entertaining. It's a memoir that reads like fiction, right? Equal parts historical mystery, suspense, horror, dystopian, right? And what I hope for and what I strongly encourage is that everyone who works for a private liberal arts college in the United States where the enrollment is less than 10,000 students, but especially for those of you who have fewer than Regardless of your role at that institution, I hope you will read Requiem for a College, because if you can better understand what kills colleges, you stand a better chance of saving yours, or at least keeping it on life support long enough to find a new job for yourself and new college homes for your students. And by the way, it is perfectly fine to say, I don't think this book is about my institution or my subset of colleges, but I think I'd find it interesting to learn about those well-intentioned fools who killed all those other colleges. And by the way, you're going to learn a lot by reading it.

So, John Nichols, an exceptional writer, and the more I speak with you, an exceptional speaker on higher education. What's next, sir? What's next for you?

I have given that a lot of thought, and I'm really not sure. I have been doing Requiem for a College for so long. That I genuinely don't know what comes next. I have a few ideas. A lot of me for a long time was saying, I don't want to write about higher education again. I just really don't want to. I got to do something else. My brain's fried. However, I do have a slight inspiration to work with a couple colleagues on a book possibly about how to revitalize gen ed education. Attractive at the college level, to make them different, meaningfully different. I love that tagline that Kate Colbert has at the bottom of her emails, be meaningfully different. And I think every college, every small college or any college anywhere should take that in considering how they're going to change for the 21st century. Yes, you need to set yourself apart and you need to be having an an ear to the market and be fiscally minded, but how are you going to be meaningfully different? That, that's a great question. So I think if we can make general education meaningfully different from, so that students don't feel like they are repeating a few things that they did in high school, then, then we can level them up and then maybe get them excited about classes that are compulsory. So I've got a few colleagues working on that with me. Maybe one day that'll be what I eventually get out next.

Very cool. Well, I will be one of the first ones to preorder that sucker because you're such a talented writer. So one question for both of you, and Kate, I'm going to start with you. And let's jump ahead to the summer of 2028. And Lord knows what's going to happen in this industry in the intervening years, but what again, looking for an opinion, what, what do you expect, what impact you expect this book to have in the next 2 to 5 years?

Yeah, I think it's going to be profound. And I think the reaction to the book is going to be sort of a slow, consistent burn, as it were, you know, post-secondary education enrollment rates are currently still lower than pre-pandemic levels. So for all the people who are writing articles about, oh, higher education is just fine, you know, enrollments are higher this year, and Right. But nobody wants to peel back the onion and talk about where we were in 2019. Right. And so the higher education is still struggling. And by the way, a strong labor market right now has fewer people feeling like they need to go to college.

Yeah.

And so add that to that, the fact that we simply don't have enough 18-year-olds to fill all those empty college classrooms, thanks to Gen Xers like me who didn't have kids. And it's really clear that— and you, right? I know, like all these dinks, all the dual income, no kids kind of folks, right? You know, I mean, it's really clear that that small colleges with fragile financials and those that lack unique offerings— and my— I did not pay John to sing the praises of my company's tagline, be meaningfully different, but thank you for that. But if you are not meaningfully different, if you do not have unique offerings, if there's not something about going to College A that is specifically meaningfully different from going to College B, why will people choose it? And so modern learners are are going to— these institutions that are not appealing to modern learners and what they're looking for, they're going to struggle. So I think college closures typically come in waves, right? We saw like a really horrible year about a year ago for closures, and then things get a little bit quieter and more waves are coming. So when, when Derek Newton, a higher education contributor for Forbes, reviewed the book that I wrote with Joe Salustio in 2022, he said something powerful that I think actually applies equally to Requiem for College by Jonathan Nichols. He said, quote, The authors are likely right about one thing: higher education is at or near an inflection point. It does feel as though something is going to break soon. And he was right. He also said, and I think this also applies to Jon's book as well, quote, a decade hence, we will either say it was all right there in this book, or this is why we thought that way at the time. Either way, we will be returning to it, and probably more than once, end quote. I've read John's books multiple times, and I know you have too, Gary. And when the next wave of college closures happens, presidents and boards will be quoting this book. Trust me on this. And higher education consultants are going to be teaching from it and hopefully paying John a licensing fee for that. And of course, John will get to— is going to get asked this ridiculous question. People are going to say to him, why didn't you warn us? And he's going to say, I did. So, 3 years from now, those of you who have read this book will have a leg up on those of you who don't. And you have been warned.

And John Nichols, you lived it. You lived the trauma of a college closing on short notice, and you've written 2 books about it. 3 years from now, what impact do you want the book to have on this industry, on this business?

If nothing else, I hope it starts conversations. I hope it gets people talking about what's happening because while I did cover a number of factors that Kate mentioned in Requiem for a College, I did talk about, for example, the enrollment cliff that she just said. But there are other things we are dealing with right now that didn't— there just wasn't the space for artificial intelligence that is changing a lot. And let me tell you, as someone in the classroom, it's changing a lot. There are new federal policies, executive orders that are creating pressures that will— we don't know. You set the date of 2028, what things will look like. So add all those into the whole slew of things I mentioned in Requiem for a College that are bearing down on small colleges and there, there's even more to consider. So by 2028, my gosh, I, I can't imagine. So, uh, yesterday was too late to start talking. So I hope it gets people started talking right now about, about what to do and how to look at the problem.

So John, again, excellent writer. For those of you listening to the podcast, Take the guidance. Podcasts always promote things. This is a book that makes a difference. And it's not just about the industry. It's about somebody who went through what too many others have gone through since then and almost certainly what too many others will go through in the coming months and years. Buy the book, Requiem for College, Second Edition. Jon Nichols is the author and has been my guest today. Jon, always a pleasure.

Thank you so much, Gary.

Kate Colbert, again, I would talk to you any day of the week because you are profound with all the knowledge that you can provide to this industry. So thanks to both of you. And my name is Gary Stocker with College Viability. This has been a very special episode of This Week in College Viability. Thanks as always for making time to listen.