The Opportunities for Small Colleges

This episode of Future you is brought to you by Nelnet Campus Commerce, delivering payment technology for a smarter campus and by Entangled Solutions. This is Future youe with Jeff Selingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe. I'm Michael Horn, joined by my co host Jeff Salingo, and we're delighted to have on set today Mary Marcy, the president of Dominican University of California. Thanks so much for joining us.

Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thank you both for inviting me. Looking forward to the conversation.

Yeah, we are as well. And a question we love to kick off our episodes with is how did you get to where you are today as the president of Dominican?

That's a challenging question for a president because he could settle in and talk for a while.

You can go wherever you want. Yeah.

I will say that I've spent my career in higher education. I didn't know that would happen. I started out on a cattle ranch in Nebraska and higher education really became the path for opportunity and personal change for me that I think we hope it will be for so many of our students. And so the, the opportunity to lead a university really feels like a mission for me as well as just a great job.

So you know how to herd cattle then, which I guess we we won't talk about faculty and students hurting all the people.

You don't want to put her into difficulties when she goes back.

I will tell you that my cousin got me a lariat for my inauguration because he thought it would he he's a faculty member at another college and he thought it might be useful.

So, Mary, you recently came out with a book called the could you tell us a little bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Sure. There's so much noise information, but really noise too right now in the space around small colleges. Are they going to survive? Who's going to be the next Hampshire? Who's going to be the next Sweet Briar? This kind of high drama, some of it legitimate, but because of all that noise, it's hard to sort out what's reality for a lot of these institutions. And for me at least, I didn't really want another conversation about everything that's wrong. There are a lot of challenges. So I do talk about the challenges up front. But the bigger question is how do you respond to them and are there hopeful paths forward and what are they? And although some of the conversation, I think because of the Sweet Briar Hampshire Mount Ida narrative has become more prominent in recent years, the issues of demographics the issues of marketing, the change in educational technology, the business model, those actually aren't new things. And so there's a number of institutions over the last few years that have really started to adapt. So the question in the book is, can we learn from them and what's working and what is replicable, what's maybe idiosyncratic to particular places?

So let's get to that in a moment. The question I want to back up for just one moment before we dive in is how. How do you define small colleges and what fits in the group and what is out?

I don't have a scientific explanation, but I would say that any institution that's small enough that it is not focused on, we can be all things to all people. We don't have to have multiple levels of law school, business school, engineering school, et cetera. Now, some small colleges have a few of those things, but they're not research one institutions. They're probably certainly less than 10,000 students, maybe less than that. I will say in the book I actually feature an institution that's much larger than that. But they started out as a small college, so we can talk about that, right?

Well, so Southern New Hampshire University, I think, is one of them. If I remember from the paper that you released before the book itself, can you, for the audience, give an overview of the five big solutions, if you will, that you talk to for small colleges?

When you asked a minute ago about how I started, I actually started with my own board saying where do we fit? What questions are we trying to answer? And where do we fit in the larger scheme of things? Of course, some of that's who's the competition? So the five models really came from that conversation. It was saying, this is what I see in the landscape. So the models range from traditional, which is the kind of core, traditional liberal arts, residential, what everyone thinks of as small colleges, but it's actually a relatively small number. The second category is Integrated, which maintains the core liberal arts, but tends to add professional, pre professional, some graduate programs, but really focuses on integrating them in thoughtful ways. The third model is a distinctive program model, and that's a little bit less concerned with what's the core academic program and more concerned with what's the student experience. Not outside the classroom necessarily, but how do we make sure students are successful and engaged and how do we distinguish ourselves in that space. The fourth model is the expansion model, which is a little bit more agnostic, frankly, about liberal arts and much more focused on where's the market and where do we add program to respond to that market. It may be on campus or off campus, and then the final model is a distributed model. And that's very much more focused on the online just in time react to current needs.

And that one, it's sort of growth focused as well. Is that part of it or not necessarily.

It certainly is. When it starts, I think it's still growth focused. Yes. And it's very much reacting to the broader landscape in the market and saying, where do we need to be to fit the current needs for people? And it also tends to move away from the traditional student age. Now, traditional students certainly age. Students certainly take some courses through those programs. But a lot of times it's retooling for adults. It may be partnering specifically with businesses and organizations that want their workers trained in specific ways.

Mary When I was editor of the Chronicle right after the Great Recession, we were thinking about a story, kind of taking the line from Shakespeare, the first thing we do is kill all the lawyers. The first thing we do is kill the small colleges. Thinking about what higher education looks like after the Great Recession, they've been much more resilient than I think people probably gave them credit for. But it begs the question, right? Why are small colleges important? And even if they're important, why do we need so many of them?

Yeah, I think it's a profound question, actually, for American higher education right now, because I do think that the Great Recession is a great jumping off point. Jeff Many of these institutions have not recovered from the Great Recession. If you look at net tuition revenue, it's basically flatlined since before the recession. So they have been very resilient. But it's also wearing in a lot of these institutions. Why do they matter? I think that the great strength of American higher education has actually been the diversity of offerings. It doesn't always align as much as we might like with exactly where the students are, or the students may not understand the choice. They'll have more help now, thanks to your book, Michael. But I think that that diversity is actually important to the larger ecosystem of American higher education right now. The challenge to liberal education is real. It's not as clearly aligned with the market as people would like it to be. They think the data suggests otherwise, but it's not as obvious. And so I think that notion of engaged learning, of communication, of critical thinking, but also an educated citizenry that can participate in our democracy is pretty core to the notion of American higher education.

So you mentioned kind of net tuition revenue following the Great Recession for colleges, for small colleges, universities, what Are some of the other big issues you think facing institutions? Because when I think about everything facing higher education today, it seems like much more pronounced even at small colleges. Right. They tend to be in more rural areas, for example, when students want to go to more urban areas, they're concentrated in the Midwest and the Northeast, where we have a demographic downturn in terms of high school graduates. They don't have big endowments, they're tuition dependent, and on and on and on and on. So as you think about the core issues facing them, not that if they can just fix those two or three issues, they're going to be fine. But when it comes down to it, what are the real core issues for small colleges?

I think one is not just reacting to the present, but actually anticipating a bit of the future. And I don't mean that actually primarily being market driven, but looking at who are our students and who are they likely to be? So one of the things I talk about in the book is how a few institutions have responded in really thoughtful ways to what they see coming with the demographic changes. So my own institution has become much more diverse in the last decade. At the same time, our student success rate has gone up. We have a huge improvement in graduation rates. That's because we saw that change coming and we really were trying to respond to it. Cal Lutheran is another one that's featured in the book where Lutheran College. You think you have an idea of what that's like, right? Cal Lutheran intentionally, over a period of years, reached to become a Hispanic serving institution because they saw student demographics changing in that way and they focused on the serving part. They were really not just saying we're going to add more numbers, but how do we need to change in terms of our programs in our core to meet the needs of those new students? So I would say anticipating those shifts is as crucial as anything else they can do.

So let's talk about what you've done at Dominican University then, specifically first, how you fit into those five models that you laid out. But then also you've launched some really innovative partnerships with MakeSchool, for example, and made some moves that have caught a lot of eyes around the country, frankly, about how that fits into this concept of anticipating the future.

Sure. So we did say our students were already diverse a decade ago, but There were about 48%, I think, students of color at that time. Now we're almost 2/3 students of color. About a third of our students are the first in their families to go to college. Usually 25 to 30% are Pell eligible. And at the same time, our graduation rates have increased dramatically. And the reason is because we're in the distinctive program model, we focus on something called the Dominican experience. We've taken those high impact pract practices. There's lots of research that says this is what matters. And we said, we're going to do it, but we can't do all of them. What are the things we think we could be good at? So every student has an integrative coach. Every student has some form of community engaged learning. Every student has a signature experience. Every student has a digital portfolio that helps with their integrative coaches, undergraduates. But then as they move towards graduation, it can work for graduate school, it can work for applying for a job. Now that's a core experience. But at the same time, we've added new partnerships, we've added new programs. The makesco partnership was very specific. We knew, particularly in the San Francisco Bay area, we needed to be offering something in terms of digital literacy and core computer science. The idea of starting that from scratch for an institution like ours or the shadow of Stanford and Berkeley, can you imagine how many millions of dollars and just how much credibility we'd have? But we knew what we were good at, and we're incredibly good at a core student experience. And so we found a partner in MakeSchool who was equally committed to student opportunity and the student experience, who had great background in computer science and coding and had some ideas for how they wanted to change that space. So we've partnered. So they deliver cs. We deliver the kind of core general education, liberal arts. Their students are still in San Francisco. We go there with our faculty. They're getting a CS degree now from Dominican and Dominican students are getting up to a minor in CS that they're delivering on our campus. This is made possible because we've got a great, thoughtful accreditor in wasc. I think this is one of those cases where accreditation actually helped.

Has helped innate.

Yeah, Helped innovation. But I would say in general, those kinds of partnerships are, I think, a space that we need to move into. I have a chapter in the book on new types of partnerships and consortia. It's a really fertile space, but it's not fully fleshed out yet. We're also starting a partnership with the state. We had a partnership with a city up the road where students would get paid by the city for public service and we would provide a scholarship. The governor is now interested in that. We're expanding it statewide so that students will do some civic engagement with the state. As a part of their academic core. So it's going to be built into four years and they'll get a scholarship from us. It will help them pay for college. The students that we have in the current program are going debt free at this point. So we think that kind of model could also work.

Mary, one final question. Let's go back to WASC for a second because I think when we talk to presidents and other senior leaders in higher education who really want to be innovative, the thing we hear over and over again, well, if it just weren't for the accreditors or the federal government or the state government or you name it, we could do it. So WASC is obviously one of the more progressive accreditors out there, but it still required work. Can you tell if there's listeners out there who want to do things at their own universities? What advice do you have for them in terms of working with their accreditors, whether they're in in the west or not?

I would say it's a little bit like the questions I suggest we ask of ourselves as small institutions. We can't do everything. What is it we do well, why do accrediting bodies exist and what is it you need from them? So in this case it wasn't we need accreditation. For us, they helped ensure the legitimacy of the partnership. You know, we were partnering with a for profit that uses an income share

agreement and is seeking its own accreditation.

And is seeking its own accreditation. We, you know, we wanted the, the external review to push us to make sure that the boundaries were there so that we didn't get off the rails in developing the partnership. So we really worked closely with them because we needed their, we felt we needed their expertise. And I would say that's the question is not what do you want from them? What is it they can provide that you need?

So in other words, don't see them as a threat or something that that's in the way as a bar, rather see them as a partner. Is that part of it?

Absolutely. Because I think most accreditors, they want you to be successful. They do. But their responsibility is to make sure that you do so in a way that's legitimate, whether it's financial or academic.

Well, this has been great, Mary. Thanks so much for joining us. Mary Marcy, president of Dominican University of California and author of the new book called the Small College Imperative. It was great to have you here.

Thank you very much. It's great to talk to you guys.

And we'll be right back. On future you

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We're back with Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo along with Michael Horn and coming off a great conversation with Mary Marcy of Dominican University of California, one of the great small colleges in the state that's dominated by public higher education, the UC system, the CSU system, and the California community colleges. Michael, you've written a lot about small colleges. You've been associated, of course, with these predictions about the future of colleges in general. But I think a lot of people just insert small college there when you talk about colleges potentially closing. Why? Why are small colleges? I mean, it's they make up about 40% of the market, right? So colleges under a thousand students, you know, those are what I call probably tiny colleges, make up 40% of the market and, you know, a couple more thousand, another 20% of the market. So this is a big part of American higher education. Is that the only reason they're important is because they make up such a large proportion or are there other reasons?

Well, and what I'll supplement right to that statistic is they make up a large percentage of the institutions but not a large percentage of the students. Students, right. Most of the students go to public universities or to community colleges and that makes up the bulk of the students. And so I think a question we often hear, and it's why I'm glad we asked Mary how she sees the importance of small colleges. One of them I think is right, it's a diversity of options so that not everyone is going into a similar track. It creates other pathways that are possible. But the other piece of this, I think from my perspective as I look at it, is that the outcomes for different demographics of students are actually often superior in private schools compared, or excuse me, small schools, I should say compared to their large public counterparts in many cases. And I think that's bred from the Familiarity often a faculty that is more focused on teaching and learning and supporting than research in many cases. And so that some of these impacts in terms of how students do, in terms of graduation, are actually better. Now, job outcomes is the other piece of this that I think is tricky because of the rural urban divide aspect that you talked about in your book and you asked Mary about. And I think that's complicated the narrative a little bit the last several years, but I think it gets into this creativity, frankly, around partnerships also.

Right. Do you think, though, that larger institutions. Right. So if most flagship universities, do you think there are something that those universities can learn from small colleges? In other words, are there ways of scaling what small colleges do, or is it just because they're able to do it because they're small?

This is the question I think I personally struggle with, just to be honest, which is I think think public universities could do a better job of creating small learning communities within the university that maybe are microcosms of the larger campus or are particular divisions of the campus, if you want to be focused on in a particular way and things like that, to create some of the fabric. One of the challenges, though, is that because of the pecking order in higher education, regional public universities often want to look like flagships. And flagships are often trying to compete from a research perspective with the Ivy League and so forth. And so that emphasis on research and promotion around tenure tied to publishing, I think is often challenging, frankly, for these institutions to replicate, you know, sort of the best of the liberal arts. The third point that small colleges bring to the table that I'm not sure the large publics can replicate is the interconnectedness with the broader economy outside of urban areas in many cases. And it's not necessarily a reason to support a college on its own merits, if you will. But these small schools are often very tied into the fabric of their communities. And if they disappear, it's literally the collapse of the largest employer in that region, or certainly that town in many cases. And that has very significant impacts, not just obviously on the town's employment situation, but also economic development more broadly and the chances of those regions staging a comeback effectively. And so I. I don't personally think that's a reason just to keep the institution alive on its own merits, but I do think small colleges play a larger role than is popularly understood for those reasons. I guess from my perspective, then it gets to the solution set, which is where I thought Mary was so interesting in terms of not just the categories that she's come up with in the book and the white paper that she wrote that preceded it. But the partnerships that she's been thinking about and your question about the accreditor being seen as a partner, I found. I found her answer pretty insightful. I'm curious your take on it.

Yeah, I mean, she obviously spent a lot of time with the accreditor. You know, one of the things she didn't mention is Wask is now head by Jamie Studley.

Yes.

You know, formerly of the. Of the department, formerly a college president, her, herself. And so I think that they had a. First of all, Wask is a little bit more progressive than some of the

other and has been seen as such for many years.

And, and having somebody like Jamie who has a position on innovation but also has a process on innovation, I think really helped there. But I think part of this is just the legwork that I think that most college presidents, to be honest with you, don't want to do.

Right.

Because it's much easier to just say, well, the accreditor won't let us do this. The federal government won't let us do this. The state government won't let us do this.

And just hide behind it.

And just hide behind it. Because it does take a tremendous amount of. Of legwork. You know, one of these days we're going to have Paul LeBlanc on the show, and he will talk a lot about the work that Southern New Hampshire has done and the work that they had to do not only with the federal government, but also with their accreditor as well. And it just requires the time that I think most college presidents would rather spend on campus or spend fundraising or doing the other things that they're doing. And sometimes they don't really have a good understanding of the process. And I thought it was really interesting what she said, using the accreditor as a partner to help you rather than see them as a barrier.

Yeah, I thought to me, that was the big distinguishing feature as well, which is, I think sometimes an accreditor is seen as the mother you need to get permission from as opposed to the partner that actually brings a set of answers to the table that you might not have on your campus or that you're going to have to rely on legal counsel or somewhere else to get the answers to. I was so impressed with how she brought them in as a partner because when Alana Dunnigan and I wrote a chapter in a book about accreditation as a barrier to innovation. And Paul obviously stands out for his work with NEA Ask, but it felt a Little bit like the haves and the have nots. What this conversation changed my mind on, I think was viewing it not as sort of are you politically connected to the accredited or not? But more, okay, let's come to them early and say these are the questions that we have as we're contemplating this partnership. This is why we think it'd be really advantageous. How do we structure it so that we're getting the advantages out of it and we're not running a field of anything.

And having presidential leadership on here, I think is, is critically important. I spoke a couple of months ago to sacs, you know, the Southern Accreditors and you know, thousands of people go to these annual meetings. But most of them are, you know, associate provost, assistant provost, deans who are in charge of accreditation. Many of them send a huge team, especially if they're gonna be going through, you know, reauthorization or re accreditation in that particular year. But it's very unlikely the president will be there or get, you know, presidents get their hands dirty around accreditation. And I think in this case it shows what can happen when a president takes great interest in this and actually gets their hands dirty in getting these partnerships done.

Yeah, I totally agree. So let me ask you one last question, because if I've been known as the person spelling the demise and merger and acquisition of small colleges, you've certainly been the other part of this saying, hey, there's a lot of opportunities for partnerships and consortia and so forth. So what's your take on the partnership that she has with makeschool specifically? But what it signals for the broader sector and the creativity we might see around that?

I mean, what I think is creative about this is that it's a non traditional provider.

Right.

Most of the partnerships I've been talking about is, you know, universities or colleges partnering with other colleges or universities that are accredited. This was obviously a case of a non accredited partnership. But in this case there were specific needs on both sides because Dominican, as she talked about, needed a computer science minor. More students are clamoring for that. They couldn't really put the resource to that. I don't think Mary talked about it.

It's.

And in this episode, but she's told us before it would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to start that and the competition you would have had with other colleges and universities would have been tough. So this is distinctive in that way. Meanwhile, makes school needed not only an accredited partner, but they needed the liberal arts skills that a place like Dominican can teach their students. Right. Because the Facebooks of the world and the Googles of the world want that. On top of that, Dominican is a very diverse place. And we know that Silicon Valley is very white in that. And so they wanted that diversity of students that were going to be provided by Dominicans. So everybody had a need here that was fulfilled. And that is the great example of a partnership that works. I don't think that colleges, universities should partner, just a partner. But here we had a case where there were needs on both sides. They were complementary, they worked, they were close enough to each other. So this was something that you didn't have to work over the phone or over long distance travel. The creditors were right there. This is a case, I think, that can be replicated elsewhere. One of the things that we didn't get to talk about is that I would love a university like this to create a playbook that, you know, if I'm sitting in, you know, Arizona or I'm sitting in New York or Massachusetts or Michigan, and I'm in a place like Dominican in terms of, you know, I don't have a minor in computer science or a major in computer science and I want to create a similar partnership. Can I do that? In other words, can we replicate this by creating that playbook?

Well, and I think we're starting to see some of that with, adjacent, with Davidson and so forth, starting to work across lots of colleges and universities. But the other big thing I'll take away from that in terms of the plea for a playbook, is that presidents, probably up front, ought to spend some time with their teams and say, what are our needs? And be very specific about that. And what are the other organizations that we might partner with or work with? What are their needs and expertise? And how do we come together in a genuine conversation and genuine mutually beneficial relationship? So we're not asking something of someone that we think flies in the face of what they stand for but is actually helping them advance forward as well. And so I think she did that incredibly well. And it's a great way. That's the template for me that I take away from this. So that does it for this episode. Thanks again to Mary Marcy for joining us and especially thank you for listening. We love hearing from you. So please drop Jeff and me a line with ideas, comments, questions, or even complaints. We love those as well. Until next time, keep one eye on the present and the other on the future.

Hey, folks, Michael Horn here.

Hope you enjoyed the latest episode of Future youe. And just a reminder to please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform. And if you like the podcast, rate us so that others can find us and find out about the good conversations that we're having here. As always, thanks so much for listening.