The End of Business as Usual in Higher Education. Applying 3 Lenses to Daily Work.

Within a few years, there will be hundreds of thousands fewer college-going students than there were just a few years ago.  This will be perpetuated by continually sagging birth rates in the U.S. that started back in 2007, a result of the overvalued housing bubble and concurrent subprime mortgage lending practices.  Students graduated from college and jobs were scarce, so instead of marriage and kids, many opted for graduate school, resulting higher debt, and extended time living as single adults. Voila! No babies!  More than a simple blip on the demographic radar, it turned out to be a cultural shift that the U.S. has not recovered from.  We have gone from about 70 births per thousand women to only around 55 births per every thousand women today. So, this is going to be an existential shift for many industries, but especially higher education.  Many of my friends at larger division one, research schools think they will be immune. . .they will not. . .not even close.  Don’t be lulled into business as usual my higher education friends, it will reach all of us and now is the time to change how we think about our work.

I used the word existential in the last paragraph.  In 2024, 24 institutions closed their doors, in 2023, 18, in 2022, 11, in 2021, 10; so, everyone can see that is a steadily increasing trend. Already, 5 institutions have announced their closure for 2025: Bluffton University, UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, Fontbonne University, St. Ambrose University and Eastern Nazarene College.   Projections are that between 30 and 35 colleges and universities will close in 2025 in total, and it will get larger and larger as the years go on.  This is not to mention that dozens of schools will merge, including those in the state where I work, where six separate long-standing universities were merged into two, each university with three separate campuses, and one administration. See what I mean? Existential!

Starting in early 2024, I began to ask staff members in our subdivision to think about their work through three lenses, and I have perpetuated this sense as I continue to work with faculty and staff across our campus.  These are the three lenses that I have asked everyone to use as they consider their work:

Excellence = Do I leave every ounce of energy, thought, creativity and effort on the playing field everyday and not hold back a single ounce when it comes to our students and our work - and do I commit myself to data, research, committee work, offering papers and attending conferences and building my certifications (and do I support my staff and faculty in the same effort)?

Exemplary = In Jim Collin’s book Good to Great – of which I am a big fan – I still think the author neglected something.  We should be moving from good (functional) to great (“Hey! Look at us!”) to exemplary (“Hey! Look at them!  How are they accomplishing that?”).  This year our university broke our modern day first-year student retention record, and for the first time in recorded history, our African American, Hispanic and multi-race students all persisted to second year at a rate higher than their overall cohort. Already, people want to know what we have been up to.  That is exemplary! Next we will work on closing the graduation gap as well.  As another example, with one, single, strategic programmatic change our Exploratory Studies (undeclared) students went from 65% first-year retention, to over 90% first-year retention in one year, with 100% underrepresented student retention. That is exemplary, and we will not relent!

First Choice = Mind you that being a “First Choice” institution is part of our strategic plan narrative at our institution, but I absolutely love that idea!  In our crowded western Pennsylvania higher education market, there are so many reasons that our school should be first choice for students, but that is not just a marketing story, it is a personal story.  I encourage our staff to think about their daily actions, choices and the programming that we produce and ask this question “If a student was considering coming to our institution, and if they were able to see me, and my actions, and my programs, hear the things I say to others, to myself and about others, would they consider us even more of a first-choice institution, or less of a first-choice institution?”  It’s pretty simple, we need to take a hard look at ourselves, we need to set our goals, measure outcomes, and start to respect our ‘stop doing’ list as much as we wring our hands about our ‘to do’ lists.  And it is not always about doing more.  In fact, most of our recent accomplishments have been attained by simply ‘doing differently’ and not by ‘doing more.’

I come back to that word – existential. At larger schools, there might be a tendency to feel more removed from budgeting, enrollment management and decision making, and so it is easy to become lulled into a false sense of security.  This demographic shift will affect all 4000+ degree granting institutions in the county.  All of them!  No one will be left out. We need to think differently, work differently, make our stop doing lists, and start to look at our world of work through the lenses of excellence, exemplary and first choice.

Thanks for reading.