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Much ink has been spilled in the last several years about the “Enrollment Cliff in higher ed. The term has become so ubiquitous that it deserves to be capitalized as a formal title.
The causes of the cliff are well-known, and the anxiety over its impending arrival is widespread. The real enrollment problem for small institutions, however, isn’t the upcoming decline in high school graduates. It is instead the rising tide of non-traditional students who need to pursue or complete their college degree and the inability (or unwillingness) of small schools to meet these students where they are. The efforts of traditional colleges and universities to tighten up their recruitment practices by targeting traditional students with greater effort comprise an “enrollment wall” for non-traditional students This wall will get higher as institutions double down on their commitment to the traditional 18- to 24-year-old student as the key to their mission.
This enrollment wall will force many traditional colleges and institutions either to reconsider their core mission or face failure.
The business dynamics here are not complex. The current number of degree-granting IHEs in the United States (just under 4,000) is simply too high for the declining number of high school graduates that will become available to them as potential students in the next decade. A fair number of these IHEs are small institutions with enrollments of fewer than 1,000 students. Without fundamental changes, many of these institutions will go out of business in the next ten to twenty years.
I am of course painting with a very broad brush here. Leaders at these institutions are very bright and forward-looking people, and almost all of them have made some level of effort to bolster traditional enrollments by offering academic programs geared at working adults. But in the majority of these cases, these efforts have been too few and too late to stave off eventual financial implosion.
While the fundamental market realities are pretty simple, the reasons for institutions’ relatively meager response are more complex. In some cases it’s a matter of refusal to face the reality of changing student demographics. In some cases it’s a matter of faculty recalcitrance to the basic changes required to face that reality. Sometimes it involves complex relationships between faculty, administrations, trustees, and alumni that make it impossible for troubled schools to move forward with dispatch in addressing the looming crisis. Add to these issues the realities of the Great Recession of 2008, the COVID pandemic, the ways the culture wars are impacting decision-making on campuses, and the breakdown of the tuition discount finance model of higher ed (the subject of a future post). For some IHEs, the problem has become a Gordian knot defying resolution.
Unless traditional IHEs become much more adept at meeting the needs of adult students, that segment of our industry will soon reach a tipping point. Past this tipping point, the bulk of the traditional aged college students will be served by a relatively small percentage of the overall number of IHEs in the United States. And these IHEs will on average come in two flavors: public flagship and regional universities, and well-endowed private institutions (that is, schools with endowments north of $300 million).
Many other institutions will remain behind to “pick up the pieces” of the student market share not swallowed up by other larger or better-endowed schools. But no one knows for sure how many schools will be left standing in this “also-ran” category. Many of these schools are justifiably proud of their heritage and cannot countenance the image of their being also-rans at anything. It will be that very sort of pride that will be their undoing.
What Comprises the Enrollment Wall?
In 2017, Nathan Grawe published his seminal book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. That work laid the foundation for the concept of the Enrollment Cliff discussed above. In his 2021 follow-up, The Agile College: How Institutions Successfully Navigate Demographic Change, Grawe provided guidance for colleges seeking to face the Enrollment Cliff successfully. He grouped these strategies under six headings:
- Recruitment and financial aid policies
- Retention initiatives
- Program reforms
- Reorganization and/or retrenchment
- Enrollment growth initiatives
- collaborative strategies
My purpose here is not to examine these strategies more closely. All of them are well-known to higher ed leaders at small, tuition-based schools that are seeking to minimize the future effects of the Enrollment Cliff. Nevertheless, in many cases pursuit of these strategies will be insufficient to prevent eventual disaster. Many schools cannot afford to pick and choose which of these strategies will apply to them and then pursue those strategies piecemeal. While each of these strategies is a smart way of addressing an aspect of the problem, the root problem remains for these institutions: the increasing unavailability of traditional students.
Resolving that problem will require a significant retooling of these schools that will extend even to the mission of those institutions. Many schools that have the education of traditional students as the core of their mission must redirect that mission in order to survive. There simply won’t be enough of those students to feed their pipelines for those institutions to retain long-term stability.
IHEs are loath to revise their mission statements. It’s a more disruptive process than an institutional name change. Altering a mission statement calls into question the commitments that have bound together faculty, administration, trustees, and alumni. Every school has an idealized picture of what its educational impact should be. That idea is realized in the lives of thousands of alumni who exemplify how the college experience should affect one’s life journey. That life journey is the actualization of the school’s mission. So when a school’s mission is, for example (and I’m pulling this from thin air), “to prepare students for effective lives of service in church and society,” many alumni sit up and say “That’s me! University of [name] gave me a sense of identity as I moved into adulthood, and without them I wouldn’t be who I am today.” But a change in the school’s mission could appear to invalidate the perspective of those alumni.
Changing a school’s mission is the steepest of uphill battles. But without fighting this battle, many schools will not survive. Why? All too often, it is because the traditional raison d’être given by those grateful alumni will no longer pay the bills.
Such IHEs need a new reason for existence–one that addresses the educational needs of contemporary society rather than the society that existed during the formative adult years of their typical alumni.
Whereas the number of traditional-aged high school students (aged 18-24) is slated to decrease significantly over the next decade, the number of adults 25 and over who have never been to college or who have stopped out short of a degree is on the increase. Yet according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 91% of students at public universities and 87% of students at private, nonprofits IHEs were under the age of 25 in 2021. Most institutions are still geared toward serving the traditional student. And many see the continuing predominance of traditional students on our campuses as evidence that our missions remain successful.
But the changing student demographics making those traditional students more scarce will soon undermine that assumption. Highly selective, well-endowed schools are best able to adjust to this new normal. And public funding for state universities will help shield them from the worst effects of the new normal. But small, private, modestly-endowed schools will have no safe haven. They must retool themselves to become more accommodating to the adult student, even if that requires an adjustment to their mission and long-established traditions.
How Do Schools Breach the Enrollment Wall?
Many if not most schools in this last category have already made significant adjustments over the past twenty years. Most have or have had adult degree completion programs. Many expanded their graduate curricula as a means of reaching the adult student population. Most have begun online programs. Many have begun whole academic divisions aimed at serving adult populations. Some campuses developed remote sites or extension centers, with varying degrees of success.
But as significant and sacrificial as these efforts have been, they may not be enough for many of these IHEs. At these institutions, efforts to recruit, enroll, and retain adult students to graduation still suffer from systemic barriers presented to these students in deference to traditional students. The specialized needs of non-traditional students are well-known and openly acknowledged. But all too often, schools attempt to meet those needs by shoe-horning adult students into support systems designed for traditional students. Hence, adult students frequently encounter barriers or even walls when attempting to access services such as academic advising, financial aid counseling, personal counseling, tutoring, research assistance, and many others.
The curricular issues here are often the most troublesome. Adult students present the traditional private institution with difficult quandaries regarding the transferability of credits from community colleges, general education requirements that don’t have adult students in mind, and the concept of credit for life experience.
Faced with these numerous barriers, highly motivated students will choose to enroll elsewhere. And modestly-motivated adults will not enroll at all.
Breaching the enrollment wall will certainly require all of the strategies outlined by Grawe in his most recent book. IHEs must find a way to keep the cost of education low for the adult student. They must develop robust student support services to aid in the retention of non-traditional students. Schools should be securing rock-solid articulation agreements that allow adult students to transfer seamlessly from community college with only a minimum of general education courses that must still be taken. And some institutions will need to undertake rigorous and possibly painful program prioritization initiatives that will ensure that their menu of academic programs will continue to serve them effectively in the new emerging environment.
And yet, even these may not be enough. From mission statements to admissions requirements, new program development policies, to student support services, this group of schools faces likely financial disaster unless they remake themselves to face the new reality. And that new reality is that adult students will soon become more numerous in their marketplace than traditional students. This changed demographic is already the reality for some schools. The question is whether those schools will respond to that change and make the hard choice required by the change.
Where Should Such Schools Start?
The starting point for any institutional re-creation is the mission statement. Schools need to take a hard look at their reason for existence and make sure their mission statement looks forward and not backward (which is all too often the case for an institution). A second focus should be on institutional organization. IHEs need to be structured in ways that help smooth the path to success for adult students. That will probably require a separate academic division that deals with these students. This academic division should have its own recruitment efforts, admissions staff, and financial aid procedures.
Next, schools need to take a hard look at any policies that touch adult students. Many schools have already adjusted their missions to ensure that the institutional aims are as available to non-traditional students as to 18-24 year-olds. But many of these schools have not yet taken the courageous but painful step of ensuring that their admissions, academic, and student support policies are not biased toward traditional populations. In some cases, this difficult adjustment will need the support of trustees as well as the administration.
A further step would be to ensure meaningful faculty involvement in the process while not sacrificing the streamlined, rapid decision-making required to be successful in adult markets. Some faculty–even those with foresight and enduring love for the institution–may be hesitant to relinquish the level of curricular control that has all too often prevented these changes from taking place. That may mean using faculty committees to review and approve curriculum geared to non-traditional students rather than allowing each curricular change to be debated on the floor of a full faculty meeting.
Traditional institutions need to make certain they have exploited all means of smoothing the student transfer process for community college students, whether they attained the associate’s degree or not. That will require close collaboration with faculty leadership and with those community colleges. Achieving this goal will require some curricular sacrifices by minimizing or even eliminating the general education requirements community college students must fulfill upon transfer. Many IHEs have already completed this step. But those who have not are merely undercutting their own competitiveness with this particular student market.
Conclusion
Institutions unwilling to break down the walls that prevent the smooth recruitment, enrollment, and retention of adult students do so at their own peril. The typical objection to this process is that doing so will undermine academic quality by reducing the admissions and graduation standards of the college or university. Since faculty are the first line of defense in protecting academic quality, this objection usually comes from those faculty who have built their callings and careers around protecting academic integrity.
But defending standards is noble only so long as those standards apply to the process at hand. A new day is upon us. Like all other social standards, the standards that denote academic quality are always a function of the persons to whom they apply, namely the students who sit or will sit in our classrooms. All too often, faculty define those standards in terms of the students who have sat in their classrooms in the years gone by. It is not helpful to continue to teach and develop curriculum that is based upon a student population from a generation ago.
Yes, I am arguing that academic standards can, do, and should change even as our students change. Failure to pursue this change will not only be detrimental to our future students. It could also be deadly for some of the institutions that are called to teach them.