Agnes Scott College, in Decatur, Ga., unveiled a pioneering “signature program,” Summit, in 2015. Promising to educate young women for roles as global leaders, Summit includes a refocused curriculum, foreign travel for all first-year students, upgraded advising, and digital portfolios. The effort brought one year of disappointing admissions results but then seemed to take hold. Last fall the college had its largest on-campus population ever, 1,040, and its biggest entering class, 324.
Leocadia I. Zak, who took over the presidency from Elizabeth Kiss last summer, says the college is still tweaking Summit. Among other steps, including alumnae on students’ advising teams “didn’t work out as well as we had hoped,” says Zak. But a survey of incoming students found that 95 percent said Summit was important or very important to their decision to attend. Zak also notes that diversity at Agnes Scott has passed an important tipping point: “There’s no ethnic majority here.”
The college draws a significant portion of its students from Georgia, but contingents also come from Chicago, Texas, Massachusetts, and California. The goal is still to reach 1,200 students, a number at which the college seems sustainable. “In a couple of years,” Zak says, “we may need some residence-hall space.”
Oglethorpe University, in Atlanta, attracted attention from NPR and The Wall Street Journal last year when it announced Flagship 50, a program in which applicants with good grades and standardized-test scores can qualify to pay no more in tuition at Oglethorpe than the flagship public university in their home state would charge. Lawrence M. Schall, president of the 1,264-student university, says the program is an attempt at “communicating to these families that Oglethorpe’s affordable.”
“People ask, ‘How can you afford to do that?’ But those students are very heavily aided anywhere,” he says. “The discount rate per student is going to climb. In last year’s class, it would have cost us more, but it wouldn’t have bankrupted us. And it would have taken us from maybe 40 top kids to 50 to 70. Deposits from that group have tripled.”
Schall preaches sticking to basics, keeping a close eye on costs, and avoiding debt. Oglethorpe’s student-faculty ratio is 16 or 17 to 1, he says, and its administration is “very efficient.” His strategy, essentially, is to increase how much cash is coming in the door. “Net tuition was below $10 million when I came. It’s $16 million now. It’s not the rate of discount you have to worry about, it’s your net tuition and expenses.”
Sweet Briar College, just outside of Amherst, Va., was famously saved from closing in 2015 by its alumnae, who have raised millions to underwrite its survival. A new president, Meredith Woo, took office in 2017, and soon announced that Sweet Briar would reset its tuition to match that of the state’s flagship public institutions. It was an attempt to combat “the perception that Sweet Briar is unaffordable,” Woo says. “We didn’t want to have people walk by us.”
She has also led efforts to make the liberal-arts curriculum less “generic” and more “intentional.” To do that, she says, “instead of starting from the abstract, we started from what’s concrete. We looked at alumnae, at women who get things done, and asked, Can this kind of leadership be taught?” The result was “a streamlining of our offerings to add depth” and to create a project-based learning environment.
“So far, so good,” Woo says of the turnaround effort. But the current senior class numbers only about 30, and the college has a long way to go even to get back to a total enrollment of 600, a number many small-college presidents would say is half what their institutions need to thrive.
In the meantime, Woo is looking at other revenue possibilities on the 3,200-acre campus. About 30 acres will be planted with grapes to sell to Virginia winemakers, and greenhouses will be put up on retired tennis courts to grow produce for the college’s food-service contractor, Meriwether Godsey, and possibly some of its other clients. An apiary is also in the works — 19 students have signed up to be trained as beekeepers, Woo says — and the college is considering adding orchards and livestock.
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
