In a 2017 white paper for the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, Mary B. Marcy outlined five approaches that small colleges are taking in an era of “evolving realities of costs, demographics, and quality.”
Leaders hope souped-up advising, international and research programs, and other ambitious offerings will keep them afloat. But can the institutions afford them, and will they work? It’s too soon to tell.
Marcy, president of Dominican University of California, wrote that the four new approaches (the fifth is to carry on as before) are responses to tuition discounting and to a “shift in focus from college as a public good to a private service,” which has, she writes, “led to a devaluing of the liberal arts and a rise in professional and preprofessional programs.”
She described the approaches at a recent meeting of the Board of Trustees of Queens University of Charlotte:
- The traditional college — think Amherst, Pomona, Swarthmore, or Williams — is an undergraduate, residential liberal-arts institution with a strong reputation. But “very few institutions actually look like this now,” Marcy notes. It’s an expensive approach that requires a big endowment and doesn’t necessarily adapt well to changes in the kinds of students seeking an education, she says.
- The new American college — the model Marcy says is followed by most non-elite small private institutions, including Florida Southern College and Mary Baldwin University — retains its residential, liberal-arts core but adds professional and graduate programs. The institutions, she says, are “typically small colleges adapting to the last big financial crisis.”
- The distinctive program is often, but not always, an addition to the new American college, as is true at Marcy’s own institution, Dominican, and at Queens University of Charlotte. “A common student experience defines this institution,” she says, “and that experience is going to be focused on quality.”
- Expansion — the model adopted by Chapman and Drew Universities — retains a “limited” commitment to the liberal arts, concentrating instead on adding professional and graduate programs to meet market demand. “The expansion model is where most small colleges that are innovating are headed if they can,” Marcy says.
- Expansion and separation — the model into which Antioch and Southern New Hampshire Universities have evolved — turns to branch campuses or online programs to maintain enrollment. A core campus may or may not still be part of the institution. This model, Marcy says, is challenging for small colleges “because there’s a lot of upfront investment unless you’re already doing an awful lot online.”
