A Small University Saved by Big Plans

Nabil K. Mark for The Chronicle

Change in academe is notoriously, agonizingly slow, subject to endless debate and second-guessing.

Except when it’s lightning fast and decisive, as it has been at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in recent years.

HU has expanded its revenue streams and enrollment. It plans new programs, buildings, and an overseas offshoot. What sparked this sudden, ambitious growth? Desperation and necessity. The young institution had to either move aggressively or wither on the vine.

Founded in 2001, approved to award degrees in 2005, and fully accredited in 2009, the Central Pennsylvania university had borrowed heavily to build a signature 16-story downtown tower. The founding president, Mel Schiavelli, left for another job in 2012, and the interim president, Eric Darr, who had been involved since the university’s inception and had served as chief financial officer, and then as provost and executive vice president, was appointed the next year to take the presidency permanently, inheriting the debt crisis.

A native of Mechanicsburg, Pa., less than 10 miles from Harrisburg, Darr draws from his background in mechanical engineering, industrial psychology, business consulting, entrepreneurship, and academe. A college swimmer turned Hawaii Ironman triathlete and Boston marathoner, he has a competitive personality, and says he wasn’t about to flee the academic ship he’d helped launch just because it was taking on some water.

Harrisburg U.'s Turnaround, by the Numbers
Twenty new academic programs. An additional location in Philadelphia and plans for master’s programs in the United Arab Emirates. A new student union scheduled to open in August, and a new health-sciences building slated to open in 2021. Harrisburg University’s recent growth has been remarkable. Here are other changes it’s seen in the past five years.

Harrisburg University was started because civic leaders felt that the financially sagging state capital of 50,000 needed a four-year university in its downtown. Its focus on enrolling lower-income undergrads was noble. But with no sports, no arena, no Greek life, and no brand, recruiting was a struggle, and the institution was unsustainable without other sources of income.

The university had roughly $300,000 in available cash and about $3.6 million in debt due. It had an enrollment of 300 undergraduates and 50 graduate students. It muddled through its debt payments with short-term loans and gifts, then quickly charted a new path.

Sticking closely to the university’s missions of developing a STEM work force and bolstering the regional economy, Darr and his team started to emphasize lucrative graduate programs, most of them primarily online, in fields with large and growing demand for workers in Central Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Those include IT-project management, information-system engineering, data analytics, cybersecurity, and health services and sciences.

The formula has worked.

From near extinction in 2013, HU now has $50 million in net assets. It went from $8 million to $80 million in annual revenue. In each of the past three years, it generated $10-million surpluses and is on course to reach $11 million this year. It has $30 million at its disposal, and its 6,500 students — 600 of them undergraduates — come from 103 countries. In 2017 it started a location in Philadelphia, about two and a half hours away. And it has plans for a program in the United Arab Emirates.

In the past three years, it has begun 20 academic programs, including two Ph.D.s. In that same period, its faculty has grown from 147 to more than 400, the majority of whom, 318, are “corporate,” which is what HU calls its adjuncts. A new student union is scheduled to be ready in August, and a health-sciences building is projected to open in 2021.

Undergraduates say they like HU’s small class sizes (20 or fewer, even in intro classes) and easy access to their professors. They like the increasingly livable and vibrant downtown. And they like the price tag, which hasn’t gone up in five years. The sticker tuition is $23,900, but no one pays that. All undergraduates receive scholarships of $6,000 to $20,000, with other awards available.

The percentages of women and minority students and faculty members are well above national averages. Fifty-two percent of undergrads are women, compared with an 18-percent national average in science-and-technology programs. Women make up 28 percent of graduate students, 14 percent higher than the STEM average. Forty-five percent of HU’s undergraduates are African-American, compared with 7.6 percent among STEM students nationally. Twenty-six percent of the faculty members are minority, exceeding the national average by about 13 percent.

Darr says Harrisburg University is more concerned with enrolling students who are curious about science and technology than ones with stellar standardized-test scores. “We have spent time, effort, and money,” he says, “building relationships with teachers, advisers, and administrators in troubled urban school districts hoping to attract smart, curious students who others will overlook or deny for admissions.”

Then, diversity in faculty and staff members as role models is crucial to those students’ success. “For example,” Darr says, “young black women will see themselves in our admissions counselors, students, and faculty. They begin to believe that it is possible to pursue a science and technology career.”

Sam L. Delvalle-Trinh is a third-year biotechnology major and president of the Student Government Association. She wanted to get out of Philadelphia, somewhere not too close and not too far. At HU, she says, “I’ve always felt very much part of a small community where everyone’s welcome,” and where women feel at home. In one lecture and lab course, out of nine students, only one was male.

HU stays administratively nimble because it doesn’t carry any fixed costs or bureaucratic baggage it can avoid. For instance, it has no dining halls or dorms. It partners with companies that offer nearby apartment-style living situations with kitchens.

No problem, says Delvalle-Trinh. She likes “taking charge of your lifestyle and being an adult.” Potlucks with friends are common, and “one time we went all out and made crabs and corn on the cob,” she says. “We did not joke around. We had a full-on feast.”

Sumaiyah Armstrong, a sophomore biology student from Landover, Md., says, “I actually had never heard of this school before, and I was like, ‘Harrisburg what?’ " She saw an online ad, took a virtual tour, and liked the look and the class sizes. “That’s the main thing that drew me — no more than 15 or 20 kids.”

Clarisa Agyeman, a junior from Upper Darby, Pa., near Philadelphia, double-majors in biochemistry and chemistry. She plans to earn an M.D. and an M.B.A., become an internist or pediatrician, and open clinics in her native Ghana. Her dad flagged Harrisburg for her at a high-school college fair. She, too, liked the size and access to professors, and HU gave her a full scholarship. A resident adviser, she comes up with student activities. If her peers don’t come, she goes to them and asks what they’d like to do. Last year she put on a fashion show with 20 students.

She says she is happy she chose HU “because here I feel like I focus more and I’ve developed more of my goals in life. I feel like if I went to a bigger school, I would have more distractions and wouldn’t have the close relations with my professors.”

A ‘Startling’ Recovery

“HU’s success over the last four to five years has been startling, incredibly positive for the city,” says Eric R. Papenfuse, Harrisburg’s mayor and a onetime vocal critic of the university during Schiavelli’s presidency. Papenfuse was “a real skeptic” toward the young institution, he says, because like the city it’s in, it had a debt-and-subsidy mind-set. That’s changed, he says, and both HU and Harrisburg have turned themselves around financially.

A population decline that spanned more than a half-century has begun to reverse, with civic health and the tax base in a refreshingly upward spiral. HU has played a large part in that, Papenfuse says. “They switched to a much more global strategy, and that’s allowed them to just explode and be a real economic driver and partner in the city’s recovery.” He credits Darr as “the driving force behind that vision.”

The attention HU has recently drawn, however, has been not for its fundamental turnaround, but for its quirky but clever dive into the rapidly emerging mania for esports. Working with the nearby Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts, HU started a varsity esports team in 2017 and is putting together a junior-varsity one. Last year the university held its first HUE (Harrisburg University Esports) Festival, with 32 teams from 21 colleges competing in the festival’s main event, an esports tournament that gained national press. HU hopes that, with music, food, and related activities, the festival will grow into an East Coast equivalent of Austin’s South by Southwest.

It’s a fun rallying point for a university that has no traditional varsity athletics. And that’s characteristic, because what HU doesn’t do is as crucial to its success as what it does. Along with not running dorms or dining halls, HU also partners with companies for parking, custodial work, and even essential functions like marketing, for which it works with a half-dozen firms, some situated in Philadelphia, some specializing in creative, some focusing on analytics.

In the academic realm, too, HU outsources to and barters with Penn State institutions “right up the road,” as Darr puts it. Some HU students take a semester at the Nanofabrication Lab at Penn State’s flagship campus, in State College. HU’s health-sciences students work in labs 12 miles away, at Penn State’s Hershey Medical Center. On the flip side, HU lets nearby universities’ students use sophisticated drones from HU’s Geospatial Technology Center.

“We share our toys,” says Darr.

Philly and Beyond

An impressive hometown performance, but Philadelphia and the United Arab Emirates?

Does Darr not know that there are 115 colleges in Philadelphia?

He knows. But if you go to Philadelphia schools and are interested in STEM fields, he says, your shot at getting into Penn, Drexel, or Temple is iffy. Rowan University in New Jersey, maybe. But smart, cost-conscious Philly kids from schools outside the elite might give HU a serious look.

So HU opened up its Philadelphia offshoot, “slightly bigger than a closet,” Darr says, to offer an in-city first-year experience with the option of transferring to the Harrisburg campus for the other three years. Philadelphia got to know HU, which built out 40,000 square feet and added full in-city degree programs in computer science, computer-interface design, and digital and interactive marketing. No bio or chem hooded laboratories needed.

The location started with eight students. Now it has 40, with room for 450. Time will tell, but, says Darr, “we fill a need that nobody else is filling.”

The UAE project, though far-flung, sticks close to HU’s work-force-development mission. There are more than 100 international universities represented there, says Darr, and you can get an M.B.A. at 89 of them. But if you want a master’s in data analysis or cybersecurity, you’re down to two, and “competitively there’s a need for what we do.”

Workers in Cairo, Bahrain, or Mumbai won’t be coming to the United States for a degree, but an easy monthly round-trip flight to the UAE for a low-residency program at a budget price? That could work. Enrollment surveys suggest, Darr says, that if HU opened a program there tomorrow, it might sign up 2,000 students from India alone; without recruiting, maybe a quarter of that. The enrollment goal is 1,000. He hopes that American accreditors and agencies in the UAE will approve the project by November, and that the first class will begin in January 2020. The plan is for HU’s reputation there to be primed by a nondegree six-month professional-training program offered before then.

‘Flat’ Governance Structure

New degrees. New programs. New buildings. New locations. New teams. New partnerships. How do these things happen at HU in a matter of months and not years?

“Flat” governance and, by all accounts, Darr himself, whom colleagues say has to approve everything but will listen to anything.

From its start, HU hasn’t offered tenure, although it has an otherwise conventional academic promotion model and three- to five-year contracts for full-timers. The university thinks that tenure sets scholars on a frenzied climb up a greased ramp, distracting them from the university’s focus on teaching and practice. Tenure is seen as associated with cliquish, siloed departments vying for resources, so HU doesn’t have departments, either. Or deans. Only programs and the “program leads” who run them.

Faculty members do sometimes have strong research interests, and that is encouraged and supported. In fact, it’s becoming common enough that soon HU might have to consider a more standardized research-oriented career track alongside the teaching trajectory, says Glenn Mitchell, a professor of and program lead for health-care informatics and president of the Faculty as a Whole. That body, which other universities might call a faculty senate, includes professors and the corporate (adjunct) instructors who generally hold jobs in industry. Those corporate faculty members have a full vote in the assembly after logging a year or two of teaching credits.

Mitchell established his program, which emphasizes applications of health data — the ability to translate between the number gurus and the medical-decision makers — several years ago. It passed through the curriculum committee and a faculty vote in a matter of months, many times faster than it would have taken at a traditional university, he says. Formerly a military physician, an academic at Brown University, and a chief medical officer for hospital systems, Mitchell says, “One of the reasons I came here is this kind of entrepreneurship and agility, and it has been for a lot of the new faculty who have joined us over the past two years.”

Harrisburg U.

That entrepreneurship hews closely, though, to HU’s core missions: work-force development and regional economic growth. Mitchell’s program is part of expanding offerings in nursing, physical therapy, and pharmacy to be located in the planned $100-million, 19-story health-sciences building. This is no random bet. There are 5,000 openings in Central Pennsylvania alone for nurses, physical therapists, pharmacists, and other medical professionals, Darr says. HU has CEOs of three health systems and two health insurers on its board to help guide the project and, when the time comes, to offer clinical hours for HU students to get their practical experience.

“There is a broad need for clinical expertise and nursing that really wasn’t being addressed,” says one of those trustees, Gary D. St. Hilaire, president and CEO of Capital BlueCross. “We’re able to fill a gap.” From medical providers’ standpoint, he says, “it becomes a great flow of talent.”

Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

HU talent flows to tech firms, too.

“I really admire what they’re doing,” says Treff LaPlante, a local business executive. “They cut all the red tape. It’s a very dynamic place.” LaPlante’s Harrisburg company, CitizenDeveloper, creates no-code point-and-click web interfaces. Some 20 students and faculty members from HU have worked with him.

There are other entrepreneurial crosscurrents as well. Try, for instance, to follow this:

Philip Grim was the first graduate of HU’s master-of-science program in analytics, in 2014, spent two years as corporate faculty member, then came on full time, while earning his Ph.D. at HU in data sciences. He also works for a start-up called Thought that was founded by Andrew Hacker, a cybersecurity expert who is also an HU professor. Darr offered HU seed money to Thought under a business-accelerator program. A major Thought client is Gannett Fleming, a global-engineering-and-infrastructure company whose CEO, Robert M. Scaer, is an HU trustee.

You get the idea. Harrisburg University is its own little network, 00000170-d184-d79d-a1f5-dbfdf177000a and Hacker says Darr “fosters that ecosystem.”

Hacker adds that Darr took a risk on Thought, and that the company’s capabilities in blockchain, artificial intelligence, and data analytics are attracting attention from potential purchasers.

Darr says that he hates micromanaging, and that his philosophy is, “Let’s hire people who are smarter than I am in any particular area, and give them the freedom to do what they do best. Give them direction, care, and feeding. All of those things are wrapped in an entrepreneurial spirit.”

“We’re not afraid to try new things,” he says, “and in fact it’s encouraged. We have a very high tolerance for failure” as long as experiments yield lessons.

St. Hilaire, the trustee, says Darr “is somebody who is very assertive and pushes.” And that seems to be working out well.

“It’s easier for a board to pull back the reins a little bit,” St. Hilaire says, “than constantly be trying to push your leadership team to go into new things.”

Alexander C. Kafka is a Chronicle senior editor. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.</em></p>