Wilson College opened for the fall semester in what students and faculty members have come to accept as its usual condition: threadbare.
The library has been closed for more than a year because of a steam-heat leak that undermined a floor, and the pool is closed too, because it needs repairs that would cost thousands. There are only 316 undergraduates in Wilson’s College for Women, and total enrollment—counting the coed adult-degree and graduate programs—is just 695, a far cry from the fiscal break-even point.
The broad lawn and bright flower beds in the middle of the campus are still carefully tended, and again this year the 143-year-old liberal-arts institution made the U.S. News list of best academic values among regional colleges in the North. But professors chafe at classes canceled for lack of students, and water finds its way into buildings when it rains.
So why does a current of optimism run from the high-ceilinged admissions office in its Victorian mansion over to the sleek atrium of the 2009 science complex? A new president, Barbara K. Mistick, arrived a year ago, and this spring she and the Board of Trustees appointed a Commission on Shaping the Future of Wilson College and told its members to recommend anything they think will put the college in a position to thrive.
“At this point, everything’s on the table,” Ms. Mistick says—program shifts, pricing changes, even accepting male undergraduates. The commission’s 23 members—faculty and staff members, trustees, students, and alumnae—have been digesting reams of data and meeting incessantly, and they plan to have preliminary recommendations ready for public discussion in mid-October.
Commission members know they will have to recommend “transformative changes,” says William K. Shoemaker, a professor of education who heads the subcommittee on pricing, one of five subgroups. “Incremental won’t do it. The status quo certainly won’t do it.” A wake-up call came earlier this year, when a consultant hired to help the commission pooh-poohed the 1,000-student enrollment target set out just two years ago in a strategic plan. The consultant, John Stevens, president of Stevens Strategy, said enrollment would have to reach 1,325 if the college hoped to match revenue to expenses.
“We put our noses to the grindstone,” says Michael G. Cornelius, an associate professor of English who leads the marketing subcommittee. “We’re trained to be scholars.” His subcommittee alone has looked at more than 160 sources of data, met for something approaching 150 hours, and spent easily twice that much time reading commission e-mail. Three members canceled vacations this summer to keep up with the torrent of information on such subjects as Wilson’s competitors (Delaware Valley College, in Doylestown, Pa., tops the list) and the fiscal health of the other colleges that remain women-only (there are now about 45, depending on what criteria you use).
The subcommittee’s enthusiasm for its work follows years in which many professors felt powerless, Mr. Cornelius says. “The faculty had a sense of frustration. Inertia just sort of sapped morale. You live in a culture of austerity only so long before you adjust to it” and stop aspiring to something better. He and others were eager to help the college out of its morass.
Mary Ann Naso, vice president for enrollment and a member of Mr. Cornelius’s subcommittee, is equally enthusiastic about the commission’s work.
“This whole commission concept has really energized me,” she says. “We have tried our level best to make the academic side of the house understand what the market trends are, but it’s been a challenge. Thank God we have three majors a lot of other colleges don’t offer"—in veterinary medical technology, equestrian studies, and equine-facilitated therapy. “Those have been the saviors of the place.”
A Long Struggle
Wilson is not, of course, the first small college to realize that it has to make big changes if it hopes to survive. What’s unusual here, though, is that Wilson has already come through one near-death experience, in 1979, when the trustees voted to shutter the campus, and only a lawsuit by alumnae kept it open. What else is unusual is the openness that Ms. Mistick and the trustees have encouraged—even inviting The Chronicle to follow the discussion and talk with anyone involved.
Alumnae were briefed in June on the results of an extensive market survey conducted by Stevens Strategy. Faculty members were briefed in August, and this month the subcommittee chairs held two detailed, all-campus informational meetings that were streamed live for anyone who couldn’t attend in person. When the subcommittees settle on their final recommendations, next month, the college community will be invited to discuss them before they go on to the trustees.
“A process like this, I think, invigorates an institution and leads to greater commitment by the faculty and staff,” says the board chairman, John W. Gibb, a former Sallie Mae executive who is now a managing director at Jones Lang LaSalle, a commercial-real-estate company. As the board’s vice chair, Mr. Gibb, whose mother was a Wilson alumna, led the search committee that hired Ms. Mistick.
That process, too, he says, was “very open and transparent,” thanks in part to advice from the search firm the college hired, Archer-Martin Associates. “Everybody got to feel that their voices counted,” says Mr. Gibb, and faculty and staff members made it clear how much they liked that approach.
Ms. Mistick was picked, he says, because “we were looking for someone who could be an agent for change” as well as someone “who could reach out and have the confidence of the faculty and the staff.” A former professor of entrepreneurship at Seton Hall University and at Carnegie Mellon University, Ms. Mistick had been president of Pittsburgh’s 19-branch public-library system since 2005. At the library, she coped with cuts in state appropriations and with the needs of 235,000 cardholders.
“I think I knew from the beginning—I’d seen some of the financials and so on—that Wilson really needed to look at change,” she says. “I had an idea about the kind of process that I wanted. I had talked to a number of schools that had had significant change. Some had done it with an executive committee behind closed doors.” At Wilson, she thought, that wouldn’t work, not after devoted alumnae had already saved the place once.
She specifically did not want a repeat of the unrest at Peace College, a women’s institution in Raleigh, N.C. Protests erupted there last year after the trustees surprised the campus by announcing that the institution would change its name to William Peace University and begin admitting men.
Ms. Mistick opted for “a process built heavily on feedback,” she says. “You’re wrestling with change, maybe adding new things, giving up some old things—all of that has some tension about it. I’m happy when there is good conversation and dialogue and questions. That allows people to come along on the journey with you.”
She also says she is “pretty dorky at the end of the day—I like data-driven decisions.” The big survey this spring has helped ground the questions the commission is asking, she says. “You’re dealing with results that came from the community you serve. That takes some of the emotion out of it.”
The survey also highlighted the challenges facing Wilson, though. Some were old news, such as that only about 2 percent of collegebound women are initially interested in women’s colleges, and that Wilson alumnae, however loyal, rarely send their daughters here. The college is also less well known than its competitors are. Among prospective students, only 6 percent have heard of Wilson, the survey found, compared with 10 percent for Delaware Valley.
Other findings were eye-openers for some people here. Despite the college’s longstanding reputation as an elite institution, its current students have greater financial need than the average student in Pennsylvania, and they’re less academically engaged. They also borrow more than their peers elsewhere, even though Wilson’s $28,745 tuition is comparable to competitors’. Price sensitivity is a big issue, especially outside of the three unusual programs in veterinary medical technology, equestrian studies, and equine-facilitated therapy.
Challenge to Lure Students
Meanwhile, most prospective students said they’d prefer going to a college with 2,000 to 10,000 students in a city bigger than Chambersburg, a quaint county seat with a population of about 20,000. In the survey’s rating of student housing, every competitor did better than Wilson, whose dorms are drab at best. The cramped 1966 field house, constructed for a neighboring private school that later closed, rated only 1.83 on a scale of 1 to 5.
The college faces other challenges, too, starting with deferred maintenance that’s on the books at $6.4-million—a figure that seems low given high-school students’ expectations of college facilities. Architects have been brought to the campus to plan a library renovation, but Ms. Mistick says she wasn’t expecting to have to start raising money for a building so soon. In the meantime, a temporary library occupies what had been a popular campus hangout, Sarah’s Coffeehouse. It has been attracting more users than the old library did, in part because Wilson has no student center to hang out in.
Meanwhile, the college has operated in the red in three of the past four years—it received a big unrestricted bequest in the fourth—but its endowment of over $60-million gives it a cushion. A ticking time bomb is the debt that Wilson took on to build its new science center. For now the college is paying only interest on the loan, but in 2019 it will have to start making about $1-million a year in payments on the principal. For an institution with an annual budget of $16-million to $17-million, that’s a big commitment—one that Ms. Mistick and the trustees hope to be able to meet with revenue from increased enrollment.
Can a college whose enrollment has hovered around 750 for a decade reach 1,325 in a half-dozen years? Mr. Stevens, the consultant, says there are not a lot of examples of success on that scale, “but there are examples.” Going co-ed, if the commission were to recommend that, would not by itself be a quick fix for what ails Wilson’s admissions numbers, he adds. “The key is putting together a set of programs that meets the market you’re going for.” Prospective students, he and others here emphasize, search for programs, not colleges.
Dana Harriger, a biology professor who heads the commission’s programs subcommittee, says Wilson’s faculty was already looking at possible curriculum changes. Among the options, he says, are alternative delivery formats, articulation agreements with other institutions, low-residency programs, and certificate offerings, as well as new programs—health care is the most often mentioned.
Meanwhile, Mr. Shoemaker says, the pricing committee is examining tuition models, like charging different amounts for different programs or offering students a single guaranteed tuition level for four years.
The big question in many minds, though, is whether the commission will recommend that Wilson admit men—and, if it does, whether the college can hang on to its cherished traditions, like students’ traveling to a remote rural churchyard twice a year to put flowers on the grave of Sarah Wilson, the college’s original benefactor.
So far, Ms. Mistick and others say, alumnae and students have been tracking the commission’s progress but haven’t been particularly vocal, although Ms. Naso, the admissions vice president, says she hears regularly from one alumna who is adamant about not admitting men to the regular undergraduate program.
“I want people to be passionate about what is the essence of Wilson,” Ms. Mistick says. “We really need to get to a sustainable financial model without losing who we are, without losing our legacy and traditions. There will be ups and downs—I fully expect that. I really feel that at the end of the day, we will get to consensus.”
