‘Each Year Is a Full New Crop’: An Iowa College Prepares for Enrollment Change

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Central College Prepares For Enrollment Changes

We traveled to Iowa, a state with lots of small colleges and a declining high-school population, to see how Central College, in Pella, is facing enrollment challenges. For the video, we tagged along with the admissions staff; talked to Carol Williamson, vice president for enrollment and student development; and sat down with President Mark Putnam to get a better sense of their concerns and see their efforts firsthand.

The following excerpt from the interview with Putnam has been edited for clarity and length.

Tell me a little bit about Central College. How many students do you have?

About 1,150.

Let’s talk about enrollment. What have you been seeing, and how worried are you about what’s ahead?

When I came in 2009-10, I said to the board, “A storm is gathering.” I began to share demographic data. The benefit of that conversation, and those unfolding conversations, was that it gave us a chance to be ahead of this. We reordered, organized our debt, and restructured it. We thought differently about how we invest the endowment. We began to think about liquidity needs going forward. We began to think about the importance of certain kinds of facilities, projects that would be important in the future. And so that allowed us to respond and not react. We’ve been able to stay ahead of the challenges that we knew would likely emerge.

Let’s talk about about the tuition reset.

Six years ago, we began doing research on pricing. It was not clear to us in those early days exactly where this was going to move. But what’s always true about higher education is that each year is a full new crop. The classes that come in, they come and go. There’s no continuity in the market. The only repeat business we get would be legacies or siblings, so it’s a new market every year. And the perceptions in that marketplace change through time. And if there’s something we face as challenges across the board in higher education, it’s that we think things are the same. But they’re changing a lot.

So having done four pricing studies in a six-year period, along with other branding and marketing studies, we began to detect a change in attitude among those who were looking for a college education. That unfolding through those years allowed us to map the terrain into a different kind of an approach to pricing. But it wasn’t simply about looking at: Could we lower our price? It was fundamentally a question about what does it cost to educate a student.

So we started with an economic question much more than a finance question. How does the economy of the institution work? And what that allowed us to do was to see this holistically, not as a marginal question or an incremental question, but a fundamental question.

Can you tell us what the tuition was and what you reset it to?

The annual tuition right now is $38,600. In the fall of 2020, it will be $18,600. We were able to say, this is what is an appropriate charge, given the costs of education.

Part of what’s happening with pricing is making it so the average parent can understand the discounting, right?

Right. We had a parent event this past winter, and a mother raised her hand and said, with a very pained look on her face, “I don’t understand this tuition. Why don’t you just charge what it costs?”

It was the most interesting moment for me, because I realized you really can’t explain tuition discounting in a way that makes sense to somebody. Because it doesn’t. It’s a fictional price structure.

When we began to think about a different pricing, the term that came to us was “authenticity.” Sometimes people use “transparency,” and there’s something to that as well. It is more transparent, but it’s authentic in that it represents what it costs us to educate a student.

When you’re working with a family that’s putting significant resources behind this choice, they want to understand how the economy of the institution works. They kept coming back and saying, But what do you do with all that money? How do you say, Well, we turn around and give it back to you?

Can you tell me about how you recruit students?

We approach that in a highly personalized way. Now a lot of small colleges will say that. But what it means to us is that we will actually visit every high school in Iowa this year — that’s 377 high schools that we will have a person in and have a conversation with students.

This is a very relational place. Our counselors just don’t go to college fairs and high schools. We do home visits as well. So we’ll meet a family in their home at the kitchen table, in a coffee shop, or a restaurant to have a conversation. It’s a highly targeted, highly personalized approach to recruitment.

And that’s new, right?

Absolutely. While we were looking at the tuition-pricing approach, at the same time, we had to think differently about recruitment. The way I put it to people is that we’ve always relied on the admissions-funnel metaphor. That you pile a lot of applications on the top, and you just run them through the machinery, and then they come out the bottom.

The funnel’s broken. Everything that we’ve seen in our research tells us that that funnel no longer works as it once did. And the manifestation of that is huge drops in yield. Yield rates have been dropping all across the country.

So what we have to do is to say we don’t start with the idea of piling up tons and tons of applications or trying to buy more and more names in order to send more and more materials. That’s a diminishing return now. What we do is to say, Who is expressing the greatest levels of interest in Central College, and how do we then work with them to make this a viable option?

You’ve also talked about adding new programs to stay relevant. What’s changing there?

We have three ways in which we try to enable learning to happen. One is liberal learning. It’s general education and a broad-based curriculum. The second is professional learning, specific to the students’ interests and where they want to go in the future — which may be very well defined, or it may be fairly open because they can migrate across different kinds of industries and fields of study. The third is experiential learning. The balancing of those three things is the key element in the design of education.

So we have been dialing up more and more experiential learning as part of that system of bringing liberal learning, general learning, together with professional learning.

Parents will say to me, What do you do to help students learn about negotiation and conflict resolution? I said, We give them roommates. They’ll say to me, What are you doing in order to enable help students work in teams? And I said, We have them sing in the choir. Because that’s the kind of thing that grounds the learning they’re doing.

It’s the lived experience that matters. And that’s why this campus-based approach is so central to what we do.

Our winter-break Career Kickstarter program is another way of building in a deeper level of experiential learning, so that students have a place where they can really apply their learning in a context where they can test and validate. You think about internships as an opportunity to see if you’re good at something, or whether you like something. Some students will come back from internships and say, I never want to do that again the rest of my life. That’s a great success, because we just saved a decade of someone’s life trying to find a pathway.

Whether it’s in athletics, because that’s a beautiful form of experiential learning, resiliency, working as a team, listening to each other; music ensembles; internships; undergraduate research; study abroad — all are places where liberal learning and professional learning are integrated and applied.

The demographic change — the cliff that’s coming in 2025, do you have a sense of how big a concern that is for your colleagues? Should it be? What is your feel for other colleges here?

I first saw the projections a few years ago, when they started coming out beyond 2025. I was sitting next to a colleague at a meeting of presidents. And he leaned over to me and said, “See that right there? Yeah. That’s retirement.”

There are people out there for whom this is the point of exit. I understand it, but I think it’s really unfortunate, because our task is to prepare the institution to be resilient through that period of time, not look for the exits at that point.

What matters here is the role of the president to enable the board of trustees, the faculty, and the administrative leadership to work in concert in order to build a resilient future and to be able to adapt through time — thoughtfully, carefully, and consistent with mission and purpose.

That takes a lot of advance work. I’m about to turn to our board and say, There’s a new storm gathering, and we have to start getting ready for 2030. What’s that going to look like for Central? It’s not a sudden thing. It’s going to be an evolving change through time. But by being ahead of it, then we position the institution to be able to have options and make decisions and work from a position of confidence, purpose, and strength, rather than sort of being reactive in that moment.

So what’s Central in 10 years? Do you have a vision?

Yes. The next 10 years will be about maintaining a commitment to undergraduate education. We see that as being important. Some will run from it because they’ll pursue more online, more graduate education, other kinds of professional learning. But there is no substitute for what happens in these four critical years of human development for students. What parents know is that these students are going to be figuring it out through these years. And that’s what they want. What they’re looking for is an experience that will help these students to broaden their horizons, their ideas, and the ways they think about themselves and who they can become. So undergraduate education is going to be even more important.