Lewis E. Thayne, president of Lebanon Valley College, strolls through the gymnasium here with a look of marvel. Opened a decade ago, the 1,650-seat facility is a testament to what Lebanon Valley has done well: luring students in south-central Pennsylvania to a small liberal-arts college with upgraded buildings and other enticements like generous merit-based scholarships.
“For a school our size and for our endowment, I’ve never seen anything quite this nice,” says Mr. Thayne, glancing up at a banner that commemorates the Flying Dutchmen’s 1994 Division III men’s basketball championship.
A building boom that began in the 1990s helped bolster enrollment and staved off an existential crisis, but what the college failed to do then is painfully clear now. In June 2012 its accreditor placed Lebanon Valley on warning, announcing that the college had no good mechanisms for assessing student learning and revealing that administrators spent money with little regard for how doing so might improve student success.
Lebanon Valley is a microcosm of some of the most vexing problems facing colleges in the 21st century. At a time when the public is increasingly skeptical of the quality of higher education, the college found itself ill-positioned to prove that its product was worth the $45,000 sticker price. There was a firm belief among the faculty that students were learning something important, but little hard evidence to support that position.
Deanna Dodson, director of curriculum, says the college lacked a strong centralized system for tracking student outcomes.
“We had a lot of data,” she says, “but nobody knew where it was.”
Officials of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education braced the college for the possibility that the warning would be in place for two years. But Lebanon Valley revamped its assessment strategy within a single year, and the accrediting agency removed its scarlet letter from the college this past June.
Something else, too, appears to have happened along the way. Many of those most closely involved in Lebanon Valley’s fight to retain accreditation say the college managed to recover its soul in the process.
The warning from Middle States forced a rare level of self-analysis, and the picture was not always pretty. No one argues that capital spending and scholarship programs were anything less than essential to keeping the college afloat when enrollment plunged three decades ago, but some say the institution became distracted from its primary mission.
“We had lost the idea that academics was central,” says Ms. Dodson, a professor of psychology.
A lot of colleges lost focus on their core missions in recent decades, says Thomas C. Longin, a consultant with the Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities, because they were primarily concerned with how to get students in the door.
“We created more-attractive programs, we upped the aid,” he says. “We didn’t do rigorous systematic assessment in the way we should have been doing it, and we didn’t do strategic planning. Two things got lost in the quest for survival.”
Seated in his Lebanon Valley office on a fall afternoon, Gary Grieve-Carlson reaches into a stack of books and pulls from it a copy of the course catalog. He thumbs a quarter of the way through until he reaches a section titled “Liberal Studies.” The category includes a decent chunk of the college’s general-education curriculum, covering areas as diverse as fine arts, history, and natural sciences.
Mr. Grieve-Carlson, an English professor, concedes that until recently, the college did little to ensure that students met its goals for the liberal-studies portion of the curriculum. There was a faint hope that individual departments were measuring outcomes in that area, and a few of them were, he says. But there was no collegewide effort to do so.
“That big piece fell through the cracks,” says Mr. Grieve-Carlson, who was director of general education for a dozen years, until he stepped down this past summer. Ms. Dodson has taken over many of his duties.
He figures prominently into what some describe as the “aha!” moment after the accreditor’s warning. During a visit in August 2012, the vice president of the accrediting agency asked Mr. Grieve-Carlson if he could name all of the goals for the college’s general-education program.
A pause filled the auditorium.
Mr. Grieve-Carlson had no answer.
But who could blame him? Lebanon Valley had 33 goals for its general-education curriculum, far more than anyone at Middle States thought the college could reasonably assess.
“That was a moment when I think everyone in the room realized we are not doing what we want be to doing,” recalls Mr. Thayne, the president.
The accreditors found that there was insufficient evidence to demonstrate Lebanon Valley’s compliance with two of the agency’s 14 standards. Standard 7 requires a college to have a system in place for determining whether it is achieving its overall goals, and Standard 14 says that a college must be able to assess whether students have acquired specific knowledge and skills.
One of the key steps Lebanon Valley took to reaffirm its accreditation was to scale back its goals from 33 to nine. This was accomplished largely by combining and simplifying language rather than abandoning any particular ambitions for learning outcomes. Faculty members still say they want students to graduate as better thinkers and communicators, but there are fewer specific goals within that larger framework.
The college has also introduced software called TracDat, which serves as a campuswide repository for data, including test scores and students’ survey responses, related to learning outcomes. The system allows for a continuous analysis of student mastery of specific skills, such as distinguishing among literary genres in French and demonstrating a basic knowledge of U.S. history.
TracDat was released in 1999, and the software is now used by several hundred colleges, developers say.
The early results at Lebanon Valley, its officials say, suggest that it does a good job of developing students’ critical thinking. The college has been less successful developing their ethical reasoning and intercultural competence, which gives students a better understanding of social, economic, and political systems different from their own.
The Middle States team’s visit in August 2012 came just one day after Mr. Thayne assumed the presidency. Stephen C. MacDonald, his predecessor, had begun his planned retirement within weeks of learning that the institution was on warning status.
Mr. Thayne says he knew before he took the job that the accreditor’s assessment of Lebanon Valley was not positive, but he did not anticipate a penalty as severe as a warning, which signals that “accreditation may be in jeopardy,” the agency’s policy states. Colleges without accreditation lose eligibility to receive federal student aid, and without that money most institutions could not survive.
Mr. Thayne recalls that Debra G. Klinman, the agency’s vice president, did not mince words in her first meeting with him: “Lewis, you have an urgent and serious situation on your hands.” It was hardly the way he pictured the start of his presidency.
For a moment that day, Mr. Thayne questioned how the college had gotten into this mess. “I really did think to myself, ‘Why didn’t they make a bigger effort when they had the opportunity to do so?’”
He had come to Lebanon Valley from Franklin & Marshall College, a nearby liberal-arts institution, where he spent seven years as vice president for advancement. He has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton University but has built his career as a fund raiser.
“I had absolutely no background in academic assessment,” he says.
But that was the subject that would consume him.
Regional accrediting agencies are increasingly interested in documenting what students are learning, too. Middle States, which has 526 member institutions, has placed 35 colleges on warning since 2011. Of those, 30, including Lebanon Valley, were found to be noncompliant with one or more of two key standards tied to assessment.
“Our commission and other commissions have paid much closer attention to those standards,” says Richard J. Pokrass, a spokesman for Middle States.
The increased emphasis on assessment standards is, at least in part, a response to federal pressure for colleges to better demonstrate how and what they teach students, Mr. Pokrass says. College leaders often express the fear that if they do not do more to show that their students are learning, a system will be imposed upon them.
There are already indications that this may happen. President Obama and the U.S. Department of Education have pressed colleges to prove their worth, and a recently proposed federal ratings system would tie student aid to some measures of outcomes.
The problems Lebanon Valley faced with Middle States were in part the result of decisions made at the highest level, and Mr. Thayne says he determined rather quickly where the true power rested within the institution.
For decades, Lebanon Valley’s general officers, known on campus as “the GO’s,” were regarded as the captains of the college. It was this group of seven people, which included the president and vice presidents, that was principally responsible for establishing the direction of the college and divvying up the budgetary pie.
Given their traditional roles, the general officers were arguably the people most responsible for ensuring Lebanon Valley’s compliance with Standard 7. It says that hard data about student learning “should be linked to the institution’s ongoing planning and resource allocation processes.” That was not happening, according to Middle States.
Reviewing the accreditor’s reports, Mr. Thayne became convinced that part of Lebanon Valley’s problem was an “isolated” leadership team that tightly controlled spending decisions without broad consultation. So he created an 18-member task force, digging deeper for opinions about where things had gone wrong and how to correct course.
“I pushed the decision point down,” Mr. Thayne says, “so that people reporting to vice presidents had a say in real time about what we were going to do—and that was just uncomfortable for some people, really uncomfortable.”
In some cases, the process was physically uncomfortable. The conference table in Mr. Thayne’s office accommodates 10 people, but nearly twice as many were squished around it for meetings that were held every Friday for several months. Sometimes the meetings ran more than three hours.
“I’m very short, so I never had a place where my arms were at the table,” recalls Susan Sarisky Jones, coordinator of student retention.
The task force created a rare but sometimes awkward opportunity for lower-level administrators to question vice presidents. Conversations invariably involved rationales for spending money on buildings or landscaping rather than technologies and staff to assist in student assessment. The answers were seldom satisfying.
“All the decisions were based on revenue, revenue, revenue,” says Michael R. Green, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.
He says the president’s decision to broaden the conversation constituted a sea change. Before the formation of the task force, an associate dean who challenged a general officer would have done so at his or her peril. “That GO would say, ‘That’s not your place!’” recalls Mr. Green, slamming his palm on a table.
Mr. Green has been at Lebanon Valley for only a few years, but some of the other general officers who led the reaccreditation response had been on staff for decades. By many accounts, the most influential among them was Deborah Fullam, a Lebanon Valley graduate who had risen to the position of vice president for finance. She recently resigned, taking a job in August as budget director at Haverford College.
“Bringing in the broader group was difficult for her,” Mr. Thayne says. “I think Deb did not entirely agree with how I was running this aspect of the institutional response.”
Asked if Ms. Fullam left the college on good terms, the president says, “Deb left because she wanted to. I didn’t fire her or ask her to leave or even indicate that she should leave.”
Ms. Fullam declined to be interviewed on the record but did say her departure had nothing to do with discomfort about involving more people in decision-making.
None of the vice presidents who spoke with The Chronicle said they felt uncomfortable with Mr. Thayne’s approach, but most acknowledged that the task force represented a shift away from longstanding hierarchies.
Ann E. Damiano, associate dean of academic affairs and a member of the task force, describes the group’s meetings as tense. “One of the things President Thayne insisted on was that we all play in the sandbox together, and we didn’t want to,” she says.
A key change to emerge from Lebanon Valley’s reaccreditation process was the creation of the Planning and Resource Allocation Committee, which reviews whether proposed expenditures are consistent with the college’s academic goals. About one-third of the members are faculty, who have not previously had such a formal mechanism for weighing in on budget matters.
“I don’t know that it’s fair to say the GO’s were territorial,” says Patrick Brewer, a member of the resource committee and secretary of the college’s Steering Committee, which oversees faculty governance. “But they were the voices in the room. They had the information and they made decisions based on that.”
Lebanon Valley, which has an endowment of about $45-million, enrolled 1,647 students this fall, but the picture used to be far less rosy. In 1985 enrollment bottomed out at 759, raising concerns about closure.
William J. Brown, vice president for enrollment and a Lebanon Valley graduate, recalls how the campus had deteriorated by the mid-1980s. Heating and ventilation systems were defective, weeds and grass sprouted through cracked sidewalks, and students in dormitories had to jockey for the single phone on each hall.
The town of Annville, population about 5,000, was even smaller back then. “It was not a showpiece,” Mr. Brown says. “It didn’t have really anything other than a convenience store, a couple of bars, and a pizza place.”
Key to the college’s financial turnaround was the creation of its Presidential Scholarships. Established in 1992, the program covers up to half of the cost of tuition for students graduating in the top 30 percent of their high-school classes. Unlike the elaborate and opaque systems of financial aid that dominate higher education, Lebanon Valley made a simple promise that allowed eligible students and families to calculate what college would actually cost them.
“It struck people’s imagination,” Mr. Brown says. “They could understand it.”
But it carries trade-offs. Since students from wealthier families tend to perform well on the measures used to calculate the scholarship awards, the college may end up giving some of its biggest discounts to students who least need the money.
In one of the Middle States reports, the visiting team questioned whether stakeholders had enough information about Lebanon Valley’s merit-aid strategy to meaningfully evaluate its pros and cons.
“To put it simply,” the report states, “we felt that we were seeing too many forms that provide too little information and, in the process, obfuscate the ways that assessment is used to inform strategic planning, resource allocation, and decision-making.”
Those findings were not surprising to Mr. Thayne, the president. Altering the merit-aid program has become taboo, he says.
Standing under a tree at the center of campus, the president vividly recalls the first time he mentioned his misgivings about the financial-aid strategy. He says he felt like Indiana Jones in a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the hero tries to swipe a sacred artifact from a temple and triggers a barrage of booby traps.
“I touched the idol,” Mr. Thayne says with a chuckle. “And it was unbelievable. It set off, ‘How can you even talk about this? That’s the program that saved our lives. It saved the college.’”
The merit-aid program was not central to the accreditor’s concerns, but Mr. Thayne says the resistance to discussing it was symptomatic of a larger problem. The longest-serving general officers, he says, were paralyzed by the college’s history and resistant to anything that signaled a cultural change.
Thus far, talking is about all Lebanon Valley officials have done relative to merit aid. The college’s most recent analysis of the program determined that about three-quarters of institutional aid meets student need, even though financial considerations do not figure into the award amounts given. In all, the college meets 80 percent of student need, which is “not enough,” Mr. Thayne says.
The program remains unchanged a year into his presidency. To his mind, though, it is significant that trustees and vice presidents no longer consider the subject off-limits. “Every year we should talk about what’s working and what isn’t,” Mr. Thayne says. “That’s the whole point.”
Indeed, that was the essential message from Middle States. The agency’s two accreditation standards that deal with assessment span more than 11 pages and contain 89 bullet points, but Middle States has one fundamental commandment: Talk about what’s working and what isn’t. As Lebanon Valley has demonstrated, that may be one of the toughest things for any college to do.
“We say the examined life is worth living,” Mr. Thayne says, “and assessment is that.”
Correction (9/30/2013, 1:35 p.m.): This article originally stated that the Middle States Commission on Higher Education’s visit to Lebanon Valley College in August 2012 came just one day before Lewis Thayne assumed the presidency. It was actually one day after he became president. The article has been updated to reflect that correction.
A Year on ‘Warning’
June 28: Middle States Commission on Higher Education places Lebanon Valley College on warning, citing noncompliance with two standards related to assessment.
August 1: Lewis E. Thayne, a former vice president for advancement at Franklin & Marshall College, becomes president of Lebanon Valley.
August 2: On Mr. Thayne’s second day as president, the vice president of Middle States visits campus and tells him he has “an urgent and serious situation” on his hands.
August 17: Mr. Thayne creates an 18-member task force, which includes vice presidents and some of their subordinates, to respond to the warning. This breaks with tradition on campus, where key decisions were typically made by a handful of “general officers.”
November 19: Lebanon Valley begins to use TracDat, a software system that serves as a repository for data about student outcomes and helps the college better assess learning.
2013
February 28: Lebanon Valley submits a monitoring report to Middle States, asserting that the college now complies with accreditation standards.
April 11-12: A team from the accrediting agency visits the college again.
June 27: Middle States removes the warning status from Lebanon Valley.
