Last month’s announcement that Sweet Briar College will close sounded the alarm at many small liberal-arts colleges nationwide. The challenges faced by the Virginia college are by no means unique. By one estimate, about 250 institutions could face a similar fate.
THE PROBLEM
Dwindling enrollment
Like many small liberal-arts colleges, Newberry College, in South Carolina, was struggling to recruit new students — never a good sign for a tuition-dependent institution. The college lost about 100 students over a two- to three-year period, and in 2012, total enrollment stood just under 1,000.
When Maurice W. Scherrens took the helm as president that year, one of his immediate goals was to stop the slide. “It was clear,” he says, “that we had to turn that around.”
Compounding the problem was the fact that, just before Mr. Scherrens arrived at Newberry, its accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, gave it a warning. Then in 2014, the college’s status was dropped to probation. The association had concerns with the college’s financial instability, which was due in part to its faltering enrollment.
At the heart of the problem, officials at the college said, was that not enough people knew the “Newberry story” — that the college is affordable, offers small classes, and has a beautiful 90-acre campus — so the institution had to distinguish itself from the crowded landscape of liberal-arts colleges in South Carolina and beyond. Transfer students, especially, didn’t see the college as a place where they could continue their education.
“The relationships that we needed to have with the high schools, two-year colleges, the technical schools, even alumni and donors, weren’t what they needed to be,” says Mr. Scherrens, who came to Newberry from George Mason University, where he was senior vice president and chief operating officer. “We had just become invisible to too many people.”
THE APPROACH
Revamped enrollment and a tuition guarantee
Mr. Scherrens stopped outsourcing enrollment management and hired Delsie Z. Phillips as dean to oversee it. Ms. Phillips had held senior positions in admissions and enrollment at Haverford College and Lynn University; she hired new admissions staff members.
Instead of having recruiters crisscross the country, Newberry focused on the areas most likely to yield future students and also began urging prospective students to visit the college. “We know through research that people who visit campus are much more likely to enroll,” Ms. Phillips says. And the college hired a coordinator to tailor campus visits to students’ specific interests, like sitting in on classes and meeting with professors one on one.
Newberry also made moves to take some of the financial uncertainty out of attending college, an important consideration at an institution with more than 40 percent first-generation students. It revamped its financial-aid structure to be able to offer students a certain amount of institutional merit aid in the fall, during the early stages of the admissions cycle, Ms. Phillips says. And the Board of Trustees approved the Newberry College Tuition Promise, which since 2013 has guaranteed that the tuition price at the time a student enrolls will remain the same for four consecutive years. Those changes, the college hoped, would get students to commit earlier than in years past.
To attract more transfer students, Newberry crafted agreements with several two-year colleges in the area, specifying how credits would transfer. One challenge for small liberal-arts colleges, Ms. Phillips says, is “the mind-set that people go there for all four years.”
Month by month, Ms. Phillips is emphatic about collecting and scrutinizing admissions data to guide recruitment and retention. For example, her office tracks which events and what kinds of contact with students yield the most enrolled students.
THE RESULTS
Largest incoming class on record
This past fall, Newberry welcomed 379 new students, the most in the institution’s history. That’s an increase of 19 percent from the year before.
Most of the new students, 277 of them, are freshmen. But the college’s efforts to be more transfer-friendly appear to have paid off, too — 86 transfer students enrolled in the fall compared with 73 the year before. Meanwhile, total enrollment is up 4.2 percent, to 1,084 students.
The goal for next fall’s class is to get even closer to the 400 new students that “would give us the critical mass we’re looking for,” Mr. Scherrens says. Officials say they’re also being careful not to dilute the college’s academic standards as its student body grows.
With the enrollment success, Newberry’s financial future looks better, and it is no longer on probation — its accreditation was reaffirmed in December 2014.
Meanwhile, fund-raising efforts — in the form of the college’s first comprehensive capital campaign announced in October — are off to a good start, Mr. Scherrens says. Newberry has already raised more than $9 million in cash and pledges toward a $35-million goal, with the money slated for new construction, renovations, and the college’s endowment.
“Without a sense of urgency, things just languish,” Mr. Scherrens says. “But it was important that we weren’t just answering to an accrediting agency. We wanted people to see that we are running a marathon, and that what we’re doing is sustainable.”
Now, persistence is key, Ms. Phillips says. “A lot of what we’re doing isn’t rocket science, but it hadn’t been done here before,” she says. “We have to keep doing what we’re doing and do it better.”
Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.
