Small Colleges Get Experimental in Bid to Survive

Lori E. Varlotta had been president of Hiram College for just two months when two banks to which Hiram owed money met with her to say they were going to call their loans. For Varlotta, a hiking aficionado who had been trained as a philosopher, the 2014 meeting was an unwelcome surprise, especially since the loans amounted to $33 million.

The 169-year-old college’s situation was “dire,” she says. “They gave us six months.”

Varlotta began by cutting administrators and staff, and got busy renegotiating Hiram’s debt. Then last year the college, with fewer than 900 traditional full-time students, also dropped several majors — including art history, mathematics, music, philosophy, and religion — and trimmed about a dozen slots from what had been an 83-member faculty. The faculty and staff cuts left many who remain at this close-knit institution grieving, even as they put the college’s budget on a path that satisfies its lenders.

But Varlotta has also encouraged the faculty to make curriculum changes that Hiram is branding as “The New Liberal Arts” — a term it has trademarked. Faculty members hope the changes will attract students by offering them high-impact experiences and the chance to focus their education on societal challenges like climate change while learning the same analytical skills that liberal-arts programs have always promised.

And the president has encouraged the faculty to develop new majors with contemporary appeal. International studies and sports management are already approved, while a design major is in the works, and majors in data science, information technology, and engineering physics are being studied.

Meanwhile, donors underwrote another trademarked program, “Tech and Trek,” that provides every student both an iPad Pro and a pair of hiking boots. The viewbook-friendly idea is to make sure that all students have good technology available (like many small colleges, Hiram enrolls a significant number of Pell-eligible students), and also that they’re mindful of how much time they spend online.

“It would be foolish to claim we’re out of the woods,” Varlotta says, but the college, which has a $74-million endowment, has seen two years of “significant” admissions increases and three years of record-breaking fund raising. “We’re leaps and bounds more sustainable than we were five years ago.”

Nonetheless, warning flares are everywhere. Just last week Hampshire College, citing “the challenges we’ve faced as an under-endowed institution,” said it was seeking to merge with another institution and was debating whether it should enroll a first-year class this coming fall. In November, Iowa Wesleyan University considered closing because it lacked a solid financial base despite having doubled its enrollment. Two weeks later, however, it said it had raised enough money to see it through the next few semesters but would still be “actively pursuing new partnerships to create a more sustainable future.”

Hiram, meanwhile, is one of several small institutions now living the adage about necessity’s being the mother of invention. Facing deteriorating demographic forecasts alongside students’ and parents’ uncertainty about the value of the liberal arts, these colleges are adjusting their offerings and their marketing in creative ways. And while some such changes prompt complaints from critics — can a college that doesn’t offer a major in religious studies or philosophy call itself a liberal-arts institution? — backers point out that a college that has been forced to close benefits no one at all.

Among recent developments: The much-admired Summit program at Agnes Scott College, created after the women’s institution failed repeatedly to increase its enrollment, has brought the college its biggest student population ever, 1,040. Oglethorpe University has promoted a tuition plan under which applicants with good grades will pay no more than the cost of attending the flagship university in their home state. And Sweet Briar College, which nearly closed in 2015, has overhauled its curriculum and cut its tuition to match those of the University of Virginia and the College of William & Mary. It’s now planning to bring in extra revenue by using part of its 3,250-acre campus to grow grapes for Virginia winemakers.

Coed, but Not Entirely

Mary Baldwin University, in Staunton, Va., hasn’t faced a crisis as stark as Varlotta’s meeting with the bankers, but it had watched enrollment decline in its traditional undergraduate women’s college, long the heart of the institution. Pamela R. Fox, president since 2003, says that while a College of Health Science created after the 2008 downturn was beating all revenue predictions, “at the same time the College for Women was going down at a steeper rate.”

In 2016, the Board of Trustees took a controversial vote to admit men as residential undergraduates, but that just seemed to make the situation worse: The 2017 entering class had only 136 students, including seven men. Fox responded by persuading James McCoy, an old friend who had handled admissions at Louisiana State University and the University of New Haven, to come out of retirement and serve as vice president for enrollment. She also hired a new provost, Ty F. Buckman, who had been vice president for strategic initiatives at Wittenberg University, and a new vice president for external affairs, Aimee Rose, who had been a senior vice president at the marketing giant Edelman.

Working in what Fox calls “the war room” — a spartan space furnished with whiteboards, a plain table, and stackable chairs that no one thinks are comfortable — Fox and her new team came up with a clever have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too response to alumnae pushback on the coeducation vote: Mary Baldwin would retain its College for Women as a home for women’s leadership programs and women-only housing. Rather than going entirely coed, says Fox, “we’re hoping that we’re finding a third way to do this, to honor our heritage.”

Now women entering Mary Baldwin choose whether or not to join the College for Women, which is also home to a residential program for gifted high-school-age women as well as to the only all-female cadet corps in the United States (created before the Virginia Military Institute admitted women in 1997). McCoy, the enrollment vice president, says that in the fall of 2018 the “vast majority of the new freshmen who came in were women who were interested in coeducation.” The record-setting 428-member class included 104 men and about 70 women interested in the College for Women.

“We had one market before: women who were interested in attending a women’s college,” Fox says. “Now we have at least three: men, women interested in coeducation, and women who still want to come for dimensions of a traditional women’s college. So that was huge.”

But coeducation is only part of the mix that Fox foresees keeping Mary Baldwin healthy. “In 2008 we were hit really hard with the recession, because we don’t have a large endowment,” says Fox, noting that the endowment is about $35 million. “The positive thing that came out of it is this intense decade of change.”

In addition to establishing the College of Health Science, with what Fox refers to as “zero-discount, full-pay graduate programs,” Mary Baldwin has graduate programs in education and in Shakespeare and performance, the latter in partnership with Staunton’s American Shakespeare Center. And the university now has almost as many online students in undergraduate programs as traditional undergraduates. While Mary Baldwin had been marketing its online programs only in Virginia, it is now pushing them regionally, with an eye toward the national market in the near future.

“What makes Mary Baldwin work is the combination of all the revenues,” Fox says, adding that the college is ahead of schedule on a plan to reach 2,500 students by 2025.

She credits the university’s faculty and staff members for their willingness to jump in to do whatever has to be done, and particularly the administrators who convened in the war room. During the fall of 2017, she recalls, “Every single day, Jim [McCoy] would come in and say, Hmmm, I’m kinda worried about this. So people would get in the room and I would say, What are the three things we could do to correct that or change that direction?

“We didn’t talk about whether we were going to do it for three months. In 10 minutes we decided, that day we’d do these things. And it all paid off. But it’s an unusual attitude in higher ed.”

‘We Had to Cut to the Bone’

At Hiram, changes have not come quite as quickly. But an institution that took nine years to accomplish its previous curriculum overhaul has, this time around, been working so fast that Varlotta likes to quote a faculty member who said Hiram is laying track “only five feet ahead of the engine.”

That is, in part, the lenders’ doing, because they insisted that Hiram meet budget targets. But they also gave the college a considerable amount of slack. The original six-month deadline turned into a year and a half, Varlotta says, adding that the banks were “great” to work with.

Still, it was an excruciating experience. In the first rounds of cuts, Hiram fired a phone-system overseer who, before leaving the campus, completed that day’s installations, a print copy editor who couldn’t also do web editing, and the development vice president. Varlotta figured she could take on that job herself.

She graciously avoids assigning blame for the situation that greeted her when she took office. “People did what they thought they needed to do to make the college marketable,” she says. “There are no bad players at Hiram.”

But by the fall of 2017, Hiram’s budget was still more than $1 million over what the college had promised lenders. “We had to cut to the bone,” says Nicolas Hirsch, an associate professor of biology who is the faculty’s elected chair. “We’d had a de facto hiring freeze, but we were still faculty-heavy.” As ugly as the process might become — “There was a lot of fear and resentment,” Hirsch says — “the fundamental assumption was that we needed to do whatever we could to keep the place open.”

Meanwhile, the dean and vice president of academic affairs had resigned, so Varlotta hired a replacement, Judith Muyskens, a former French professor who had retired from Nebraska Wesleyan University as provost and before that had worked for the Appalachian College Association and for Colby-Sawyer College. Varlotta “had announced at the faculty meeting during my interview that all the cuts have been made with the staff and now it was time to cut faculty,” says Muyskens. “I knew what I was getting into.”

“There were too many faculty for the number of students now — this was the right-size faculty for when we were closer to 1,100 to 1,200.” And the faculty members “were not in the same places as the students wanted to be,” Muyskens says.

She had made cuts in a few programs at Nebraska Wesleyan, she says, and she was able to rely on the lessons she had learned there. “I invited a team of faculty to work with me. They needed to be brave people and objective and love data and also value the mission of Hiram and the liberal arts.”

The committee gathered information on what students said they wanted when they applied, the number of students each faculty member taught, the number of credit hours each generated, and how much it cost to educate a student in each major. It asked each department to comment on its contributions to the curriculum. It asked faculty members to suggest new programs.

“So we gathered all those reports, and we set a system of kind of scoring,” says Muyskens. When the committee made its recommendations, she says, “from all the majors that we either eliminated or combined or moved to minors, there were 18 students impacted — it really wasn’t a lot of people.”

“Still,” she says, “it was really hard for the faculty. Five folks took us up on a very generous retirement plan. Six folks were discontinued, and thanks to Lori’s work with donors, everybody — no matter whether they were visitors or what — got a year’s pay.” The severance money “really helped a lot.”

So did the idea that the college was creating new programs, not just axing old ones. “Most of the faculty see this as an opportunity to do something new and different, to craft a curriculum that will make us more exciting and interesting.” says Hirsch, the faculty chair, who was a member of the committee. He and Varlotta are now working with the Board of Trustees on faculty-salary benchmarks that could bring professors their first raises in a decade.

Hiram has also divided its remaining departments, many of which are still tiny, among five schools, so students and faculty members in small departments will belong to larger groups. The reorganization may also take some administrative burdens away from department chairs, allowing them to devote more time to teaching.

Muyskens says small colleges need to do a better job of aligning faculty positions with students’ program preferences: “Every school should continue looking at those same numbers every year, because this shouldn’t come as a surprise.” Before she retires again, she says, she hopes to leave Hiram with a process for regularly checking enrollment figures against the college’s offerings and mission.

For all that people here are hopeful, no one predicts a cakewalk. Varlotta worries about deferred maintenance, despite having spent $2 million on it recently. And she says Hiram needs to increase traditional undergraduate enrollment to 1,100 or 1,200. Meanwhile, this part of Ohio is facing challenges bigger than those afflicting Hiram: “GM’s closing the Lordstown plant” about 25 miles away from Hiram, Hirsch says. “That’s going to hit us hard.”