It was, she joked, the hardest decision she had to make in her first year as president of the financially struggling Lake Erie College, in Ohio.
With parents heading to the northwest Cleveland suburb for graduation and rain in the forecast, Jennifer N. Schuller had to choose: keep the outdoor commencement exercises on Saturday morning, and pray the rain wasn’t too hard, or postpone it a day and risk upsetting everyone’s travel plans.
That there was even a ceremony was a bit of a miracle. For much of the fall semester, creditors and Lake Erie officials went back and forth about whether the college would even be able to have a spring semester.
Last April the board announced, without much explanation, that its then president was departing suddenly, and Schuller was promoted from her position as advancement head. The depth of despair around finances also became clearer: Vendors were going months without getting paid; the endowment had been raided and raided and raided; Covid-relief dollars had been used as bandages for structural budget issues; there was next to no cash on hand; and the college was just under $30 million in debt.
The end seemed nigh.
Lake Erie went begging for relief from its creditors. “You know, me, especially having just come to this institution two years ago, just recently taken over as president, [I] hate that we’re coming to you at the 11th hour saying we need this or else we might have to close in January,” Schuller said in a September phone call with bondholders.
The college eventually worked out an agreement with its creditors, striking a forbearance deal in early January. The deal stops payments — interest and principal — from being due until the spring of 2025. In exchange, the college agreed to a series of key performance indicators tied to items like enrollment and finances. It has to give updates on those indicators every two weeks. Falling short of those standards voids the agreement. The college also has given liens on almost everything it owns to its creditors.
“It was a whirlwind,” Schuller said. “The last year has been a slog.”
In addition to working with bondholders, the college also worked on increasing revenue. It beefed up advancement efforts to bring in donations and grants, and got a verbal agreement from donors to remove restrictions on more than $1 million of endowed funds. It signed a deal with BloomBoard, a company that partners with K-12 school districts to provide ongoing education for teachers. Those courses will come through Lake Erie, giving it more credit hours, which means more revenue for the college.
We were past the bottom of the barrel. We had cut, not just to the bone, but through the bone. Now we are making significant investments that are going to help us grow.
Schuller said the college has also beefed up its admissions recruiting and student-retention efforts. It added an on-campus visit day for prospective students, something it hadn’t been doing. It switched food vendors, worked to make the library a better place for group study, and even looked at how much it would cost to do laundry in the residence halls. All of those were complaints students had raised.
“It was just a matter for listening to students,” Schuller said, also crediting faculty members for moving quickly on redesigns of academic programs. “We need to be nimble. There’s probably nothing we’ve come up with that someone else hasn’t done, but we were doing so little that just catching up with what everyone else does has really made a difference.”
The college also has solicited and gotten support from donors and governing bodies, including the Lake County Board of Commissioners, which awarded the college a $1.5-million grant to put a new turf field on its campus.
About 80 percent of the college’s students are athletes, so upgrading its facilities helps with recruiting and retention efforts, Schuller said, and is part of the college’s efforts to fix years of decline. “We had just done so many things so poorly in so many areas,” she said. “It was basic things. Our transfer process was broken. We had a lot of catch-up work we had to do, but also we have been working on how do we distinguish ourselves in the marketplace.”
‘We Made It’
Ultimately, Schuller decided to go ahead with the commencement ceremony as scheduled.
But as feared, that Saturday morning in early May was wet. In the minutes before the ceremony was to start at a local minor-league baseball park, an employee was using a large squeegee to push water off the dirt area between home plate and the stands, where folding chairs were set up for platform guests. During the procession, several faculty members wore clear plastic rain ponchos over their academic robes. The national-anthem singers performed huddled under umbrellas at the podium.
The student speaker, Kaitlin Altman, reminded the graduates of how far they’ve come and told them that the day stood for something very special: “It also symbolizes the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. During our time here at Lake Erie College, we have learned the importance of resilience and perseverance.”
By the time Schuller moved in front of a large Lake Erie College screen, where she greeted graduates, handed them their diplomas, and posed for a picture, the sun had come out. “When I walked up to the podium, I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, we are here. We made it here,’” she said. As graduate after graduate filed past, the sun increased its strength, casting shadows across the mostly dry dirt.
After the ceremony, there was a sense of optimism in the crowd, not just for the graduates now heading for jobs, but also for the college.
“It seems like things are heading in the right direction,” said Mark Lowe, who was there to see his daughter receive her diploma. “It doesn’t feel as bleak as it did last fall. It really seemed like they weren’t going to be able to make it, but I’d be really surprised if they don’t now.”
It would be easy to see the successful ceremony as mirroring the college’s financial journey during the academic year. But a lot has to break right for the college to remain on solid ground.
The budget for the coming fiscal year is reliant on a 23-percent increase in tuition and fees revenue from the previous year, along with a 50-percent increase in revenue from auxiliary operations, documents shared with bondholders show.
Enrollment, as of early April, the latest numbers available, show the college is slightly behind the pace of previous years, but enrollment from the BloomBoard partnership brings the total enrollment to roughly even.
“There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that we’re moving forward as an independent college,” Schuller said. “We were past the bottom of the barrel. We had cut, not just to the bone, but through the bone. Now we are making significant investments that are going to help us grow.”
