The Edge

I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week.

Advice from readers to stave off ‘consultant fatigue.’

Last week’s newsletter (you can read it here) described some of what I’ve seen in a consultancy’s “turnaround” work at Fort Lewis College, in Durango, Colo. It seems to have hit a nerve — especially the bit about the challenges of overcoming resentments that linger from past consultants’ engagements.

Below I share more of what I learned from my initial visit to Fort Lewis, when a team of five consultants from Entangled Solutions came to town.

But first: I heard tons of great comments and suggestions from college officials and consultants themselves on ways to make these relationships more useful. Here’s some of what folks told me about the college-consultant relationship.

As the client, find a firm that will be a good partner. That’s my takeaway from what I heard from Beth Hardin, vice chancellor for business affairs at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She recalled a recent selection from among three consultants to oversee an IT transition. She wrote: “When a firm said they’d be ‘done in six weeks,’ I knew they would not be. When a firm implied that their really talented people were doing us a favor by working in our industry, we did ourselves a favor by selecting another firm. In the end, we selected a firm that had notable IT knowledge, knew they’d be working with us for at least half a year and realistically more, recognized that they would learn as much as we would, and valued a partnership.”

As a consultant, use your ears and eyes. That’s the essence of the message from Lee Maxey, a longtime consultant and chief executive of MindMax, a company that advises colleges on enrollment and marketing. He wrote: “Asking good questions and then really listening to all that is being said are the keys to effective consulting. My father was a therapist, and helped me understand that one never truly understands what’s going for someone else in their experience of life (much less a whole organization like a college).”

This is one relationship that shouldn’t last. That insight came from Larry Ladd, a longtime college administrator turned consultant. He wrote: “A good consultant makes themselves unnecessary over time. By the time you leave, the client should feel gratitude but also feel that it is time for you to go …... You are enabling the client to be successful without you.”

Ladd’s advice resonated especially because it echoed what I had heard repeatedly from professors and administrators at Fort Lewis College. They want help from Entangled on things they can’t do themselves. But they don’t want to be forever dependent on outsiders when evaluating new opportunities.

What else I learned when the consultants came to campus.

Along with anxiety about consultants (even free ones) that I described at Fort Lewis in last week’s newsletter, here’s what I else I observed while in Durango.

The higher-ed zeitgeists — about the changing nature of teaching in the information age and the value of the bachelor’s degree — get around.

During one exercise, Entangled asked local business leaders when, if ever, the bachelor’s degree would lose its monopoly as the credential of choice for employers in hiring. (The reason: Entangled is evaluating the market for Fort Lewis to offer certificates and other credentials beyond the four-year degree.) Of the dozen-plus folks in the room, about a quarter moved to stand next to a sign that said that was “already true.” Most of the rest said the monopoly would evaporate “in the next five years.”

I hear a lot of this talk challenging the value of the bachelor’s degree from the “disruption crowd” on the conference circuit, but clearly the message has made it all the way to the Four Corners region too.

Likewise, in a conversation about new programs and new ways to deliver them, professors made their preferences known for the personalized teaching they now do in mostly face-to-face classes, but they also showed that they understood that their roles as teachers are changing.

“Certainly, my job is no longer to disseminate content knowledge,” I heard Ann McCarthy, a professor of mathematics, say. She then went on to explain that she sees her job as fostering students’ own creativity and critical-thinking skills within the discipline. So much for the stereotype of professors’ relying on decades-old syllabi.

A little surplus can go a long way for colleges on the margin. Fort Lewis leaders are looking to bolster their financial sustainability so they can pay more competitively — Durango can be an expensive place to live — and stave off layoffs like the ones the college made in 2017-18.

To get there, officials determined the college needs to bring in an additional $500,000 a year, an increase of less than 1 percent in its annual operational budget of about $57 million. I’m surprised the goal is so low. But it just goes to show how little it might take to steady a lot of other colleges now considered on the brink.

Fort Lewis hit its enrollment peak in the early 2000s, with 4,456 students. (Yes, tellingly, folks still know the exact number.) There are lots of reasons for the enrollment falloff — more student interest in the state’s bigger universities and more competition for Denver-area students from outside the state among them. Regional publics in other states could tell a similar story.

Fort Lewis officials had previously thought they could hit that $500,000 target if they could restore enrollment to 3,700 or more. Now, with Entangled in the picture, traditional enrollment growth of 18- to 24-year-olds isn’t necessarily the sole path to sustainability. The college is also looking into other ideas, perhaps more online degrees with a summer residency component or other adult-serving programs, as a means to that $500,000 end.

Challenges remain on the near-term horizon.

—Entangled is almost certain to propose that Fort Lewis offer at least some new degree programs online, even as the consultants recognize that those offerings might be out of step with the academic vibe professors seem to treasure. The courses I heard professors brag about, like “Soil and Society” and “The Art of Protest,” would be at home at any elite, East Coast liberal-arts college I could name. But online programs might make sense for an institution like this, if only, as Lauren Dibble of Entangled noted, because they could make it easier for the college to more affordably hire professors who could teach remotely.

—Demographic shifts make it logical for Fort Lewis to develop programs aimed at older students, but that’s a constituency it hasn’t served extensively in the past.

See you next week SXSW EDU in Austin?

Barring any last-minute changes, South by Southwest EDU is still a go — and my colleague Scott Carlson and I look forward to elbow-bump greeting you as we swap news, ideas, and gossip in the sessions and hallways.

And please be sure not to miss The Chronicle’s Sixth Annual Shark Tank: Edu Edition, on Tuesday, March 10, from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. Four great contestants will be pitching their ideas to improve higher education, and three sharks (including me) will oh-so-gently beat down their dreams. As always, it should be a blast.

Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, or sign up to receive your own copy, you can do so here. If you want to follow me on Twitter, @GoldieStandard is my handle.