‘Scale’ isn’t the holy grail for impact.
Two years ago, when I shared four lessons in digital strategy that Nicole Hurd had learned while leading the College Advising Corps through the first phase of the pandemic, I didn’t know she was on the cusp of leaving that organization, which she founded in 2005, to run a college.
Now Hurd is 18 months into her term as president of Lafayette College, in Pennsylvania, and I caught up with her recently about what her transition to a new post has taught her about innovating. An academic by training (religious studies), Hurd otherwise has an unusual résumé for a college president, and I’ve long admired her passion and drive to expand opportunity for students. Picking up on a conversation we started in person in September, Hurd and I spoke at length last week by phone. Four themes stood out to me:
Colleges and groups that help low-income students get to college need to think more broadly about what “access” means. Embedding near-peer counselors in high schools around the country, the College Advising Corps is the nation’s largest organization dedicated to guiding students — about 250,000 a year — down the path to college. Now Hurd is thinking a lot more about students’ experiences once they enroll. Colleges may boast of generous financial aid and high graduation rates, she said, but “that doesn’t mean the students will have four awesome years on that campus.”
Especially for low-income students at selective colleges, inclusion isn’t a given, and Hurd said she always knew that. As president, she’s trying to focus attention on “where some of the cracks” might be. Do students have the resources to do an internship that might not pay as much as a summer job? Do they have the right clothes for a Pennsylvania winter? Can they afford to go home for the holidays? (Over Thanksgiving, she and her husband hosted 50 students for dinner.) “My lens is a lot more nuanced now,” she told me.
Lafayette is part of the American Talent Initiative, a consortium of colleges that have pledged to increase their enrollment of low-income students — although as I’ve reported, many are falling short. So I had to ask about that. Lafayette’s goal is for low-income students to make up 15 percent of its enrollment by 2025, up from the current 12 percent. The pandemic set the college back a little, Hurd said, but she believes it is now “on the right trajectory,” at 13.5 percent in its current freshman class. “What I do know,” Hurd told me, “is these students are out there.”
Growth isn’t the only way to have impact. After 16 years expanding the Advising Corps, Hurd realized that “going deep” can be just as valuable. “In the nonprofit space,” she told me, “there’s lots of pressure to scale” — a challenge she used to discuss a lot with Aimée Eubanks Davis and Alexandra Bernadotte, two social entrepreneurs who appeared on my “Innovation That Matters” podcast series in 2021. Now immersed in the life of a campus with 2,700 students, Hurd is discovering the “huge social impact” of preparing individual students to graduate and go out into the world.
Colleges’ “affinity” advantages in fund raising go only so far. Colleges are said to have an easier time raising funds than nonprofits do because the core donor base — alumni — are familiar with the institution and eager to see it do well. “You don’t have to prove value in the same way,” Hurd put it. “You can go straight to the hopes and dreams.” (That was in my mind the day after we spoke as I sipped wine at a cocktail party here in D.C. and watched the president of my own alma mater play on some heartstrings during a kickoff for its latest capital campaign.)
But that notion of affinity can make colleges complacent, she said. Leaders might want the perfect conditions to solicit a gift. But as she learned at the Advising Corps, “You can’t wait forever to make an ask.”
As a college president, Hurd appreciates the luxury of being able to solicit gifts from alumni for something “they already love.” Often they are willing to invest in projects with a long arc, she said. More nonprofits, she thinks, could benefit from some of that. “People have to start talking about investing in nonprofits as institutions,” by funding them for work that extends over multiple years or donating to their endowed funds, she noted. If donors aren’t thinking that way, I guess the organizations need to be making the case.
Building an organization is a never-ending process. After founding and leading an organization, Hurd is now the 18th president of a liberal-arts college that’s nearly two centuries old. I wondered if there were fewer ways to shape a more-established institution, but Hurd said otherwise. “There’s some build in this job, too,” she told me, noting how the college continues to evolve. “Turns out,” she said, “there’s lots of clay to play with.”
That’s a good reminder for all of us. Even at tradition-bound places, there’s plenty of room for change.
Check these out.
Here are some education-related items from other outlets that recently caught my eye. Did I miss a good one? Let me know.
- President Biden’s broad debt-forgiveness plan has attracted a lot of attention — and litigation — over the past year, but the administration’s other student-loan proposals, which would alter income-based-repayment plans, are likely to have a longer-lasting impact. An analysis by scholars at the Urban Institute highlights how the proposal could transform such repayment plans from “a safety net that supports borrowers with low incomes into a substantial subsidy for most undergraduate students who take on debt.” If the rules take effect as proposed, “fully repaying a student loan will be the exception rather than the rule,” write Matthew Chingos, Jason Delisle, and Jason Cohn. “For typical Pell Grant recipients, the additional loan forgiveness will be larger than the total Pell Grants they receive while in college.”
- The College Board has been drawing fire for appearing to have capitulated to right-wing pressure over its new Advanced Placement course in African American studies, but as The New York Times reports in this deeply sourced piece, “in today’s political climate, a dispute may have been unavoidable.” The story details the chronology of the course’s development, some of the back-and-forth between Florida officials and the College Board, perspectives from Black-studies scholars, and the latest assertions from the College Board that Florida education officials showed “ignorance and derision for the field of African American studies.”
- For colleges looking to help students tap into federal-benefits programs that offer assistance for food, low-cost internet access, and other services, the Benefits Data Trust has just published this new tool kit with step-by-step instructions on how to establish such programs and make them effective.
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