Lessons in Survival from Small Colleges

A Chronicle of Higher Education piece by Lawrence Biemiller describes the paths several small, liberal arts colleges are taking to find financial sustainability. The plight of such schools is well-known, but my take-away from the article is that five practices underscore the more successful transformations:

1. Increasing the speed at which decisions, even about matters such as curriculum, are made; this is true even in domains that require significant faculty input or consent;
2. Stopping programs, no matter how beloved, that pulled down the bottom line; e.g., no margin means no mission;
3. Reducing faculty positions, one of the most painful, but ultimately helpful, of the strategies;
4. Benchmarking private school tuition at the same level as the flagship campus of the state’s public university (this required re-engineering the budget to hit the price point, as illustrated by Oglethorpe University and Sweet Briar College); and
5. Changing pedagogical approaches to emphasize project-based and experiential learning (remember our post in this space that everything is progressive now).

Also notable is mention of a consortium among Amherst, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Hampshire, and UMass at Amherst (all in Massachusetts) to reduce expenses by shared services.All of the above are interesting case studies for smaller independent K-12 schools.