The Battle for the Soul of American Higher Education

A guest post by Joshua Travis Brown

This is a guest post by Joshua Travis Brown, an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education and a Research Fellow with the Center for Skills, Knowledge and Organizational Performance at the University of Oxford. He is the author of a new book — Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went From Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed — published by Oxford University Press. I met Josh at a workshop a few months ago on the current state of U.S. universities. As part of THB’s continuing focus on the many dimensions of the challenges and opportunities facing U.S. universities (see the recent five-part THB series), I invited Josh to publish a guest post here at THB, drawing upon his new book focusing on how tuition-driven univesities balance budgets while trying to keep true to their mission. Enjoy!

“You say you care about mission, and you say you care about these students and yet it seems like everything you are doing is undermining that… the only way I can make sense of the decisions that are made here and the rhetoric is to say, ‘Oh, the rhetoric is just bullshit...it is all just about money.’”

This admission from one faculty member I spoke to captures the tension between maintaining their university’s values, while fighting to survive the competitive crucible of American higher education. As I traveled across the country from college to college meeting with more than 150 university leaders, I repeatedly heard sentiments from administrators that described the precarious tightrope leaders walk between institutional mission and financial margins.

One senior vice president pointedly asked me in a raised tone,

“How do you change the world as a scrappy young institution when you do not know where the next dollar is coming from?”

While many institutions remain committed to their core values of serving and providing educational opportunities to students, administrators have been forced to operate within a highly competitive market and make budgetary decisions that threaten their ability to fulfill these commitments. A board member at another school framed the tension as an impossible battle:

Those two things fight each other. If all we wanted to do was to be deeply mission-conscious and make sure our students have wonderful experiences things would spiral out of control rapidly and we would be out of business. Or we could just decide to hell with that and let’s take the steps needed to batten down the financial hatches and sacrifice the mission stuff. And then we would lose our soul.

Every school I visited had battle scars to show. One academic dean pointedly recalled with observable tension, “That summer I missed two paychecks,” while a faculty colleague shared the remarkable uncertainty her family experienced during this period:

“I was nine months pregnant…These stories are not just something in some history book somewhere. I remember where we were living and thinking ‘we are not going to make it this month, we cannot pay our house payment.’”

These stories and others far more candid come from the interviews I collected while writing Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed and paint a picture of the lengths that universities go to in order to keep their doors open and souls intact.

Fueled by federal policies that strategically promote competition between universities, institutions are incentivized to innovate and expand their financial margins––or cease to exist.

But what happens when the cost of existing is to sacrifice the university’s original raison d’être?

Candid Confessions

“Please do not hit record yet,” one executive vice president mentioned as she motioned toward the recorder on the table between us. At her request, our interview had been rescheduled from a midday meeting at the university to an early morning get-together at a local family restaurant––more than one interviewee requested off-campus venue changes at every campus I visited. Speaking openly about the hidden tensions universities must balance is not without risk, and many leaders felt more comfortable doing so outside the earshot of campus.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

After taking a moment to doctor her coffee and compose her thoughts, the administrator said she wanted to first explain the context of what she was about to say. As the only guests seated before dawn, the diner now felt as quiet as a confessional.

“In this administrative job,” the senior vice president offered, “it is imperative that you establish what I call a personal ‘Go to Hell Fund.’”

She went on to elaborate that the money was a financial reserve set aside to permit a leader like herself to not remain beholden to their employer. If a predicament or professional impasse were to occur, the reserves were there to provide the administrator the financial cushion to stand by their convictions and quit (effectively telling one’s boss to “Go to hell!”). She then confided that,

“as this job and the institution itself has changed, I have increasingly been tempted to use that fund.”

The changes at her campus, along with many others, were business-minded decisions made in order to stabilize budgets, secure financial margins, and avoid institutional failure.

Ranging from building new state-of-the-art dorms and stadiums, to establishing footholds in new student populations, to experimenting with online programs, and creating multinational networks of branch campuses, university leaders employed a slew of innovative measures to keep their colleges running. Irrespective of the ultimate fiscal success of these efforts, the choice to put the focus on money above mission was not without critiques or controversy. For many, it felt like the competing priorities could not coexist, but to say so openly was anathema.

There were leaders at every campus I visited who, while not explicitly admitting to a “Go to Hell Fund,” expressed a similar sentiment of not knowing exactly when the struggle between margin and mission would claim them as a casualty.

“Please do not tie me to this because I could get in all kinds of shit,” one vice president confided, while a senior leader at another university conveyed similar sentiments: “If I said that publicly, I would probably get hung.”

The recently resigned presidents of Penn, Harvard, Texas A&M, Virginia, and Florida will tell you no administrator’s job is truly safe in the battle for the soul of American higher education.

Photo courtesy of Pexels.

Four Strategies of Survival

Though fraught with professional pitfalls, finding ways to survive as an administrator––and even succeed––is indeed possible. I discovered that in their attempts to establish greater security for both themselves and their institutions, university leaders devised four strategies to ensure adequate revenues to continue operations: Traditional, Pioneer, Network, and Accelerated.

In what I call the Traditional Strategy, some schools attempted to imitate the best practices of the Ivy League and focus on climbing the perennial rankings through campus beautification projects and prestige-boosting branding campaigns.

Other schools, like those engaging in the Pioneer Strategy, turned to innovation and tried recruiting new types of students (e.g. adult and “nontraditional” learners) in new enrollment markets.

Others pursued the Network Strategy, daring to be even more entrepreneurial by experimenting with new types of students, locations, and course delivery methods simultaneously.

And still others attempted the Accelerated Strategy by building systems to rapidly scale new course delivery methods (e.g. online) to create major revenue booms.

Indeed, some leaders were even trying to devise a fifth strategy (Accelerated Networks) by layering multiple approaches that only a multinational corporation could pull off.

Though the results were mixed from institution to institution, the innovative experimentation of university leaders had bought themselves the chance to fight another day.

Success, but at what cost?

There was a wide spectrum of outcomes for the universities implementing different survival strategies. But regardless of what the financial state of each institution was like, the battle for its soul still remained.

Some universities, like those attempting the Traditional Strategy, found themselves overstretched and even closer to failure than they had been before.

Emulating elite colleges was not effective at staving off enrollment crises and efforts focused on strengthening organizational prestige distracted from the work of sustaining total student enrollments––which fell over 15% at each college. Eventually recognizing the need to embrace innovative educational options that previously were considered antithetical to their mission, leaders attempted to “catch up” with other schools that were already down the path of innovating.

But even universities that were successful in boosting enrollment and revenues struggled with what the changes meant for their institutional identity.

One school pursuing the Accelerated Strategy was able to generate unimaginable wealth from student tuition to the extent that it actually replaced donations from traditional philanthropy––essentially turning current students into “new philanthropists” whose loans serve to bolster school endowments by tens to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Leaders described how they had practically started “printing money” and accumulating “more money than God.”

With the margins side of the equation now out of balance, the mission side was called into question with growing faculty and staff concerns about the organization’s commitments. In the words of one professor:

“It is more of a business than an educational institution from the perspective of those who run it. In fact, the academic mission is not even secondary anymore. I think they have totally forgotten about it.”

A dean regrettably confessed their innovative labors ultimately yielded something that reminded him of Frankenstein:

“We have created a monster. Just the pressure to go that way… in order to be successful, in order to be competitive.”

Amid the university’s rapid expansion, the mission had become hard to discern:

“In an operation this size it is easy to think about the buildings rather than to think about our mission,” one leader acknowledged, while a colleague observed, “We have grown too fast at the expense of our founding.”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

Whether in response to having too little money or too much, administrators across the spectrum struggled to find their footing adjusting to an increasingly competitive landscape.

Without ignoring the tensions, forward-thinking leaders I spoke to recognized the threat market-oriented strategies posed to their mission and tried their best to find harmony between budgets and core values. Some “pushed back” on extreme market practices that might undermine their educational mission by returning to foundational commitments and reiterating that purpose, and not profit, was the underlying motivation of these institutions.

As one impassioned provost put it:

“This is hearts and minds, this is people’s existence we are supposed to be serving… people will walk through hell for that! Nobody is going to walk through hell to make another 1% profit margin!”

Conclusion

In the midst of financial uncertainty and political posturing, today’s higher education landscape suggests there will be no dearth of challenges that threaten institutional missions and demand innovative solutions.

As endowment revenues continue to fall, research dollars continue to vanish, and international student enrollment plummets, schools will continue turning to revenue generating strategies to survive. And as every school battles for its soul while balancing missions and margins, the stories and strategies shared in Capitalizing on College provide a roadmap for navigating the way forward.

In the words of one administrator,

“The need to navigate a middle ground between our mission and context in which we reside... It is a messy business – a messy business of compromise in many cases. And how do you compromise without losing...” He stopped and paused for moment, gathering himself, then finished voicing his concern: “You need to do that in a way to hang on to your soul.”

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