Like many other people, I suppose, I only heard about Sweet Briar College, a small women's liberal arts college in Virginia, when I saw the news that it is shutting down.
The school was affected by the financial crisis and the general crisis in higher education. Young women have lost interest in women's only colleges, and small private liberal arts colleges have typically higher tuition, and students are increasingly scared to death of graduating with high debt loads. Obviously, the future of higher education is of paramount importance for our economy. And obviously, it's always a cultural loss when a liberal arts college has to shut down.
That being said--the college has a $94 million endowment. $94 million!
The world of American higher education is insane. The top, most thriving higher ed institutions in France would kill for a $94 million endowment. Surely something could be done.
What are some things Sweet Briar could do?
Have a specific identity. Granted, it's no longer enough to be a "small women's liberal arts college" when you're not one of the Seven Sisters. If you're not a blockbuster school, you have to focus on a specific identity, you have to stand out. The great thing about American higher ed is precisely how many different schools there are. St John's College has its famous great books program. Wheaton College is the "Harvard of Evangelicalism." Franciscan University of Steubenville is super-Catholic. Cornell College is on the block system. Middlebury has an international focus. Rose Hulman is the only school whose engineering program is on par with MIT or Stanford which is also very small. Claremont McKenna combines humanities and social sciences. George Mason University promotes kooky (and therefore underrated) young academics. Sarah Lawrence takes the pot-and-hippie vibe and takes it to 11.
Focus. The former should drive the latter. By my count, Sweet Briar has 37 majors, not counting minors, certificates, and pre-law and pre-med programs. This with a student body of 724. Patrick Henry College, a small startup college founded in 2000, has six majors. Once you realize what your identity should be, you should see that a lot of infrastructure is superfluous.
Make difficult choices. Again, this is implied by the former. Some tenured positions and other benefits will have to go. Things that are crucial to the school, like its riding identity, should not. But if the college is failing because it is too expensive, then costs will have to be cut, something which is overwhelmingly difficult in an academic environment, but nonetheless has to be done.
Explore audacious financial decisions. Sweet Briar is too expensive? Did you know that schools that turn down federal and state subsidies typically have lower tuition rates? Federal and state subsidies mostly subsidize administration and make the college too costly to run. Can Sweet Briar explore providing equity-based loans to her students rather than traditional student loans? And then there is the internet. Online education is and can be very profitable, and it doesn't have to be done horribly.
Explore the integration of software into the classroom. I'm not talking about Blackboard. I've had reason before to write about Minerva, the startup that wants to build a residential liberal arts college with 21st century technology. Their main innovation seems to be their seminar software, where students and teacher skype into a virtual seminar, and the software brings up documents and quizzes.
So, for example...if I was starting a liberal arts college from scratch, here are some of the things I would do...
I would not have teacher tenure. I would be a teaching school, and I would hire young instructors (read: cheap, yes, but also enthusiastic) and reward them on the basis of teaching skills, not publications or other academic standards.
Our focus would be at the intersection of the liberal arts and the social (and harder) sciences. The degree granted would be a bachelor of philosphy (BPhil) not a BA or BS. The first two years would mostly be a core curriculum of humanities (literature, philosophy, classics, perhaps with an immersion Latin course) and social sciences, including the hard stuff like statistics, modeling, financial analysis and the like. During the last two years, students would enroll in two fields of study instead of a major/minor.
The college would publish its own online magazine, written by both professors and students. Writing 5,000 words that actual people are going to want to read but is nonetheless rigorous and fact-based and profound on, say, why Cicero is relevant today, or on the impact of Evangelicalism on Latin American politics, or IBM's business turnaround strategy, would be a tremendous college assignment for a student. It would be both a great way to promote the college and a great educational experience for the students and also a good resume builder (and a good preparation for a career).
Now, obviously, I'm just a person writing things on the internet. But I can't believe that it's impossible for a college with a real history and an endowment in the tens of millions of dollars to turn it around, with some focus and grit.
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