Engaged Alumni Can Help Their Alma Maters Survive The "Enrollment Cliff"
A looming student shortage could force a reckoning and rethinking on campus
Some fear the so-called “enrollment cliff” now facing universities — the point at which a lagging national birthrate begins to constrict the supply of new college students — as another nail in the coffin of higher education. Others see it as an opportunity for much-needed reform, reinvention, and “rightsizing.”
Engaged alumni also have an important role to play by helping their alma maters weather this approaching storm.
National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood is among those who see a potential silver lining in the pressures that a constricting pipeline of college prospects will bring to bear on our complacent and hidebound learning institutions. In a recent Minding The Campus piece, Wood explained why the coming crunch has the potential to reshape higher education for the better.
Some schools will try to fill the enrollment gap with foreign students or illegal immigrants, Wood predicts. Lowering standards and slashing course offerings and degrees will also be tried. But such Band-Aids probably won’t be enough to avoid a major paradigm shift, according to Wood. Nor will it help restore flagging public confidence in the value of a college credential.
Writes Wood:
“All of these steps are already happening, and none of them can give comfort to the American higher education establishment. The demographic cliff has to be seen in the context of a whole series of other developments that promise to draw a curtain on the post-World War II rise of mass higher education in America. We overbuilt colleges and universities with the Baby Boom generation in mind and then continued to overbuild these institutions as the following generations bought into the idea that a college degree was a prerequisite for a good career and a satisfying life. Neither was true, but enough people believed these promises that higher education managed to sustain the illusion, even as the price of college grew extravagantly and the reality began to sink in that a college degree per se no longer meant that an individual had achieved much in the way of an education.
At some point, the public was going to re-assess the basic assumption that college was always the best option. That reassessment is happening, and it happens to be happening at the same time that colleges are beginning to struggle with the demographic cliff. I see several positive aspects of this situation.”
The potential upsides are as follows, according to Wood.
The crisis will place greater pressure on K-12 schools to adequately prepare students for professional lives without college credentials.
There will be a “weeding-out” of “waystation” schools that function simply as holding pens for young adults unsure of what they want to do with their lives.
“Traditional” colleges and universities will also be forced to more clearly differentiate themselves from institutions primarily focused on career training.
“Universities, with all their very smart people, have always been very good at addition, but very poor at subtraction. They can create, add, and expand with relative ease, but they struggle with reduction, merging, or elimination.”
David Rosowsky shared additional thoughts on the “enrollment cliff” in a recent Forbes column.
“The cliff” may not ring in a day of reckoning for every school, argues Rosowsky, but the required “rightsizing” will force most universities to embrace a much different mindset. The bigger-is-better model will no longer automatically apply. “Universities, with all their very smart people, have always been very good at addition, but very poor at subtraction,” notes Rosowsky. “They can create, add, and expand with relative ease, but they struggle with reduction, merging, or elimination.”
Where, then, does this leave alumni? What can we do now to help our alma maters adapt to changing realities and experience a “soft landing” as they step off the enrollment cliff?
Schools will be looking for any competitive advantage as the pool of college prospects begins to shrink. Engaged alumni can help their alma maters gain and maintain an advantage by insisting that they shore up flagging standards and vigorously uphold core, non-negotiable academic values like free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity.
Alumni can and should serve as the independent quality control monitors universities badly need. Well-organized alumni can also become quality control enforcers, by bringing grassroots pressure to bear, if their alma maters refuse to heed their counsel and won’t recognize them as legitimate stakeholders.
Colleges and universities able to showcase their adherence to high standards and academic fundamentals will enjoy a market advantage as the competition to attract a dwindling number of students intensifies. Value- and cost-conscious parents and students will choose schools that deliver the biggest “bang” for the tuition buck. Schools that neglect or abandon those values will also suffer consequences, by losing market share and seeing an erosion in the value of the credentials they confer.
The looming enrollment cliff presents a major additional challenge to colleges and universities already in crisis. But it doesn’t have to spell disaster for schools that seek solutions not in quick-fix band-aids but in a return to the bedrock values that made them great. Alumni who push their alma maters not just to strengthen those core academic values, where they’ve faltered, but to use those standards as major selling points to students and parents, will be helping these schools to better weather the oncoming storm.
Becoming part of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, or supporting our work, ensures that you will be right in the thick of that effort.
