It’s back to school time across the nation. Kids (and adults) ranging from preschoolers to people doing post-graduate work are packing their backpacks and heading to class.
For alumni and students of private liberal arts colleges, schools that number in the hundreds across the United States, it’s a time time though before the perfect storm wave of tidal change hits; a wave that will obliterate much of a part of higher education that’s been with the nation since its founding. Most of these schools, like the bison that were thick as they roamed the North American plains, will be gone the next time you look, reserved like the buffalo counterparts to a few scattered locations and folklore memory.
I’m an alum of one of those schools. And I even started my professional career working in higher education administration. My undergrad alma mater Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, traces its origins to Methodist circuit riders and cherishes its history as one of the oldest private universities west of the Mississippi River. Its slogan, “First University in the West, touts that rich history. But Willamette, like many of its fellow schools, probably fails to either hear the loud ticking clock of change or underestimates the profound impact impending changes will have on its existence.
There was a time, if you wind the clock back a few decades, where communities across the country had a main street that thrived, local newspapers, their own hospital, and even travel agents who took care of your vacations. They might have even had a school like a Willamette in their midst. Those times have come and gone, transformed by technology, globalization, and the business practices of how best to make a buck or at least not lose one. To crib a line from James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams, “America has been rolled like any army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again.” And what still remains is the private liberal arts colleges stuck with a high tuition cost, little market differentiation, and an economy that has fundamentally shifted.
The warning sirens have been clanging, most visibly in the Chronicle of Higher Education. This summer’s piece – Are Colleges Worth the Price of Admission? - lays out the case that most schools are simply not providing value for their cost. Private liberal arts institutions, which tend to be at the high end of the cost range, are no exception.
We are now at a point where students (and any bill paying parents) will start demanding schools that can provide evidence based research that shows. The same parents who run the math on performance in grade school (NY Times: The Littlest Redshirts Sit Out Kindergarten), will do the same in spades for college.
Any number of serious schools (UC Berkeley is one) are heading down the path of granting full-on undergraduate degrees via online learning. When that happens the financial math, time, and ease will lead to a host of other schools to follow the model or seriously risk being slammed.
Sometimes you know the what but not the how as in what will cause some private liberal arts to survive versus how will some schools make it? This is one of those times, and here’s my sense of the few types of liberal arts colleges that will be around in 25 years. I’m not psychic, but I did call the end of most newspapers, the demise of most independent retailers, and the consolidation of hospitals and airlines.
Maybe I’ll be prescient again; here’s who I think will survive the upcoming onslaught:
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