It’s still a stat that shocks me when I look at enrollment data: About 40% of American colleges enroll 1,000 or fewer students. Another 40% enroll fewer than 5,000 students.
We have lots of small colleges in the U.S. The conventional wisdom given other industries is that they all won’t survive with a demographic cliff coming of high-school graduates in the middle of this decade—especially since most of the colleges serve traditional-age students within 50 to 100 miles of campus.
As we head into our summer hiatus on Future U Podcast, Michael Horn and I chose some of our favorite episodes from this past season to feature on the channel over the summer.
In this episode, our guest was Lynn Perry Wooten, president of Simmons University in Boston. I’ve known Wooten since she was a dean at Cornell’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and was a fellow in the ASU Georgetown Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership that I help run.
Simmons is one of those small colleges. At the undergrad level it has about 1,800 students (and 3,900 grad students). Wooten brings an interesting perspective to the job, not only as a business dean, but as someone who has spent her career as a scholar and expert on organizational development and transformation. In other words, she doesn’t just read the business literature as a college president; she has actually written it.
Three key takeaways from our conversation with Wooten:
• The distinction for small colleges just can’t be that they are small. At Simmons, it’s that they are a women’s college for undergrads; co-ed as grad. They know the earlier you get your graduate degree, especially for women, the better your economic trajectory. So starting this year, any student at Simmons can get an undergrad and grad degree in five years. “We are focusing a lot on what can we do best in this higher ed landscape than no one else can do,” Wooten said.
• Lean into the Data. Too many colleges are still run on anecdote, gut, and emotion. When Simmons recently went through academic changes it looked at where its majors were, where its students were (online vs. in-person) and the mix between grad and undergrad. That drove decision-making and allowed them to integrate failing humanities programs into the professions and as a blended degree.
• Online ed alone is not unique. Simmons was a first mover there with an innovative nursing program. But the first-mover advantage for small colleges online was lost during the pandemic, Wooten told me.
“We have to think about what we can make unique for our program,” she said.
🎧 Listent to the full episode and subscribe now for a new seasons starting in August.
🚨 Also read this great narrative on the value of small colleges and what we lose when they go by Scott Carlson in this week's The Chronicle of Higher Education (https://lnkd.in/eWYubXEf)