Trusteeship - May/June 2020 - 22

TA KEAWAYS
■  Holistic, well-informed, strategic

thinking is needed when trustees
and their institutions make
decisions about the future. There
are many external forces putting
pressure on higher education
institutions today. Two include
acute enrollment/financial
pressures and necessary
revisions of the current teaching/
learning paradigm.
■  Enrollments have declined in

most higher education sectors
since 2010 and all colleges and
universities will see precipitous
declines in high school graduates
starting in 2026. The current
teaching/learning paradigm
and narrow disciplinary
specialization for faculty makes
it difficult to provide students
with holistic and integrative
problem-solving skills they need
to be effective workers and
citizens in the 21st century.
■  Strategic thinking is seeing from

multiple perspectives in order
to really understand the whole
picture, according to Henry
Mintzberg. Jim Collins agrees but
includes the interdependence
of mission and vision, select
program excellence, and
financial viability. Collins says
strategic planning must help an
institution learn what to do and,
also, what to stop doing.
■  Shared governance should

consist of a well-functioning
partnership between the
president, faculty, and the
board working together to align
their institution's priorities.
Governance and strategic
thinking can be messy on
campuses because of the
division of responsibilities
leading to disagreements
in decision-making. Instead
of these divisions, strategic
thinking requires participants
to reflect holistically about their
institution and its future.

22 TRUSTEESHIP  MAY. JUN. 2020

versities agree that the educational delivery model of higher education institutions
in the United States is in financial crisis.
■	 The late 2019 consent agreement
between the U.S Department of Justice
and the National Association for College
Admission Counseling that permits colleges to recruit students after they declare
their intention to enroll (or already are
enrolled) elsewhere will intensify competition for students and predictably
decrease already low net tuition.
■	 About a dozen private colleges have been
closing or merging annually and some
higher education insiders who have seen
"stress tests" of a considerable number of
small colleges say 20 percent or more are in
danger of closing in the next two decades.
To this overall unsustainable enrollment
and budgetary picture for many colleges
and universities, increasingly negative
public sentiment adds an additional headwind. With American college student debt
now above $1.6 trillion, we should not be
surprised by a 2018 Pew study that reports
that 61 percent of Americans say higher
education is "going in the wrong direction
because tuition costs are too high (84 percent) and students don't get the skills they
need to succeed in the workplace (65 percent)." This sentiment is leading many students and their families to make their final
college choice based on cost alone.
Questions for trustees, administrators,
and faculty to ask together include:
1.	 Have we studied the impact of the
precipitous enrollment decline in 2026
on our college's admissions territories
and adjusted our enrollment/revenue
projections accordingly?
2.	 Have we performed an inclusive "financial stress test" for our institution that
includes data from both internal (e.g.,
net tuition/income trends, discount
rate, etc.) and external (e.g., endowment market projections, Moody's
rating, etc.) sources?

Challenges to Our Current Teaching/
Learning Paradigm. If the first major
challenge to many higher education institutions is the increasing unsustainability
of their enrollment-based financial model,
the second threat strikes at the heart of
higher education's traditional teaching/
learning paradigm. The traditional liberal
arts learning model of "general education
breadth plus disciplinary depth" typically
takes institutional form in the myriad academic disciplines, departments, and majors
on college campuses, plus a general studies
program. The rise of land grant and public
universities during the previous century
added professional and graduate programs
to this liberal arts education paradigm.
With 7,418 different disciplinary PhD
programs now being offered by universities
around the world, the increasingly narrow
specialization of faculty makes it difficult
for the current disciplinary teaching/learning paradigm to provide the holistic and
integrative problem-solving skills college
students need to live and work in the 21st
century. Some markers shaping the world
in which our students currently study, live,
and work include the following:
■	 Two recent decades of digital innovations-public Internet (1994), Google
(1998), Wikipedia (2001)-have provided
virtually unlimited access to information
previously available primarily in the classroom and the library.
■	 Other digital innovations like Facebook
(2004), Twitter (2006), and Instagram
(2010) have created not only instant communications and strong affinity groups
across the globe, but also multiple claims
of what is "fact" or "true."
■	 Artificial Intelligence (AI) plus big data
have created what some call the "robot
economy" that has already displaced
many blue- and white-collar jobs and
require response by our colleges' current
teaching/learning paradigm, and the displacement is expected to increase exponentially in the years ahead.
■	 The digital revolution has transformed
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