A Winning Formula: Collaboration, Curricular Expansion And Lower Costs

Recognizing the increasing challenges of balancing their budgets, attracting students and remaining affordable to students, a group of nineteen presidents of small liberal arts colleges under the leadership of Michael Alexander of Lasell College got together in 2017 to explore ways to collaborate to accomplish their goals while preserving their quality and the their uniqueness. They decided to work on providing more academic programs for students at their institutions, especially programs which are in high demand in the marketplace, at little cost to their home institution. The group formed the Lower Cost Model for Independent Colleges (LCMC) consortium which has a goal of reducing tuition by 30% over the next ten years.

The consortium began with the development of three programs: one in coding with eight courses; one with Google to offer two courses in applied computer science and data science for students in the liberal arts, and one to provide the courses needed for students to sit for the National Financial Planning Exam. The LCMC realized that to scale, it would need an infrastructure and in 2019 Adrian College President Dr. Jeffrey Docking brought a young company, Rize Education, to be incubated on the Adrian campus. At Rize, the LCMC has a small team dedicated full time to expanding its program offerings by supporting the LCMC schools in their development of new shared majors, using curricula developed in collaboration with top academic experts and taught primarily by the faculty at the member institutions.

To date, the consortium has built over 20 programs in a variety of areas ranging from business to health care to engineering, technology and the social sciences. Specific, high demand programs include supply chain management, e-sports and gaming administration and computer science; many programs which are not traditionally found on liberal arts campuses. Most of the programs are in majors which lead to jobs which are in high demand and which are programs that students are looking for when they are doing their college search. The goal is to help make the small colleges more attractive to students by providing them with more majors. On average, small colleges offer fewer than 60 majors compared to the more than 250 majors which large colleges offer. The low number of majors offered by small colleges often puts them at a disadvantage in attracting students as, according to data from the Lumina Foundation and others, academic major is a top priority for student when they begin their college search.  Most small colleges do not have the resources to develop new programs, especially high-cost, specialized ones, because of the start-up costs as well as the risk of the program not attracting sufficient enrollment to cover the ongoing operating costs not to mention the time it takes to develop a program. The consortium can develop many new programs concurrently. The costs of the new programs ultimately get spread out over the enrollment which comes from all the member institutions without any member institution having to bear either the start-up costs or the risks of under enrollment in the program.

Schools can choose which, if any, of the consortium’s programs they want to offer, and each school uses its own faculty governance processes to approve the new offering(s). Schools do not pay any fee to belong to the consortium and only pay $350 per student for each course a student from their institution takes from the consortium. The courses are offered on-line, and each course has an enrollment cap of 30 students per course.  Some schools in the consortium are waiting to see how the program evolves before making new majors available to their students while others are dipping their toes in the water and have chosen to add a few courses or one or two new programs to their catalogues. For example, Holy Names University in Oakland, CA has added several computer science courses to its catalogue which it is offering as a concentration in its interdisciplinary studies major. Mike Groener, President of Holy Names, explained that “this is a way for us to see how the computer science major goes and if it is successful, we can then turn it into a major.” Other schools have embraced the ability to add several new programs to their catalogue at one time. Culver-Stockton in Missouri has added six new programs and several courses as well as a certificate in financial planning for a total of 13 courses this fall and Adrian College in Michigan has chosen to increase the number of programs it offers to 61 by adding 21 new programs to its current 40 majors as well as several certificate programs all at once. According to President Docking, “the increase in programs has had a very positive effect on enrollment as the College now appeals to a wider audience.” In Adrian’s catalogue, it frames the new courses in the following way:

The traditional college experience. Enhanced. Earn your degree at Adrian College while taking select online courses in your field of study. Courses are designed by top academic minds and industry leaders, and then taught by faculty in small class environments.

Most of the schools in the consortium find that they already offer many of the courses that are needed for these new majors and that they need only a few additional courses from the consortium. For example, at Adrian it has only added three courses to its business curriculum from the consortium to have a degree in supply chain management. At other schools, some new majors may require the addition of as many as seven or eight additional courses from the consortium. Every major includes a capstone, and many campuses work with Rize to create unique assignments, local community partnerships, and collaborative projects for their students. “Our members get creative in making the programs distinctly their own,” said Charlie Anastasi, Special Assistant to the President for Innovation at Adrian College. Most of the courses are offered synchronously but they are also recorded so that a student can still take the course even if they cannot attend during the class time. This is important as the participating schools are in multiple time zones and a student could take one of these courses while they were participating in a study abroad program.

This is one of many innovations that colleges across the country are working on collaboratively to increase their affordability. We see a variety of other initiatives which are occurring including many more examples of shared services, cost sharing and consortia which concentrate on reducing costs in administrative areas. Sea Change, an organization which is working to help colleges work through the complex challenges they are facing, is helping several colleges in pursuing these types of initiatives while also providing them with encouragement and technical support.  Colleges must continue to change how they are operating to reduce their costs so that they become more accessible and affordable. This is a step in the right direction and we need to encourage more such creative and innovative endeavors.