It is time to look around the corner
As in all other spheres of higher education, religious colleges and universities today are experiencing a transformation. These schools must chart a path forward in a complex environment marred by a growing mistrust of the academy, increased skepticism about the value of a college degree, and a decline in financial resources available to ensure their future. My new book Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went From Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed offers anyone interested in their survival—leaders, employees, alumni, clergy, students, and parents—a path forward.
I weave the stories of 150 leaders from “tuition-driven” institutions into a broader narrative showing how market competition has fundamentally changed our system of higher education and distorted the values of mission-driven schools. There is a palpable tension in their stories between money and mission, purpose and profit, but the leaders I interviewed also provide behind-the-scenes clues about a way forward—or as one president framed it, a way “to look around the corner.”
Below, I offer five “around the corner” considerations for colleges and universities with any religious affiliation—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Evangelical, and Muslim, among others.
1: From belief to behavior
In the past few decades, much of the writing about religious higher education has focused on belief. Authors have explained differences in belief commitment, how colleges have forsaken belief, and the historical role of belief in American higher education, to name a few. During this same time, the social and fiscal environment rapidly changed, leaving leaders of religious colleges scrambling to identify tools beyond belief and “best practices” maintained by elite institutions—practices financially prohibitive for schools that lack sizable endowments and rely on tuition to survive.
Capitalizing on College provides a way forward by focusing on behavior, specifically the innovative practices that span different tuition-driven institutions. Religious colleges and universities must consider that the behavior across institutions within their sector (Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Evangelical, Muslim, etc.) is more feasible to adopt than the “best practices” beyond their sector (Ivy League, research, land grant, etc.).
2: Embrace access for all
A century ago, the “Big Three” (Harvard, Princeton & Yale) strategically limited Jewish applicants, while some religious schools like DePaul made college accessible to these same students. As one vice president I interviewed told me,
When DePaul was formed, the Catholic bishop of Chicago at the time went to the Fathers and said, “We need a school for immigrants, because the University of Chicago and Northwestern will not take Catholics.” The Fathers said to the bishop at the time, “We will open the school, but we take everybody. We will take all yourCatholics, but we are taking everybody.”
The university administrator went on to explain that DePaul’s sizable Jewish and African American alumni base exists thanks to that commitment to make education accessible to everybody.
Elites are known for their selectivity, as are some religious universities with their emphases on strict student codes of conduct and signed statements of belief. In contrast, schools like DePaul that model an “access for all” approach are known by the percentage of students they include rather than the percentage of students they exclude.
3: Become value entrepreneurs
I describe a new type of entrepreneur in Capitalizing on College—the value entrepreneur. These individuals innovate, while emphasizing the development of values as the product. This is crucial for the many mission-driven institutions in higher education that exist to promote specific values, like women’s colleges that foster empowerment, HBCUs that engender Black identity, and religious colleges that develop faith. Not everyone wants to attend a party school—where one must discover who they are within the elite norms of Greek life and tailgating. Indeed, journalists have recently highlighted increased enrollments in value-promoting HBCUs and religious colleges.
Value entrepreneurs also consider how their core values relate to new types of student groups. In Capitalizing on College, I discuss how one university found its values resonated with military personnel, another college created programs unique to first responder culture for police, EMS, and fire personnel, and still another school looked to its metropolitan area to discover Muslim families who wanted a value-oriented college experience for women in their community living at home while working toward their degree. The president told me, “It was our ignorance not knowing they were part of the community.” Seeing new groups through the shared value lens enabled leaders to offer educational opportunities to students the school had not previously served.
4: Blend learning modalities
All the entrepreneurial schools in Capitalizing on College urged the same principle: Do not restrict the delivery of values to a singular place (i.e., the residential campus); instead, resolve to find new ways to take them across space (i.e., satellite locations, adult education, online, etc.). It is important to stress that universities on the cusp of innovation are usually trying to blend different learning modalities in new ways, partly to find new enrollment markets and partly to control cost. One school was blending international options, another blending residential/online, still another blending options across “sister schools.” One senior leader framed what their team envisioned:
A day is coming where a residential student—an 18-year-old—shows up on our campus and says, “I want to step foot in a classroom, but only a few times in my 4 years. I want the residential life experience to play athletics and feel the community, but I do not necessarily want to hear somebody lecture on something I can Google.
Indeed, these alternative pathways for non-traditional students remain lucrative, especially in light of data showing just 33% of US college students planning to live on-campus in 2024. What remained unmistakable across the entrepreneurial schools was the need to remain innovative to keep pace with the competition.
5: Create time-to-delivery advantages
An important competitive advantage that religious colleges and universities must leverage in the higher education marketplace is a shorter time-to-delivery process for new educational products. Religious schools are not required to navigate the same multiple channels of approval that state bureaucracies require of public institutions. Entrepreneurial schools in Capitalizing on College understand the importance of “speed to market” to capitalize on “first mover” advantages where they could saturate a region or market and establish a known brand before their competition could.
A few savvy presidents took this time-to-delivery principle further and created quick channels of approval within their own university to bypass bureaucratic quagmires in faculty governance. In this era of competition and resource scarcity, faculty must become adept at communal governance with timely actions that avoid prolonged critique as an exercise in rhetorical debate. Systems of faculty governance must become more efficient—offer opinions wedded with solutions so the institution’s time-to-delivery advantage is not compromised.
As the landscape continues to shift across higher education, religious colleges and universities must recognize that their survival is linked to their ability to adapt. Fortunately for them, there are innovative practices at their disposal—like those I show in my book—if they are willing to look across their sector and around the corner.
Joshua Travis Brown is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurial Leadership in Education at Johns Hopkins University and SKOPE Fellow at the University of Oxford. He has over 25 years of experience in higher education at institutions that depend heavily on tuition revenue and is the author of Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went From Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed by Oxford University Press.
Image: Geneva College, Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania
