Author Josh Brown has written a fascinating book on how higher education in the United States has shifted from “mission driven” to “margin obsessed.” I recently had the chance to interact with him about his book.
You outline four different strategies that private Christian colleges employ. Briefly, what are they?
Each school creates different combinations of endowments and enrollment markets to financially sustain the school and its mission. I found four different approaches and a fifth that was starting to emerge. Briefly they were:
Traditional – a college that expects students “to come” to the residential campus for a traditional in-person education. Leaders solicit donations from a robust web of alumni to grow the endowment. The money generated from the endowment is used to subsidize the expensive in-person residential model.
Pioneer – a college that “goes to” the students to deliver an in-person education in places like high schools, military bases, hotels, and shopping malls to those excluded from the traditional on campus model (usually due to life commitments like jobs, children or distance). The money generated from these “periphery” locations is used to build nicer facilities on the main campus for recruiting residential students.
Network – a college that creates multiple types of educational opportunities beyond its main residential campus (adult education, online, international, transfer, satellite, branch campus, etc.). These many different options function like legs on a table to financially support the main residential campus (tabletop).
Accelerated – a college that chooses to rapidly scale its online division to generate a substantial amount of money each year — ranging from hundreds of millions to over a billion dollars. The money is used to build nicer facilities on the main residential campus and grow the endowment using money from student loans rather than from donors, essentially making current students the “new philanthropists.”
In my conversations with Christian college leaders, some were working hard to figure out how to create a new approach called “Accelerated Networks” that would generate “superprofits,” which are profits that compound to make additional profits.
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Read the rest of my interaction with Dr. Brown, along with more background on his book, here.