40% of colleges enroll fewer than 1,000 students. Do they survive?

🔮 The future of small colleges and getting students ready for AI. Here are excerpts from Next. Sign up here.

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.

On a recent episode of Future U., 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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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. So balancing asynchronous versus synchronous, we're asking about pricing models, we're asking about new degree programs, all of those types of things,” she said.

I’m often asked when I give talks if we’ll see more consolidation or closures in the college market in the coming years.

Consolidation is tough in higher ed. As we learned on a Future U. episode last year, it’s not like health care where a third-party insurance payer is trying to drive down costs, so there are incentives to build hospital systems that can operate at scale. And in higher ed, there is no guarantee that scale gives you financial sustainability as we’ve seen recently with West Virginia University, Miami University in Ohio, and now the University of Arizona.

What’s more, the infrastructure of higher education is tough to replicate—it’s not just building a single hospital building—and most colleges aren’t in highly desirable locations. Recent consolidations or outright purchases of campuses have been mostly about real estate: Northeastern/Mills in Oakland, UCLA/Marymount California near Los Angeles, and Villanova/Cabrini near Philadelphia.

It’s likely we will see closures given the thin margins some colleges are operating on post-pandemic, a trend I can only imagine will now accelerate given the issues with the new FAFSA. Small, struggling colleges are even more reliant on federal student aid and tend to enroll more Pell Grant students as a proportion of their overall student body. Any set back in students enrolling (or deciding not to enroll at all) because of delays in their financial-aid packages will spell doom for some campuses.

Bottom line: There is a future for small colleges, as I’ve written before.

🎯 They can serve new markets of learners—mostly adults who have credits and no degree. That’s a huge market of 39 million American adults and growing. Even if they can get a very small slice of that market, it will help keep them going. But in talking to some of these college leaders and their trustees, there doesn’t seem to be much interest in serving that market or they don’t know how to do it (and don’t want to learn until it’s too late).

🔗 Colleges can also network together to form much deeper alliances, not just on back-office operations like payroll and IT (which is increasingly common), but also on the academic side of the house. Students of all ages want more of a hybrid experience anyway, according to various surveys. Colleges can maintain a small physical footprint to serve their local market in person with their strongest programs. Then they can collaborate with other colleges for courses in other disciplines. Yes, sounds simple in theory, but given the culture, workforce, political, and regulatory pressures on higher ed, it's much more difficult, if not impossible, to put into practice.

💪 I’m still waiting for the right set of leaders among faculty, deans, presidents, trustees, and policymakers to put this playbook into action. Judging from the recent news in my native home of Pennsylvania, we might see the beginnings of it there in the coming years.

How Might Colleges Teach AI?

Professors might not think AI is important in their teaching and research right now, but they do believe it’s about to become more critical. The question is how they prepare a generation of learners who already are using AI tools—and maybe not always in the right way.

Driving the news: Nearly 42% of 777 higher ed faculty in the U.S. surveyed by Primary Research Group said AI applications are “not at all important” for their research, teaching and scholarship, according to EdSurge.

• But nearly 20% thought it would be “very important” in their work within the next three years, and another 37% said it would be “somewhat important.” 

Why it matters: Too much of the discussion around AI on college campuses is still focused on how it “interferes” with student learning—just like Google and Wikipedia when they were first released. That was one of the comments in the chat discussion during the “Next Office Hour” I hosted last month.

• Colleges shouldn’t wait any longer to meet students where they already are with AI tools. “Professors need to start using AI as a teaching or learning support tool,” said Taniya Mishra, founder of SureStart, which partners with high schools as well as colleges to train and mentor students from communities underrepresented in AI.

• When faculty use AI in teaching, they can help students with the balance between the technology as a “thinking tool” vs. an “ideating tool,” said Lance Eaton, an instructional designer and author of the AI + Education = Simplified newsletter.

• “You need two buckets to work with AI,” Eaton said. “You need a good understanding of what generative AI is and how it works, and you need expertise in the subject so you understand the limitations of any questionable outputs.”

Inside the classroom: Eaton said he sees faculty members using the concept of “red teaming” in teaching AI. Red teaming is a structured testing effort to find flaws, in this case with AI output.

• Students are split into two groups. One group uses generative AI to produce an output, while the other group of students, knowing it’s from AI, critiques it to find faults.

• One issue facing professors right now is finding class time to spend on AI. “We still have the same amount of class time,” Eaton said. “And now we’re not just learning the discipline, but the way this tool is going to disrupt or challenge or reorient disciplines.”

The big picture: Given how fast AI is moving and the divide between what faculty know and what their students know, a different, more community-based approach is needed in teaching, the panelists on the “Next Office Hour” agreed.

• “There's a different way to learn, which doesn't hinge on your age and prior experience,” Mishra said. “It’s all of us learning in community and learning with each other that I think is going to really help us put our arms around this newly developing field.”

Bottom line: Sure, many professors have flipped their classrooms so students watch online lectures and do other activities before meeting in a classroom for active learning.

But course redesign takes knowledge of pedagogical research and often working with instructional designers. While community-based learning might sound like a great concept when it comes to an emerging and fast-moving field like AI, there’s the practical matter about how faculty members incorporate it into their teaching.

There’s also the matter of how teaching AI differs by discipline. In all, this requires institutional leaders—who I’ve found give more lip service to quality teaching than dedicate real resources to it—to be much more intentional about improving teaching. That includes bigger investments in instructional designers as well as teaching and learning centers (as The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Beth McMurtrie pointed out last year, only a quarter of institutions even have a teaching center for faculty).

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Until next time, Cheers — Jeff

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