One of the more interesting higher ed books I’ve read so far this year is Pivot by Mark Lombardi and Joanne Soliday.  It’s not a brand-new book – it came out a few months before COVID – but its tales of small institutions transforming themselves (usually) in the face of overwhelming enrolment and financial pressures are still very fresh and reading their stories is worth anyone’s time.

The four institutions covered in this book are, with one exception, places few will have heard of:  Dakota Wesleyan (Mitchell, South Dakota), Marian University (Indianapolis, Indiana), Maryville University (suburban St. Louis, Missouri) and Spelman College, (an upmarket Baptist women-only HBCU which is part of the Atlanta University Centre along with Clark Atlanta, Morehead, and the Morehead School of Medicine. Remember Spike Lee’s School Daze?  That’s the place).  All of them are private universities, and all have some religious affiliation. 

Two of the three non-HBCUs in the sample were, at some point, in some financial trouble.  Dakota Wesleyan’s enrolments had dwindled to under 600 students in the mid-2000s, and the institution ran consistent deficits.  Around the same time, Marian University was down to a thousand, with significant capital maintenance issues.  In both cases, the solution – as you would expect in a private institution – ran right through the issues of recruitment and retention.  And in both cases, this was achieved by significant changes to the nature of the programs offered.  Marian University went very big, opening a new college of Osteopathic Medicine, starting a football program (Div. III Football is a surprisingly big enrolment lure in many parts of the US) and pulling off an astonishingly large capital campaign.  Dakota Wesleyan, which was mostly a Liberal Arts school with a nursing school attached, changed its core curriculum to focus on innovation, problem-solving and creativity, developing better links with local industry (the new strategic vision is “to be recognized as a national model of higher education’s innovation and impact on rural America”), focused on student retention. They eventually saw a 25%+ increase in in-person enrolment, plus a substantial increase in online programs designed to help meet some specific South Dakota employment gaps.

Maryville University, led by one of the book’s authors’ (Lombardi), was not in a crisis, but it was in something of a rut.  Again, the pivot was centred directly around pedagogy and curriculum. It instituted something called Active Learning Engagement (you can read the institutions’ ten ALE principles here) which – to cut through all the jargon – is about the extensive use of learning theory, personal coaching and competency-based evaluation to come up with individualized learning plans for each student.  I can’t evaluate the pedagogy here, but the effects on student retention seem impressive.  It also reached out to regional businesses to develop bespoke workforce development solutions.  Again, enrolments and financial success ensued.

(I am not quite clear what the “pivot” was at Spelman.  I kind of think the authors just wanted to show off a well-run HBCU, which Spelman certainly is).

Obviously, my thoughts when reading this kind of book is to think about how it relates to Canadian higher education. Ok, some of what counts as innovation in US universities reads a lot like business as usual at Canadian polytechnics and colleges.  And to some extent these kinds of stories are somewhat beside the point up here: our institutions are a) public and b) on average substantially larger and hence not quite so financially frail.  Simply put, our system is set up to require fewer pivots.  But is that a good thing?

Without being overly romantic about the stories in here, the idea of institutions taking bold pedagogical and programmatic steps to make education more engaging and relevant, prioritizing retention and student learning seems like something to be encouraged.  Yet, there is little in the Canadian system that incentivizes this kind of behaviour.  And that’s probably not a good thing.