tmas Vacation SEA’s veteran sail-trainer CORY CRAMER stands to earn an annual vacation as part of that organization’s post-pandemic pivoting Marlinspike tracked down SEA President John Wigglesworth just before Labor Day after hearing through the grapevine — not very accurately, as it turned out — that the Cramer was to be mothballed. John Wigglesworth: So, you heard that Cramer was going to be “mothballed”?
sive boats and we weren’t seeing the numbers of undergraduates we needed to have a sustainable model. MS: Were you drawing undergraduates only from specific colleges, or could a student from any college in America sign up for one of those traditional programs? JW: Anyone can apply to SEA.
Marlinspike: Yeah, I did hear that! “Mothballed” is obviously a dramatic word to use, but I thought “I should give John a call and see what's going on there.” Tell us — what challenges is SEA experiencing right now? JW: Well, when I returned to SEA back in November [as interim President], we were still operating the two brigantines in the undergraduate program, which is traditionally the default understanding of SEA, in our “sea semester” — six weeks on land followed by six weeks at sea, throughout the year. That's traditionally what we’ve done, but we have been slowly moving away from that over a period of time. We've been offering different types of undergraduate programs that still involve time at sea and time onshore, but the curriculum of each program is slightly different, based on the cruise tracks. As of November we were still operating the model of two brigantines, Robert Seamans operating in the Pacific and Corwith Cramer in the Atlantic. But both due to the fallout from COVID and undergraduates rethinking their relationship with colleges and the study-abroad concept, the enrollment numbers at that time were not good. Basically we had two really expen-
MS: But most of your applicants were coming from a small group of institutions..? JW: Most students come from the Northeast area, but there is more and more representation around the country. MS: OK, sorry to interrupt. You were saying: enrollments haven’t been great since COVID. JW: Yeah, enrollment for undergraduates was not good. So we did our best to look at all the external factors that were influencing that trend. And we looked at the significant increase in secondary school programming and interest in what we do at the high school level. We had been doing high school programs in the summer to a certain extent for a while, but it was never a major emphasis. It was always the undergraduate program. We looked at the undergraduate trend and realized that we need to do much better marketing and outreach and so on, and try to recapture the undergraduates who were navigating their way through college after COVID. And then we looked at rising increase in secondary schools and we also factored in the cost of
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