The Future of Higher Education

innovated to deal with the pandemic. How will they fare in the future? And do small schools have a valuable niche to fill? From the March 30, 2021, program “Mary Marcy and Lande Ajose: The Future of Higher Education.” Dr. MARY MARCY, Ph.D., President, Dominican University of California; Board Member, The Commonwealth Club; Author, The Small College Imperative: Models for Sustainable Futures In Conversation with Dr. LANDE AJOSE, Ph.D., Senior Policy Advisor for Higher Education to Governor Gavin Newsom

LANDE AJOSE: I’m wondering if you could just share with our viewers what inspired you to write this book? MARY MARCY: We were trying to do this before the pandemic hit. The book was like one of those perfect bits of timing related to the pandemic; it actually was released on, I think March 9 or something last year. Perhaps there was a little bit of a noise in the system besides what was going on with The Small College Imperative. But what’s interesting, and I think what’s important in thinking about it now, is that the questions [about higher education] are continuing to be relevant and perhaps even more relevant as we come through the pandemic. Issues around financial sustainability, access to college, increasing diversity of students—those are crucial issues for every family, every community, all over the state and all over the nation. I really thought about the book as a way to understand, embrace and think about how higher education is changing and needs to change, to respond to some pretty significant shifts in the larger ecosystem, in the larger environment. [I’m] specifically talking about small colleges, because I think one of the great strengths of American higher education, and certainly a California higher education, is its diversity. In this case, I mean diversity of types of institutions. So you have a great community college system, a great state college system. We’ve got the UC system, lots of specialized institutions and some really strong independent institutions. The ecosystem matters. The idea is that there are great options for all students. The challenge is if part of that ecosystem is under great stress or falls apart, we lose the opportunity for higher education to do what it does best, which provides an avenue for personal and social transformation. I’m at an independent college, a small college. I know that arena well. A lot of institutions were under stress. I wanted to say what can make us successful, and how can we serve students and families and our missions more effectively. So that was really the genesis for the book. I would say, like many things as we come out of the pandemic, the questions that I had going in are probably more rather than less relevant today.

AJOSE: I went to a small college, and I was really interested in this idea of a typology—you lay out a typology for how these small colleges are structured. Can you talk about how useful a typology is to the average student or family? And tell us a little bit about where you placed Dominican within that. MARCY: I actually started thinking kind of internally about students and families and how they look at colleges. [It’s] really important to understand that even within a subset like independent colleges, it’s not one size fits all. And it’s not—as much as we talk about it—the athletics team or the beauty of the campus. They’re really very different institutions. So on the one end of the spectrum that I created, the typology, is the classic liberal arts college? Highly residential. You’re going to study the core liberal arts and sciences. You’re going to get a terrific education. You’re going to, hopefully, become a better citizen and a better member of society as a whole, as well as have great avenues to employment. That’s the classic liberal arts.

The challenge for small colleges is that’s not by itself easily sustainable for a lot of institutions. So there’s been a lot of innovation going on. I know part of your focus [as an advisor to the governor] is also saying we need to be responsive to workforce needs. The liberal arts can provide real avenues to the workforce, but it’s not obvious to everyone how that fits. And some places have reinvented themselves a little bit. [On the] other end of the topology, much more online, much more just-in-time types of education, much more market-driven. [There are] lots of spaces in between, but those are kind of the [options]. If you’re a student or a parent thinking about where you go to college, you need to understand where the institution fits in that broader spectrum. Not just what it feels like on campus, but what will my experience be when I’m in college here and what does that prepare me for when I’m done? AJOSE: So are you thinking that student preferences for college have changed, or is it that the liberal arts model just hasn’t kept pace with the enormous pressures and the enormous changes of society as a whole in terms of how it’s preparing students? MARCY: It’s a great question. I think liberal arts is actually fairly misunderstood. If you look at the data, if you get out five or 10 years from graduating from college, it really doesn’t matter that much what you major in. In fact, a lot of students from liberal arts backgrounds do as well or better if you measure the end “return on your investment” like salaries. So students from liberal arts colleges who have majored in the liberal arts do extraordinarily well. Having said that, we have become very proficient at measuring higher education based on return on investment. And it is a big investment for the state. It’s a big investment for the family. So what’s our return? That tends to track more for many folks to “What’s my job going to be what I get done, and how sure can I be that that will happen?”

So I think that one of the challenges has been for independent colleges to be able to kind of put the breadcrumbs out and say these are all the options that can happen as a result. One of the ways that some liberal arts colleges have started to reinvent—it’s certainly something we’ve done at Dominican with really good results—is focused less on what are you majoring in and more on what’s your hands-on student experience? At Dominican, every single student has some type of active community-

engaged learning. Every student has a digital portfolio that they can take with them to a job or apply to graduate school with. Every student has a mentor. Every student has a capstone project. So it’s really hands-on, and you can then tie it directly to: “Here are the skills I have, here are the things I know how to do,” and that can lead to all kinds of jobs. So we’re less interested in what you’re majoring in and more interested in creating a particular kind of experience. Now, I say that because I know Dominican really well, but there are a number of institutions that are really refocusing around that kind of handson engaged, active learning as a way to tie students’ experiences to life beyond campus. AJOSE: So when you think about that—the Dominican example in particular, which I love—I’ve been a strong advocate of a digital portfolio for a long time, because I think measuring quality in higher education becomes somewhat elusive and a digital portfolio actually shows a student’s work.

I’m wondering though, as you think about where that fits in the typology, how standard that is for our liberal arts college, what that means in terms of your typology and what it means for the kind of experience a student will have on those different campuses. Obviously if you’re online, you’re having a very different kind of experience than a small residential liberal arts college, but for some of your other models of how colleges are evolving, is it that the intimacy that we expect to see, is it that hands-on experience at most of them, or does it really vary quite widely? MARCY: It varies a lot. I think one of the challenges for small colleges—we all say you’re going to get a very personalized experience. Well, yes, you will. Absolutely. But that by itself doesn’t make a great education. So the places that have adopted some type of educational model built on what we call—because we like jargon— high impact practices, things that make a difference to students when they’re in college, institutions that have adopted those and said every student’s going to have this are the ones that are making a difference.

I can give you a pretty interesting data point. I think it was “Sesame Street” [that] was like “one of these things is not like the other”? About a month ago, some data from the Department of Education came out that said what institutions in the country are most effective at getting students access to high-paying jobs soon after graduation. It was controlled by major. So it wasn’t like every place was listed as a computer science institution. One of the things that came out of that was the top 10 institutions tend to be private colleges with a strong liberal arts core. What’s even more interesting is it’s this fascinating mix of places you’d expect and places you wouldn’t expect. Number one is Harvard, number nine is Stanford—I got to say this, Number 10 is Dominican—for salaries post-graduation. And it’s because of that kind of engaged learning. There’s a lot of institutions that are in this small, private college mode that are doing extraordinarily well for student outcomes. It tends to align when they’ve had a highly engaged student experience as an undergraduate. AJOSE: When I think about small colleges, I think about how they fit together with what we know to be the student population in California. We have a lot of what I think of as being next-generation students— underrepresented, first-gen to college, Black, Latinx, indigenous. One might assume that they might find a deeper sense of community at a large institution simply because they might find more people like them. Can you talk about how and whether small colleges are the right place for our diverse student population in California? MARCY: Yeah. That’s such a great question. And [I can] completely understand one saying, “Let’s go to a place where there’s 50,000 students; I’m going to find my tribe.” I think that [people] would be very surprised at the profile of students at most independent colleges in California. [Dominican is] about two thirds students of color, most from underrepresented [backgrounds]; about a third of our students were the first in their family to go to college. That’s not unusual. That’s actually typical of independent colleges in California. Okay, so that’s like diversityone, right? You have diversity in the room. What do you do with it? I think the question that the families and students should ask is not “Is it big enough to find my people?” but “What is the experience of diversity, equity and inclusion on this campus?”

One of the things I try to profile in the book is the places that have been successful at adapting to a changing student demographic are the places who very intentionally said, “Demographics are changing and we need to live that.” So don’t wait for it to happen. Be intentional about what are best practices for this profile of students. How do we meet those students where they are? And I would say that’s particularly true for first-generation students who are still learning college. So it’s not that these students can’t do well at large institutions. They absolutely can. It’s not that they can’t do well at small institutions. It’s

—MARY MARCY

the questions that families and students ask that’s important.

The other thing I’ll say about the question of where we fit is that we focus so much on access to college and getting in—and that’s a huge step and the first one—but the next series of questions has be, “What happens when I’m there?” And “What does it prepare me for later?” Getting in is not the prize; getting in is the first step. And the rest of these conversations are the crucial ones for student outcomes and student success. AJOSE: I’ll just say that I have a high school senior. So we are asking that question right now, as all of the college letters come in.

I wanted to talk a little bit about colleges in the pandemic. Those of us here in the Bay Area sadly heard about the announcement at Mills College, that they’ll be making a transition [away from being a degreegranting educational institution and will become a research institute instead]. I’m wondering if you’re optimistic about the role of small colleges, especially given the pandemic and how the last 12 months has changed the prospects for small colleges. MARCY: I’m kind of a hard-headed or pragmatic optimist. I think that the work that small colleges and independent colleges do is so crucial and so central to positive student outcomes, that in a general sense I’m optimistic. I’m also, you know, really sobered by Mills, by our good colleagues at Notre Dame de Namur [which is transitioning to being only a graduate school]. I’m sobered, because I think we were struggling, as you mentioned, facing really tough challenges financially and otherwise before the pandemic. I know and respect [the people at Mills College] and they did incredible work and valiant work to make things happen there. One of the things I really respect is that they have great clarity of mission. So, your question about am I optimistic? It would be one thing if Mills disappeared; it would be much more tragic if that mission was lost.

There’s great focus there around women’s voices and women’s equity and social justice. Those are questions that a lot of small colleges are going to need to be asking. Do we need to reinvent our mission or do we need to reinvent around mission? And you asked the question earlier about liberal arts colleges. Are they failing to adapt, or [is there a problem in] the liberal arts in general? That’s a question we all have to ask—how do we adapt to be successful, but still with great clarity on what’s our purpose? Why does this institution exist and what needs to continue to exist? AJOSE: Speaking of adaptation, last year I thought it was remarkable to see every single college in the state of California pivot to distance learning in the space of three weeks. I was just like, wow, because it’s a huge enterprise. It’s a set of enterprises. I’m wondering how you think the pandemic is going to permanently change higher education. What should we be thinking about in terms of distance learning, and how will it change the student experience? MARCY: It’s going to have a profound effect, and I’d love to hear your thoughts about this as you’re looking at the landscape, too. Everybody can remember where they were. I mean, we were literally in a cabinet meeting on campus talking about if we have to go online for a while. We had, I think, like two hours to turn things around and get the message out to everybody that we were going online like tomorrow and here’s the plan. For most of us, Dominican certainly included, the metaphor I used was last spring was like you’re driving down the freeway at 70 miles an hour and you blow a tire. So you put the donut on because that’s in the trunk and it might get you to the next stop, but it’s not going to carry you through.

What’s interesting about that is that most of us spent the summer really investing in trying to do this right for the fall. So there’s a lot of investment in online education. There’s a lot of learning about what’s working for students and what isn’t. I know we’re not the only institution that’s been looking at student feedback and assessment and faculty feedback and assessment saying what’s important.

So what are the outcomes from that? I’m going to suggest two or three, and I’ll bet you have some thoughts about this too. The first is that students very much miss the campus experience, but the campus experience is not the same as all of my learning takes place in the classroom, right? It’s the total campus experience. It’s being with their friends. It’s getting to know people in and out of the classroom, adults in and out of the classroom, not only faculty. It’s a total campus immersion experience that students want, and that’s understandable. But they appreciate the greater flexibility of being able to do more things online, whether it’s coursework or some of the other work that needs to happen.

And they liked the just-in-time aspect of pieces of it. So I think what we’re doing, and I’m guessing a lot of other institutions [are as well], is saying, What did we learn? Which class has actually worked better online or in a hybrid format? Some trivial things: Do we really need to have wet signatures on all of those pieces of paper? Can we actually do a whole bunch of this through DocuSign? I think how higher education is going to transform pretty significantly. But one of the surprising outcomes, and I’ve heard this from colleagues at institutions large and small, public and private, is that no one really sees this as everybody’s now going to go online or that’s going to be the predominant form, because students so missed the collegiality and the relationships and the campus experience. So we’re going to be more nimble. We’re probably going to have more options. But I don’t think we’re going to all of a sudden all be virtual. That’s my best read right now. But you spent quite a bit of time thinking about this question. So what do you think now? AJOSE: I think I would agree with you. There’s such deep desire to feel connected, beyond the little boxes that we find ourselves in. And I think that faculty missed that connection just as much as students do. Especially those colleges that are residential. It’s a huge part of the experience that students often choose to pay for. And they’re making kind of a proactive choice about what kind of institution they want to be at. So there’s so many ways in which the current environment doesn’t fit those choices. At the same time, I think California could benefit from thinking about what role can distance learning play in helping us to think about innovation within higher education. I agree with you there’ll be increased nimbleness.

But I think and I hope that there are faculty out there who are saying, “Huh, I never would’ve thought that this actually might enhance my teaching and consequently enhance student learning,” right? It’s about the teaching and learning piece. I think those questions are now being asked in ways in which they weren’t being asked a year ago, and in ways in which we maybe assumed a year ago or two years ago that technology and this pivot that we’ve made could never have possibly had a beneficial outcome. Now we see that there are some silver linings. The state will never go to a model where everything’s going to be online, but integrating a little bit more of that actually could be quite beneficial. I’ve heard students talk about how asynchronous can be great for lectures, because I can listen to the lecture; I can rewind; I can go back; and then I can complement that with a discussion group. And I can do it on my own time. So some things are opportunities that we should grab onto, especially if they could result in potentially more students having access to higher education.