The Christian Chronicle Podcast

Episode 146: How can our Christian colleges keep margins from replacing mission? (Joshua Travis Brown)

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Declining birthrates in the United States will drive down college enrollment over the next 15 years. Some experts predict that hundreds of small private colleges and universities will close.

Of the 14 colleges and universities in the Church of Christ family tree, as many as ten of them have characteristics that put them at higher risk in the new higher education market.

Many of these schools are innovating in ways that cut costs, increase operating margins and revenue and at least give them a chance to grow or maintain enrollment enough to survive.

But will a necessary focus on margins lead to less focus on mission?

Dr. Joshua Travis Brown, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education and research fellow with the Center for Skills, Knowledge and Organizational Performance at the University of Oxford, shares what he found when he researched how small private colleges are managing tradeoffs between margins and mission. That research appears in his book, Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went From Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed (Oxford Press).

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BT Irwin:

Family and friends, neighbors, and most of all, strangers, welcome to the Christian Chronicle Podcast. We're bringing you the stories shaping Church of Christ congregations and members around the world. I'm B.T. Irwin. May what you are about to hear bless you and honor God. The day I started kindergarten, my parents made a promise. They promised that if I earned good grades and went on to graduate from high school, they would pay for my college education on one condition, that I enrolled at a college on our Church of Christ family tree. From that first day of kindergarten, you could say that I knew I was going to be a Christian college guy for the rest of my life. And that's what happened. So far, I've earned degrees from two and drawn paychecks from four universities with deep roots and strong ties in the Church of Christ. So, yes, I love our Christian colleges for personal reasons. But the reason I love and value our Christian colleges the most is what they do for the church, its members, and its neighbors around the world. I mean, how can you measure the difference these schools made, are making, and will make among those who are building for the kingdom of God? I want you to consider two more reasons that colleges and universities are crucial to the Church of Christ community everywhere. First, in a non-denomination like the Church of Christ, our institutions of higher education are bonding agents. They are nodes, linking a global network of Church of Christ congregations, members, and ministries. I've never visited a new Church of Christ congregation anywhere where I didn't meet at least one person who attended one of the schools where I studied or worked. All of those autonomous Church of Christ congregations and their members may never connect with one another, if not, from meeting on Christian college campuses. Second, our Church of Christ community and heritage emerged from a 19th-century movement that I consider to be a thought movement. In other words, our ancestors on the American frontier started thinking differently about the Bible, the church, and the Christian life. It was scholars and thinkers who first found their way to the Restoration plea and influenced and inspired our ancestors to be Christians only. It was scholars and thinkers who worked out, over generations, the essential beliefs and practices that most Church of Christ congregations and their members follow. In the absence of a central governing body passing down official tenets for local congregations and their members, a loose network of autonomous congregations and their leaders have looked to our best and brightest Bible scholars and thinkers to help them figure out what it means to be the Church of Christ in their own communities and situations. And as the world keeps changing now in the 21st century, as it did in the 19th and 20th centuries, scholars and thinkers keep doing the difficult work of figuring out how the Bible, the church, and the gospel meet the circumstances and cultures of these times. In sum, we in the Church of Christ, perhaps more than most other Christ-believing, Christ-pursuing groups, depend on independent channels of communication and informal networks to connect us to each other and to the ideas and information that prepare us to build for the kingdom of God in the world today. And it is often our institutions of higher education that sponsor those independent channels of communication and maintain those informal networks. It is our institutions of higher education that often encourage and support the best biblical scholarship and thinking, as well as careful research and deep reflection on the world to which our Christ commissions us to go. So I hope you see just a little how valuable and vital our colleges and universities are to the Church of Christ community around the world. And that brings us to the subject of this episode. We live in a time when the very existence of these institutions is under threat. Let's start with the demographic cliff. Maybe you've heard of this. It refers to a historic drop-off in U.S. birth rates starting around the year 2007, which translates into a historic drop-off in the number of graduating high school seniors starting this year. That trend of far fewer high school seniors entering college is expected to continue through at least 2039. To put it in economic terms, lower demand for college in the United States will mean the supply of college education will have to contract. That's another way of saying that colleges will close, as is already happening. According to recent statistics, 100 colleges closed just in the last three years alone. A major higher education consulting firm estimates that as many as 370 more private colleges will close in the next 10 years. Most at risk, small private colleges that lack large endowments and therefore depend on tuition revenue to stay in business. Higher education experts consider a small college to be one with less than 3,000 students. Of the 14 U.S. colleges and universities in the Church of Christ family tree, 10 are considered small. In fact, half of those 14 colleges and universities enroll less than 2,000 students, and five of them enroll less than 1,000. Many are already feeling the effects of the changing marketplace, as The Christian Chronicle has reported over the years. Two schools, Cascade College and Ohio Valley University, closed in 2009 and 2021, respectively. Others have had to make radical changes in order to survive. That includes launching online and satellite programs, or putting a greater emphasis on graduate programs. Some schools have added, quote unquote, profitable programs of study while eliminating, quote unquote, unprofitable ones. These eliminated programs sometimes include those that alumni and Church of Christ folks consider to be essential to a school in the Church of Christ heritage. And some schools have been aggressive about recruiting more students who are not from the Church of Christ or from a Christian background at all. In some cases, they loosen up old requirements like Bible classes, daily chapel, and personal conduct rules that were once mainstays on Christian college campuses. This raises the question for some longtime Christian college alumni and supporters: how much of what may seem essential to being a Christian college with a distinctive Christian mission can a school give up and still be, you know, Christian? Will the financial survival of our Christian schools come at the cost of their Christiannness? I'm sure the college leaders who listen to this podcast feel the stress of trying to balance the tension between financial survival and fidelity to the Christian mission of their institutions. But what are they to do? Today's guest set out to find answers to that question, and he wrote a book about it. Dr. Joshua Travis Brown is an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University in the School of Education and is a research fellow with the Center for Skills, Knowledge and Organizational Performance at the University of Oxford. And he's the author of Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went From Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed from Oxford Press. Link in the show notes. Dr. Brown, thank you for schooling us today. Absolutely. Okay, so let's start here. What is the question that first came to you that all the research that went into your book set out to answer? Take us to the moment when you just knew you had to go looking for an answer to that question.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I'm, at the time, this is early 2000s, I'm working at a faith-based institution and it's coming into its own being. And I'm looking around as this sort of entry-level student affairs professional, barely making $20,000. And all of a sudden, the institution starts to grow, and the paychecks of the people running the place exploded as well. Oh wow. And I'm kind of looking around, going like, hmm, those of us that worked below a specific level of the institution were always told that we worked for a ministry and we were compensated as such. But there was sort of this line, sort of a glass ceiling of sorts, that if you were above that, you worked for a ministry, but you ran a business and you were compensated as such. And so over time, we just watched those figures grow from five to six to seven figures for the senior administrators. And for me, as an entry-level professional, I had been, I had gone off to seminary wondering what I would do. And I'm looking around, wondering, is this how this specific institution works? Or is this a story of a bigger picture or a bigger story about higher education in America? And that's what I started to grapple with, was sort of this what I call this gap between belief and behavior, right? Where your tenants say one thing, but the actions and strategies and policies of the college and university completely veer off. And you sort of just sit there and you're just like "Hmm." And that's, that's actually what drove the book. And there's there's eight institutions in the book. I lived on them for a week each, four Protestant, four Catholic. And I had the opportunity to sort of look at all of these different institutions and and take that question to each of them, and then to write a bigger picture or a bigger narrative about what's happening in American higher education for the last 20 years.

BT Irwin:

That's quite a story. One of the things that struck me about the book is how it revealed to me how many assumptions I make about higher education. If you can and you don't mind, could you describe for our audience some of the big assumptions we in the United States make about what college is and how college is supposed to work? And maybe tell us where some of those assumptions originate.

Speaker 1:

Some of these assumptions are actually many of these assumptions are rooted in an elite model of higher education. And that elite model comes from what's known as the Oxbridge model, right? Oxford plus Cambridge gives us the Oxbridge model. And as the early part of the 1700s, 1800s colleges are starting to be formed, you know, they're looking to Europe to start the residential model, right? And one of the assumptions is over time that you go away to college, right? As an as a young adult, you you go away, it's in our movies, it's in our novels. We just assume that after you finish this high school or boarding school, you go away to college. And, and those schools back east, back east, you know, are some of the best in, in the United States. That's one assumption. Another assumption is that every college, every university has an endowment. And that's, that's a farce. Yeah. Um, 75% of all of the wealth, all of the endowment wealth in the United States is held by 10% of the institutions. Wow. There is a massive organizational inequality in the United States. And then the third assumption that I really found and actually sort of stumbled upon in the book was, uh, as I'm going out and doing these interviews, one of the things that occurred in the sort of the late 20th century, so 1990s all the way to 2010s, 2015, there was a complete radical transformation of college campuses on the United States. There was a complete physical transformation of campuses to the tune of anywhere from $200 to $700 million, and in the case of one, $1.5 billion transformation. And the assumption here that I heard again and again was if the facilities are good, the education must be good. As folks would go on these college tours, and they didn't have access to make a judgment about the quality of the education. What they did was is they looked to the buildings, they looked to the campus, they looked to the grounds as these very sort of quick indicators of what the education was going to be like. And all three of these assumptions the we go away to college, the endowments for college, and the facilities for college, these are all rooted in the elite model of higher education. Remember, 75% of the wealth is held by the 10%. So those other 90% of institutions, they're known what is called a tuition-driven institution.

BT Irwin:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Right. And so they have to make revenue, they have to make enrollment every year to keep the doors open. And if they don't make those enrollments, then they have to shrink or cut programs or aspects of the institution. Those are the schools that I studied in this book. I wanted to tell the real story of higher education. I wanted to tell the story of what it was like for the 90% of people who the elites overlooked, right? And that's the story of capitalizing on college. And I try to do it in a very narrative, novel-like way.

BT Irwin:

The subtitle of your book is How Higher Education Went From Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed. Okay. No institutions of higher education started with clearer missions and stronger commitments to those missions than Christian colleges. In the context of our audience, that means colleges that grew out of and received their support from members of the Church of Christ. So getting back to those assumptions about higher education, you lay out evidence in your book that founders in the first few generations that sustained Christian colleges may have assumed, as I have, that their mission and particular model of higher education that you just described are may be one and the same. Okay. So they don't really make a distinction there. In other words, Christian colleges and their communities of support, they can't imagine being Christian without a particular model. I mean, so in your research, did you find this to be the case at all?

Speaker 1:

So I found something quite unexpected, right? So as I'm living on these institutions for a week each, I'm also collecting their tax records, I'm also collecting their alumni magazines, and I'm collecting their historical volumes. The one constant that I heard from all eight of these schools was the early founders of these places adapted and they innovated in ways that were just not seen because of the sort of the assumptions that we make today, right? So, for example, you know, one institution, it's a family-run college, and they're offered to move across to a more wealthy part of the state. And as I say in the book, the president says in the historical volume, I can't leave this impoverished area of Appalachia. If we leave this institute, or if we leave this area, we there's no other place for these folks to get an education. They were deeply committed to there. For some of the Catholic schools, they were some of the most innovative individuals. I had faculty member and and administrators tell me about the three sisters, right, who had journeyed from Lyon, France. They had come over to the United States. They're traveling by foot and ox cart. And the reason that they came to that area was because of the pandemic. In the late 1800s, early 1900s, they set up a hospital, an orphanage, and a school, a university. That hospital system is one of the largest in the United States to this day. That college is still active to this day. And they they've added other elements. And so these institutions, these organizations that these individuals founded, started, are still very active to this day, but they they have survived sort of the the elements and the the ups and downs of history because they were willing to adapt, because they were willing to find a way. One of the things that I did not expect to find in one of the Catholic volumes, the historical volumes, was between there was one claim that between the Civil War and the Spanish flu in the like 1918, yeah, 75% of all Catholic colleges shuttered. I feel like we're sort of on the onset, we're at the cusp of another sort of consolidation that we witnessed 100 years ago that not many folks have written about, or if they have, we haven't really dug into that.

BT Irwin:

You know, a lot of people who listen to this either work for Church of Christ schools, graduated from Church of Christ schools. And for some of them, I've I've been friends with a lot of them, and I've heard people talk about their concern for how their alma maters may be changing. But I also hear in that an assumption sometimes, and and and and this is that assumption, a lot of these schools started and grew and had their their greatest success from the middle of the 20th century on. And so there's this assumption that if we could get back to doing the things we did in the middle to late 20th century, then we wouldn't have enrollment pressure, for example. But you make the case in your book that we're not living in the middle of the 20th century anymore, that these schools are operating in an entirely different environment than that one. And so, could you just educate our audience for a moment on how the world is so much different now for these institutions of higher education than it was even a generation or two ago?

Speaker 1:

So there's two policy innovations that happen in the United States in the mid to late 1900s. The soldiers come back from World War II, the government doesn't want them on the welfare payroll. Somebody has this innovative idea that says, you know what, we're gonna give them a voucher, we're going to give them the GI Bill. And what happens at that point in time? This is innovation number one. Instead of giving money directly to colleges, you gave the money to a consumer or a customer. And if I went to Berkeley, Berkeley got the money. If I went to NYU, NYU got the money. If I went to Rochester, Rochester got the money. And this is what became known as per student funding or indirect funding. Innovation number two happens in 1965 with the NDEA Act. Somebody came up with the idea and says, you know what? Let's pay for today's education with tomorrow's money. Student loans are birthed. Ever since then, what we have set up in the United States is this sort of market-oriented environment, right? We believe both at the K-12 level and at the higher ed level that that choice reigns, that if I give the consumer choice, that ultimately they will pick quality every time. We as a society have decided that the market knows best, the market knows all, the market is omnipresent. And we have Built our system on market-based policies, and what you're seeing is the unfolding over time of a gigantic system and the consequences of a market-based system and these policies that we've created. What they have led to is, one, increased competition. You hear these leaders of these religious institutions say, we're competing with for profits. We're competing with Christian colleges. We're competing, our number one competitor is the state school right down the road. These presidents and leaders of these institutions that were leading regional colleges, right? They thought their competition was, you know, a hundred- mile radius, 150-mile radius. They are, their minds are exploding because they're saying, "Oh my gosh, this online school is now our number one competitor, and they're on the other side of the country."

BT Irwin:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And and so that has fundamentally upended the market. The second thing that's radically different is the traditional market, the 18 to 22 year olds is drying up, it's evaporating. The birth rate in 2001 with you know terrorism, 2008 with the Great Recession, and shortly thereafter, has caused the birth rate to plummet, and the pool of applicants of 18 to 22-year-olds continues to shrink. We have the ability to have and learn and educate one another or from one another in ways that we didn't previously. I mean, you and I are interacting right now on a technological platform that 30 years ago, 10 years ago, we may not have been able to do this. And I would say the final, the fourth thing would be just sort of the cost. As the cost of higher education has mushroomed, the expectations for the customer have also mushroomed. And you know, if I'm gonna put out $50,000 a year over the course of four years, and if I acquire, say, $200,000 in debt, or if I pay out $200,000, I mean, that's a house.

BT Irwin:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Right? And that's for one kid. And those four things competition, the traditional market, the technology, and the cost are radically different from what they were 40 years ago. Many of these, again, are driven by the public policies that we establish as a nation that are rooted in economic reasoning and market-oriented public policies. So going back in time, I think we can look back, learn some principles, but wishing that we could establish a prior era, I think that's long gone.

BT Irwin:

Would you mind just kind of touching on some of the some of the new models of the new innovations that these schools are trying to respond to the world that we have, not the one we wish we had?

Speaker 1:

And he's like, "You come to a tradition." And those institutions invested in graduate education, they invested in elite athletics, they invested, these are some of the the most well-known Christian schools and Catholic schools in the U.S. in that chapter. When you pivot to the next chapter and you get to the more entrepreneurial schools, there's three of them, three types of strategies. What happens is that first group of entrepreneurial schools flips the "you come" on its head. And instead of expecting students to come to the campus, to come get inculcated into the values and the heritage, they take the classroom to the students. So they would do online, they would do international, they would do transfer, they would do dual education, they would do adult ed. Like they had what, basically one president said, "I have the tabletop model of higher education. I got the residential campus, which is the top of the table." And he goes, "Josh, my job as a president is to establish as many enrollment revenue generating legs as possible." And he says, "These support financially the residential campus, the tabletop." And he said, "But the tabletop brings legitimacy to the legs." And so there's sort of this symbiotic relationship between the two.

BT Irwin:

If you just look at the marketing that a lot of schools do, it's about the individual, it's about you, and it's usually about you getting a job. And the uh the the Christian aspect is kind of like icing on the cake, right? It's a fringe benefit. You you get to come here and you'll get a good education, a good degree, you'll get a good job, it'll pay really well. And hey, icing on the cake is that you know, it's a Christian environment and whatever that means. And so I noticed this huge difference from you know from the early days of that particular school to where it is now. And I can see how uh what you've described in your book, the system around the school uh drives that change, right? They've adjusted to the marketplace. But here's here's the question I'm getting to. I had a conversation with an administrator from that school uh not too long ago, and the the changes that they've made in order to grow enrollment and get the tuition revenue they need to be competitive and to stay open and in operation. He expressed to me, he said, "I see very little Christian left in this institution." We have, and that that's where the subtitle of your book really really taught me. At what point are we not really a Christian school anymore, we're just a business?

Speaker 1:

There are a few types of institutions that I didn't have a luxury of including in the book that are on my radar, and they have of sorts what I would call sort of this like "go to hell" fund. BYU. The Mormon and the LDS Church funds BYU students and subsidizes the BYU education so heavily that every year the BYU schools in Idaho, Utah, and Hawaii are some of the lowest, cheapest cost institutions in the United States. You've got institutions like I think it's Abilene Christian, who has an oil endowment, or that, right, there's revenues that are generated from this trust that allow them to subsidize their undergraduate education or their or their campus in ways that they don't have to adhere to the market like other institutions do. We know society has these pressures, the market has these pressures bearing down on us, but these funds over here allow us to sort of adhere to our mission in ways that we may not be able to otherwise. What I would encourage leaders to do, like would be first sort of examine your value boundaries. Where are they? What are you comfortable moving inward, outward? Who are you comfortable including in your campus? And I would urge those of you listening that are leading religious institutions, do not compare yourselves to Yale, do not compare yourselves to Harvard, do not compare yourselves to my institution, Johns Hopkins, or MIT. We are not your exemplars. I argue that if you want to study innovation and enrollment in the United States, you have to go to the tuition-driven institutions, not the elites. The entrepreneurial institutions, the value entrepreneurs in the United States are the following: Hispanic-serving institutions, religious institutions, minority serving institutions, community colleges, vocational institutions, Anapezi, the Asian American, Native Pacific Islander institutions, women's colleges, men's colleges, and regional institutions. These are the tuition-driven sectors where you have a value and you have to sort of take those values to the students, whether it's you know black identity, women's empowerment, spiritual formation. I think what has to happen is we have to start looking across the sector and acting in innovative ways as tuition-driven institutions, rather than looking to the elites and saying, hey, Harvard does this. That would be my urge and my sort of exhortation to those listening and those that care about these religious institutions and their sustainability and vitality is look to look to your kind and figure out how these values can be sustained in very entrepreneurial ways. And and I I think there are good days ahead for the sector. I just think we need to start thinking and seeing and acting in in different ways than we have in the past. And we've got to shift our gaze. We've got to stop looking at the elites. We have to.

BT Irwin:

Do you have certain rules? Do you have Bible classes? Is that really all it means? Or what does it really mean? And and determining what that means from that flows everything else that you do. If you were going to start from scratch a Christian college with a Christian mission, how would you start it and build it for both effectiveness and sustainability right here in the early part of the 21st century?

Speaker 1:

There has to be a group, right? Behind this institution, behind the values, again, whether it's HBCU or religious or you know, whatever it may be, but there is a group. In addition to the collective, there needs to be a vision that is bigger than the collective. That collective must be willing to locate or have the funds necessary to sort of sustain the vision for that institution in the long term, whether that's you know 50, 100 or you know, 200 years.

BT Irwin:

Dr. Joshua Travis Brown, I feel like we're gonna get some listener email from this episode. Okay, great. Uh, congratulations to that and uh, thanks for, thank you for educating us today. I feel like we've all gone to gone to college.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I hope your listeners go out and get a copy of the book. I one thing I do want to plug is that I worked really, really hard to write it like a novel.

BT Irwin:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Um and I, I, I describe it as a thoughtful, scholarly novella. I wrote it with the average sort of New York Times, NPR, a thoughtful listener in mind. Um, so if you're interested in a good story, um go get a copy of the book. And if you if you do, um please reach out and let me know.

BT Irwin:

Link will be in the show notes. A scholarly novella. Yeah. Thanks for uh, thanks for being our guest today. Thanks for having me, BT. It's been a pleasure. We hope that something you heard in this episode encouraged, enlightened or enriched you in some way. If it did, thanks be to God, and please pay it forward. Subscribe to this podcast and share it with a friend. Recommend and review it wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Your subscription, recommendation, and review help us reach more people. Please send your comments, ideas, and suggestions to podcasts@ christian chronicle.org. And don't forget that our ministry to inform and inspire Christians and congregations around the world is a nonprofit ministry that relies on your generosity. So if you like the show and you want to keep it going and make it even better, please make a tax-deductible gift to The Christian Chronicle at Christian Chronicle.org/donate. The Christian Chronicle Podcast is a production of the Christian Chronicle, Inc., informing and inspiring Church of Christ congregations, members, and ministries around the world since 1943. The Christian Chronicle's managing editor is Calvin Cockrell, editor-in-chief Bobby Ross Jr., and President and CEO Eric Tryggestad. The Christian Chronicle Podcast is written, directed, and hosted by B.T. Irwin and recorded in Detroit, Michigan, U.S. Editing, show notes, and transcript services by Kenzie James. Mastering, mixing, and sound quality by James Flanagan. Until next time, grace and peace be yours in abundance.