They’ve had the assignment for a month, but the task at hand is still immense: Fix a small Southern women’s college that is on the brink of extinction. They’ve pored over the numbers, which are not good. The institution is discounting tuition too deeply, it’s spending too much of its paltry endowment, and its classes are too small.
For several hours, the 18 men and women bounce around ideas on ways to salvage what is left of the struggling college. The institution should eliminate certain majors, increase its student-to-faculty ratio, and reduce its endowment spending. “They have caviar taste on a tuna-salad budget,” someone says. Another suggests expanding the college’s enrollment to bring in more tuition dollars. But that idea prompts a quick veto from one corner of the room. “How about the capital costs? You have to eat somewhere, you have to live somewhere.” Others nod in agreement.
In the end, their opinions won’t matter much. For the people gathered in a windowless conference room here in the University of Pennsylvania’s on-campus hotel are not higher-education consultants or college trustees. They are wannabe college presidents, the inaugural class of the university’s executive-doctorate program. They are senior-level college officials, mostly vice presidents, with high hopes that their experience and an Ed.D. will help them land a college presidency someday soon.
“Frankly, academic credentials are important in this business,” says one of the students, Don Cahill, executive vice president for administration and institutional advancement at Wisconsin’s Marian College of Fond du Lac, who aspires to be a small-college president. “I felt having a doctorate and one from Penn would complete my skill set.”
The students, who hail from 11 states and have an average age of 46, meet here as a group once a month for an activity-packed three-day weekend. They attend classes, meet with advisers about their dissertations, and bond as a group through evening dinner outings. Everything else in the two-year program is done by e-mail or telephone conference calls. “A lot of work gets done on Sunday afternoons and Thursday night after the kids go to bed,” says J. Douglas Toma, the program’s director and an instructor.
That schedule attracted Tiffany Franks. “A traditional program would take me out of the office several nights a week,” says the vice president for student life and enrollment at Greensboro College, in North Carolina. “And in my job I need to be visible at night.”
The lengthy discussion of the troubled Southern college, a real-life example whose identity the professor asks students to keep secret, is part of a Friday afternoon’s three-hour class, “The Small College: Growth Strategies.” As the students suggest ways to save the college, it quickly becomes apparent where they sit at their own institutions. The financial executives worry about tuition discounting, the fund raisers wonder about the big gifts, and the student-affairs people question the wisdom of admitting men.
That variety, Mr. Toma says, only strengthens the program. For instance, when the group proposes increasing the college’s enrollment, Larry Schall, vice president for facilities and services at Swarthmore College, warns the students to be careful. Swarthmore, he says, once considered expanding, only to discover that the costs would be prohibitive.
Penn professors created the executive-doctorate program two years ago, Mr. Toma says, as an extension of their research on higher-education management. They found there were few programs catering to top college officials who wanted to earn a doctorate quickly and without taking time off from their jobs.
In the first year, 58 people applied for 18 spots; last year, the university had 80 applicants for 20 spots. To apply, each candidate needs eight courses of graduate work related to higher education, a résumé, recommendation letters, and a personal statement. “The people who don’t get in,” Mr. Toma says, “are those who write that this program is convenient and make it about themselves.” So far, everyone accepted has enrolled.
In admitting a class, faculty members seek applicants who are “one step away” from becoming presidents, Mr. Toma says. The professors are also careful not to overload a class with students from one part of the country or one area of college administration, such as student affairs or development. This first class, which graduates in May, has plenty of business officers; the second class, which started in September, tilts toward student affairs.
The students come primarily from large or prestigious institutions, such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Stanford University, and Penn itself, that are often seen as farm teams for college presidencies. Some students, however, work at little-known colleges, including Bellarmine University, in Kentucky, and Seminole Community College, in Florida.
“All these students have the potential to be college presidents,” Mr. Toma says. “They’re people who have shown through a 20-year career that they can handle a lot of responsibility.” The program has already had one successful placement: A member of its inaugural class, Tim Ryan, became president of the Culinary Institute of America only a few months after the program started. (In November, Mr. Ryan played host to the class’s monthly meeting at the institute’s Napa Valley campus.)
Others here hope for similar success -- at the very least, some of them joke, for the salary bump they will need to pay off the program’s hefty price tag ($87,000 for two years, plus travel expenses). About half the students receive a free ride from their institutions. “The colleges like the idea of having someone locked up for a few years,” Mr. Toma says. The other half get some assistance from their colleges or take out loans.
While nearly all the students have their sights set on a campus’s top job, a few are enrolled in the program “to read some books and get out of the office to meet colleagues,” says Lou Marcoccia, senior vice president for business, finance, and administrative services at Syracuse University. He has been at Syracuse since 1975, so at this point in his career, Mr. Marcoccia says, he is more interested in completing a three-decade-old goal than landing a job as a college president. “When I’m at the level I’m at, people expect you to have a doctorate,” he says.
Like most of his classmates, Mr. Marcoccia is writing his dissertation on a real-life issue -- in his case, leadership in the athletics department at Syracuse. For institutions, the dissertations often amount to a discounted visit from a consultant, one who knows exactly where to find answers. So if there is a question on tenure, the student pays a visit to the faculty-senate president. “It makes you a pain in the neck sometimes,” says Marian College’s Mr. Cahill. “I hear it all the time: ‘Cahill is back from Penn again, and he has 42 new ideas.’”
As the Friday-afternoon class wraps up, the seasoned administrators are already fidgeting like undergraduates. A few glance down at their pagers, while others rush into the hall and flip open their cellphones. (Some never let class get in the way of their jobs, despite some gentle ribbing from their classmates. “I encourage them not to check in with the office,” Mr. Toma says. “I really want them focused in the little time they spend here.”)
The remaining students walk slowly back to their hotel rooms to get ready for a group dinner in the city, a perk covered by tuition. The conversation from class lingers as the smaller group discusses the problems facing small colleges nowadays. It’s a debate that engages even those students from larger institutions.
“I’m amazed at how we’ve all come together,” says Ms. Franks of Greensboro College. “It doesn’t matter if you’re from Stanford or somewhere else, we all face the same problems. If you’re at Stanford, the scope is really different, but the issues are similar. Stanford may be dealing with an endowment in the billions, and we may have an endowment of $112-million, but we both have to learn how to cultivate donors. And now we’re learning about each other’s perspectives.”
Indeed, in the end, whom they meet here may be nearly as valuable as the degrees they receive, says Ralph Fitzpatrick, special assistant to the president at the University of Louisville. “I now have 17 colleagues that, regardless of where I am when I become a college president, I can call up and say, I need help, when can you get here?”
http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Volume 49, Issue 22, Page A40