Is Less More at Small Colleges?

Earlham College, for one, is resisting increasing pressure to grow and compete

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By PAUL FAIN

Richmond, Ind.

With a $261-million endowment, a healthy balance sheet, hundreds of acres of open space on campus, and a swelling pool of applicants that reached a record 1,554 this year, Earlham College could easily give in to pressure to expand from its base of 1,200 students, as other similar liberal-arts institutions have done.

But Earlham's president, Douglas C. Bennett, does not buy the Wall Street philosophy that growth is good. And he's not budging. He believes that 1,200 is the magic enrollment target for a liberal-arts college.

That figure, says Mr. Bennett, is the number of students that make an ideal teaching and learning environment for undergraduates. It is also the minimum enrollment needed for a college to offer a robust curriculum and remain financially stable, he asserts.

"The upward pressure for size has an intellectual push, it has market push," Mr. Bennett says during an interview in a spartan but attractive conference room in an Earlham administrative building here. "And if you're committed to being small, you just have to wake up every morning and say, How do we resist those pressures?"

The quest for more -- bigger operating budgets, more facilities, higher enrollment -- can be linked to academe's shift toward an increasingly corporate, numbers-heavy approach. And enrollment and campus growth are among the top achievements by which governing boards, alumni, and donors measure college presidents.

Many community colleges aspire to become four-year institutions, many colleges want to become universities, and many universities seek to add graduate programs and laboratories to become full-scale research institutions.

"Some people take it as a lack of ambition if we don't want to get larger," says Thomas R. Tritton, president of Haverford College, which has an enrollment of 1,160 students.

The question of whether to grow is currently front and center at Haverford. The college's governing board will vote in April on whether to add as many as 800 students. Though Mr. Tritton says growth is not a foregone conclusion, he predicts that the Quaker college will boost its enrollment.

Smaller colleges are getting into the growth game, mostly to bolster sagging cash flow with new tuition dollars or to add programs and facilities to gain a competitive edge. Liberal-arts colleges such as Dickinson (2,270 students), Eckerd (1,680 students), and Hampshire (1,350 students) all saw roughly 25-percent increases in their enrollments in the last 10 years. Enrollment at Washington College (1,400 students) grew by 43 percent in that period, while Guilford College (2,700 students) more than doubled its student body in only five years.

"There seems to be a ratcheting up in higher education," says Stephen L. DesJardins, an associate professor at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Yet Earlham and some other small institutions, such as Smith and Oberlin Colleges, are bucking this trend by holding firm at their current level of enrollment, or even reducing it. Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, says that while most of the group's 550 institutions are growing, a handful of 100 or so selective colleges with relatively strong finances have found the perfect, small enrollment number around which to plan.

"Everyone's got a magic number," he says.

Small, but Strong

For evidence to back up Mr. Bennett's assertion that intimacy is crucial to Earlham's personality, one need look no further than the Stout Meetinghouse, a small wooden structure on campus that represents the Quaker-influenced value of shared governance and what Bennett calls an "alignment of purpose" at the college.

The room, with high ceilings and rows of wooden benches, is full every other Wednesday, when every professor at Earlham gathers here, along with staff members from development, admissions, and other administrative offices, many of whom, as contract employees, are considered faculty members at Earlham.

"The whole faculty sits in one room and talks," says Mr. Bennett. "You can't do that elsewhere."

This collegiality pays off for students, he says, by helping them build personal connections to faculty members and other students and by emphasizing the natural interdisciplinary feel of the college.

"You can't be invisible here. You can't be anonymous. People will know stuff about you," says Mr. Bennett. "That turns out to be a good way to grow in responsibility and in intellect."

Remaining small has also allowed Earlham to maintain a strong academic profile. The median SAT score of this year's freshman class was 1240, as compared to the 2004 national average of 1026. Although Mr. Bennett says Earlham's learning environment is "powerfully catalyzed by our size," he acknowledges that many college students lean toward the "bigger is better" belief that large institutions provide a better education because they offer more choices. However, Mr. Bennett says that with the average undergraduate taking 40 courses over four years, having 600 or 6,000 classes to choose from makes little difference.

Indeed, he says, large institutions carry a "hidden penalty" for students, as they are often pigeonholed into a narrower educational experience. He says that Earlham offers a more interconnected experience in which the courses and faculty relationships "fit together" better than at a big university. For example, about two-thirds of Earlham's students study abroad.

"You come here and play football, you can sing in the concert choir. Try that" at a bigger institution, he says.

As proof of Earlham's strong academics, the college cites the fact that 73 percent of its graduates go on to earn advanced degrees, substantially more than the average rate of 29.8 percent for four-year, non-doctorate granting private colleges, according to the U.S. Department of Education. When weighted by enrollment, an Earlham study shows that the college ranks eighth among all U.S. institutions in the number of graduates who earned doctorates in biological sciences and 14th in the number who earned doctorates in the earth sciences. While most institutions have to work to encourage interdisciplinary study by creating special programs or departments, at Earlham this connectivity happens naturally, according to Mr. Bennett.

For example, he says, faculty members from different disciplines often interact, "so we have English professors who have some odd literacy in chemistry, about chemical-bond theory, and people in chemistry who have read Moby Dick, because it's their best friend's favorite book."

The Equation

As with many of his convictions, Mr. Bennett did not arrive at the 1,200-student figure arbitrarily. Mr. Bennett, a practicing Quaker, is a deep thinker who seems to enjoy mulling over difficult questions. He can casually cite Aristotle or compare his college to the Greek Polis without sounding pretentious.

"You'll find that I think very abstractly at times, and it drives a lot of people nuts," says Mr. Bennett, who has a light-red beard and a deep, somewhat gravelly voice.

Mr. Bennett's affinity for small colleges began while he was an undergraduate at Haverford. He later saw the inside of a large institution from 1973 to 1989 while teaching political science at Temple University, which currently has 23,000 undergraduates. When he was there, he says, Temple "was trying to do too much with too few resources," creating a work experience that could be "chaotic, and at times frustrating." Conflict over salaries led to two faculty strikes while Mr. Bennett was at the university. From 1989 to 1993, as provost of Reed College, which now has 1,340 students, Mr. Bennett says he began to think about the size of a university in terms of a specific mathematical equation.

He runs through a simple formula to describe why the ideal enrollment of 1,200 students is also a minimum viable number. The core disciplines in what Mr. Bennett calls the "arc of knowledge" include the arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and mathematics, and growing out of those disciplines are about 25 programs or departments that account for the essential undergraduate curriculum. Mr. Bennett says departments consisting of three or four professors are the "minimum viable size," which results in about 90 to 100 faculty members over all.

With a good annual return on an endowment and with enough students who pay the full tuition, a healthy college should "be able to afford a faculty-student ratio of 11 or 12 to one," says Mr. Bennett. "Guess what? You've just built a 1,200-student, approximately, college."

Bigger is Better

Mr. Bennett's enrollment number is "pretty much right on target" for a liberal-arts college, says Thomas C. Longin, executive editor of the Society for College and University Planning's journal, Planning for Higher Education.

Mr. Longin, a former vice president at the Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities, now works as a consultant, mostly with smaller colleges. He says 1,000 students is about the "minimum viable target" for a college. He says he hears often from presidents of institutions at or below that enrollment level who complain of cash-flow problems. Typically the first approach to this problem is to add more students, Mr. Longin says.

To bulk up enrollment, though, many small colleges discount tuition, offering more financial aid to compete for students. But this can backfire if the tuition discounting creates the perception that the college is in bad financial shape or offers a lower-quality education, which can result in a drop in enrollment.

This situation is what Mr. DesJardins, at the University of Michigan, calls a "vicious cycle" of lower tuition and sagging applications and enrollment that infected several small colleges in recent years. Hartwick College and Lasell College had their bond status downgraded in part because of their high tuition-discount rates; enrollment slid at Ripon College; and a few institutions, including Iowa's Marycrest International University and Notre Dame College, in New Hampshire, shut their doors for good.

The fiscal situation at Earlham, where tuition and fees are now $31,782, has never been that dire. But the college operated with 1,100 students for the first several years after Mr. Bennett arrived as president in 1997, a shortfall that triggered a cascade of financial woes. According to a strategic report completed by Earlham in 2002, a deficit of even 100 students at the college set the operating budget back by $1.5-million, leaving less money for building maintenance and faculty salaries.

'Optimal Enrollment'

Although Earlham has stabilized its finances in recent years, Mr. Bennett says the college is still not immune to market pressures, but is getting stronger. "Financially, we're in the best place we've been in for a long time," he says.

Mr. Longin says Earlham is "in a better position than probably 75 percent of colleges" because the institution has reached what it deems as its "optimal enrollment," at which the college can focus on its selectivity, weather a changing marketplace, and do long-term financial planning.

That does not mean the pressure to grow has subsided, however. And examples exist of small colleges with healthy finances that have grown successfully. Mr. Longin cites the repositioning of Elon University, which grew to its current enrollment of 4,584 students from its 1973 enrollment of 1,800. In the process, Elon dramatically improved its academic reputation and finances. And in 2001 it reorganized into an institution comprising a liberal-arts college with three professional schools, and changed its name from college to university.

Mr. Tritton, Haverford's president, says the growth discussion at his institution is not about the college's finances, but rather about admitting more qualified applicants to the selective college and keeping pace with expanding academic areas. "We don't need the money," he says, adding that the college would also add costs by adding students.

"I used to have the same view" as Mr. Bennett, says Mr. Tritton of the magic number of 1,200 students. But in recent years, Mr. Tritton says, he has become open to the growth of Haverford.

He says the right enrollment target for many liberal-arts colleges is in the "big space" between 1,200 and 12,000 students.

"At some point you lose" the single purpose of a tightly knit learning community, Mr. Tritton says. But "it's not at 1,201."

Big Mac vs. Mom and Pop

At Earlham, says Mr. Bennett, there is "tremendous incentive" to grow enrollment beyond 1,200 students.

Students and parents want more services and a broader range of academic disciplines. There is also pressure to bulk up administrative functions, by, for example, hiring an internship coordinator or a learning-disability specialist. And those administrative expansions have a competitive dimension, because a rival institution might have functions that Earlham lacks.

"It's easy to see why institutions want to grow," Mr. Bennett says.

To further explain the incentive for growth, Mr. Bennett returns to the arc of knowledge. He says new or expanding realms of science, or even the enhanced role of certain languages in society, create demand for new courses and faculty members. For example, he says, he wishes Earlham could offer Arabic-language courses.

Mr. Bennett says the college would consider offering a new language if it received a donation to hire new faculty members, but would not pay for it by enrolling an extra 100 students.

"How can we not teach Arabic?" Mr. Bennett asks. "We're resisting that because we think there's magic in the size. So we have to make, collectively, some very hard decisions about what we're going to do and not to do, that are in another sense intellectually unjustifiable."

Beyond the dilemma of how to respond to expanding academic needs, Mr. Bennett says, there are deep societal reasons behind the belief that bigger is better at a college.

"It goes way beyond education," he says. "How have we come as a culture to think that a hamburger served at McDonald's is better than a hamburger served at a mom-and-pop diner?"

Yet despite Mr. Bennett's belief in the virtue of small, his commitment to wrestling with difficult questions is stronger.

"It may be that in order to be intellectually and financially whole, we have to go to 1,300, that we have to have Arabic," says Mr. Bennett. But, he adds: "I think the fight to stay as small as we can be and still be intellectually and financially whole is worth fighting."

ENROLLMENTS AT PRIVATE COLLEGES Fewer than 200 students 439 200-499 students 536 500-999 students 453 1,000-2,499 students 566 2,500-4,999 students 240 5,000-9,999 students 95 More than 10,000 students 57 Note: Enrollment figures are from the fall of 2002. SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education