Much media attention on higher education focuses on elite institutions, especially the topics of who gets admitted and what opinions students and faculty hold. Elite institutions shape the popular image of a college campus. They also hold disproportionately high endowments (just over 10 percent of America’s colleges and universities have 75 percent of the endowment assets).
But students are far likelier to attend schools outside that 10 percent, which rely on funding from tuition payments rather than ample endowments. These tuition-driven schools are struggling to survive, and institutions of Christian higher education almost always rely on tuition funds.
In Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed, Joshua Travis Brown explores the challenges and choices facing tuition-driven universities, through case studies of eight religious institutions. Brown, an education professor at Johns Hopkins University, chose religious institutions because they represent “the largest group of schools among the tuition-driven institutions,” they often serve underserved populations, and they “possess tenets about money that should seemingly offer leaders motivation to push back on extreme market practices that might undermine their educational mission.”
In sum, these schools are more likely than most to possess an animating mission that puts service above profit. At the same time, however, they are more likely than most to face financial pressure from the current higher-education marketplace.
Capitalizing on College analyzes the economic forces at play and various institutional reactions. Brown highlights decreased financial support for universities from the state, the allocation of government funding per student, and the ways that individual students, rather than communities, increasingly bear the costs of higher education. These changes coincide with a decline in the population of traditional college-aged students. There also happens to be a lot of animosity toward higher education right now.
Schools without large endowments find themselves pressed to increase enrollment, almost at any cost. As one administrator told Brown, “We have to grow, or we’re going to die.” This is the situation facing small Christian colleges across the country.
All eight universities featured in Capitalizing on College have responded to financial challenges with a coherent strategy. Each of these schools “rejected the status quo,” writes Brown, and turned to entrepreneurialism to “pursue nontraditional student enrollment growth.” To understand the various approaches, Brown spent two years conducting 150 interviews, visiting campuses, and doing archival research.
The eight institutions, which he refers to with pseudonyms, granted him extensive access, including confidential interviews with presidents, provosts, and faculty; information about recruiting and admissions; and campus tours. This book offers a strong balance of statistical and broader insights, and it benefits from the inside perspectives shared in interviews.
Capitalizing on College identifies four attempted strategies for surviving collegiate market competition. Some schools chose the “traditional” strategy, emulating the best practices of elite universities, with the goal of raising a university’s profile and increasing its endowment with philanthropy. Others adopted the “pioneer” strategy, showing a willingness to challenge tradition and pursue nontraditional students through multiple campuses. Colleges opting for the “network” strategy attempted many things at once, including new locations, programs, and methods of course delivery, all while emphasizing “the relentless addition” of online and other nontraditional students.
In Brown’s account, the traditional, pioneer, and network strategies all achieved some success. Ultimately, however, they failed to save schools from their financial woes or establish stronger endowments. Each strategy posed challenges to the universities’ missions and values. In the case of the network strategy, modified organizational structures also became a challenge.
In the end, only a fourth option—the “accelerated” strategy—proved successful in dramatically and consistently increasing enrollment and the endowment. Just one of the schools featured in Brown’s case studies pursued this strategy, which involved a rapid ramp-up in online education. In this case, revenue from online students became the school’s dominant funding source, with their ranks eventually outnumbering the residential students ten to one.
Yet the improved financial outlook came with considerable costs. The drastic shift toward online education compelled the university to operate more like a business than an educational institution driven by a distinct mission. The school even outsourced the design of its programs and courses. In some ways, then, the accelerated strategy represents survival, in other ways the opposite.
One problem facing all tuition-driven schools is the price of the traditional college experience. The physical architecture and in-person classes, the support staff, and the country club–style amenities are expensive. So is the technology a university requires. Schools have found that financial support may come from increasing tuition, admitting more students who will pay full tuition, seeking philanthropic gifts, and instituting online programs that cost less to run, among other avenues of revenue generation.
Such survival strategies might preserve the traditional college experience, at least temporarily. But they threaten a school’s mission. To keep traditional buildings, schools ultimately become nontraditional and operate like for-profit entities. They diversify their products. They hire companies to increase enrollment. They take on loans and issue bonds. The end result can be buildings funded by online students who will never use them, underqualified students saddled with debt, questionable admissions tactics, overworked faculty, weakened relationships with students, and university traditions swept away.
Brown shows, too, that when schools operate like for-profit organizations, they tend to compromise core aspects of their respective missions. For example, the universities that pursued greater prestige downplayed their commitments to serving the disadvantaged and meeting needs in their communities.
Growth itself was destabilizing in many schools. Admitting too many students puts a strain on faculty, staff, and facilities, making it difficult to deliver on promises of small class sizes and personal care. The imperative of constant expansion can devolve into a Sisyphean quest for mere survival. Outsourcing course and curriculum design and de-emphasizing professors can weaken the distinctiveness of Christian higher education.
In each university Brown studied, faculty and administrators experienced burnout and struggled to find purpose in their work. The employee testimonies in his book are often very moving in documenting the effects of institutional drift.
Without asking them explicitly, Capitalizing on College raises several questions: What, ultimately, is Christian higher education about? Do Christian colleges need to function differently from other colleges, financially and otherwise? Can a truly Christian education focus on professional training or outsourced curricula that do little to cultivate a Christian worldview? Like it or not, struggling schools are answering these questions in real time whenever they opt to cut humanities programs, rely on generic online courses, or resort to questionable enrollment tactics.
Does it have to be this way? In Capitalizing on College, as in so many other accounts of the current crisis in higher education, Brown emphasizes the role of neoliberalism—a term that functions, in academic circles, as a rough stand-in for market capitalism. The argument is not entirely unconvincing, but to reach and convince a broader audience, Brown could do more to define neoliberalism.
Capitalizing on College could also do more to reinforce the distinctions between neoliberalism and other challenges to higher education, including demographic uncertainty and administrative bloat. Although Brown addresses these topics, he could have explored them further. For example, administrative bloat often receives blame for the rising costs of college. Does that charge hold up, or is it more like blaming millennials for splurging on avocado toast (a real expense) rather than saving for a down payment (which might be out of reach for other reasons)? What about the on-campus amenities? Perhaps a pared-down university could be more sustainable.
Whether or not neoliberalism is chiefly to blame, the crisis facing tuition-driven institutions should matter to American Christians. Many people bemoan the drift of elite schools away from their religious roots, but these same people often make little effort to support schools that remain committed to religious distinctives. Bystanders seem to think that schools fail because they fall away from Christian commitments, but evidence suggests that the dangers confronting most tuition-driven schools are economic, not ideological.
The current economic climate threatens the entire ecosystem of Christian higher education. Left solely to market forces, more schools will close—and those that survive will likely drift from their missions in meaningful ways. The shakeup is already here. Will American Christians consciously and conscientiously help influence the outcome?
Prestigious secular institutions routinely receive very large financial gifts, which allow them to maintain endowments, offer reduced tuition, and produce the scholarship that defines academic fields. Those concerned about a Christian presence in those fields could consider funding scholars at Christian institutions, freeing them to produce serious scholarship rather than presiding over a half-dozen online courses. If you worry about the outsize influence of the Ivy League, think about supporting schools outside its orbit. Capitalizing on College does not offer many solutions to the crisis facing tuition-driven institutions, but that does not mean none exist.
Christian higher education has a long association with the ideals of serving the common good and living life for a higher purpose. Brown’s book helpfully illustrates why that connection might be fraying. For anyone interested in conversations around changes in higher education, the purpose of institutions, and the consequences of economic policies and competition, Capitalizing on College is a worthwhile read.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history at Palm Beach Atlantic University, where she serves as assistant director of the Frederick M. Supper Honors Program. She is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War.
