The Higher-Ed Mindset for This Fall

As students return to campus this fall, what’s on the minds of college and university administrators?

Richard Keeling knows. As chair and senior executive consultant for Keeling and Associates, he spends a lot of time with higher education decision-makers. The pandemic threw everything off-kilter.

“Lots of things happened that have made it harder for institutions to do what they wanted to do,” Keeling noted in his CAMEX22 session, New Expectations, Markets, and Models: The Reshaping of Higher Education.

Much of it boils down to people and money.

Institutions weren’t surprised when enrollment dipped during the pandemic, Keeling said, but they thought it would bounce back. For many campuses, it hasn’t. He noted numerous reasons, including student dissatisfaction with education and especially its cost, the general disruption in students’ lives, smaller pool of high school graduates, and parents and students who lost jobs in the pandemic, but now competitive wages are pulling students away from school.

“There are concerns about the value proposition of higher education, especially at private schools,” Keeling said. “There’s a shift among parents and students toward a strong focus on career readiness and skills.”

Lower enrollment means, of course, fewer dollars coming in to support the institution’s operations.

At the same time, Keeling said, administrators and boards are worried about their employees. Some employees ended up working from home and now are reluctant to return to the office or classroom, at least full-time. Some burned out because they had to take on additional responsibilities. And some, more staff than faculty, decided their jobs were no longer sufficiently fulfilling and they quit.

Even though some institutions have had to lay off positions, all schools need qualified and productive people in their workforce. Institutions will need “to rethink employment entirely,” he said. “In the long term, how do we make employment more attractive?”

Flexibility is the key to both employee satisfaction and attracting students to enroll, he said.

On the employment side, administrators are considering how to:

• Make employment worthwhile.
• Create a human resources approach that responds to the changing nature of work.
• Reconsider the institutional work hierarchy and privileges, especially the faculty/staff differentials. “There needs to be more effort to bring staff into decision-making,” he said.
• Revise metrics for work performance and productivity and reassessing priorities.
• Focus on health, especially mental health and well-being.

For student enrollment, administrators are looking at:

• Developing education for nontraditional markets, “not the people we’ve usually thought of as students”: programs geared to part-timers, clustered courses, certificates, and stackable credentials, for instance.
• Recreating academic programs to respond nimbly to changes in student purposes, intentions, and goals.
• Focusing on outcome-based learning.
• Blending remote/virtual learning with in-person education.
• Expanding business and industry partnerships for experiential learning.

In these scenarios, institutions will need to “be distinctive, be first, be flexible, and be sustainable,” Keeling said. The key questions administrators are facing for 2022-23 and beyond are, he said:

• What will students expect, demand, and accept?
• What is our value proposition?
• Who’s a student?
• What will graduates need for the future?
• How to make the best use of resources?
• What risk should we take to ensure long-term sustainability?

Where do campus stores fit in? Keeling had several recommendations:

• Look for ways to be distinctive from other retailers.
• Be more responsive to students and their needs.
• Support the institution’s mission and vision.
• Adjust what “the store” means and does as campus conditions change.