Washtenaw County has always prided itself on its connections to higher education. At one time, Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti hosted five institutions of higher learning, including two state universities, two private universities and a community college.
Today, Cleary University resides in Livingston County. Out from under the shadows of the other higher education institutions in Washtenaw County, it attracts about as many students as it ever has and reports a 10% increase in credit hours and a slight increase in graduate enrollment compared to its Ann Arbor days.
Time hasn’t been as generous to Concordia University, the other private institution in Ann Arbor. In the past decade, Concordia University Ann Arbor has merged with a Wisconsin-based Concordia counterpart. Since then, it has suffered a series of setbacks and losses that the merger was supposed to address. In addition to surrendering its independent accreditation as part of the merger agreement, CUAA also ceded control of its campus to its Wisconsin partner.
With questions swirling about its viability, the Ann Arbor campus announced earlier this year that it would, in fact, remain open for the 2024-25 academic year. Last month, however, the school clarified that the Ann Arbor campus would remain open only for a handful of health sciences programs. The remainder of the CUAA students would complete the 2024-25 year online by taking courses through the Wisconsin campus. In addition, Concordia would eliminate all athletic programs and other on-campus activities in an effort to close the $9M gulf between its income and its expenses.
As for the other three amigos, Washtenaw Community College’s enrollment has declined more than 19% from its peak in 2010 and its credit-hour enrollment has dropped by 28%. Eastern Michigan University’s enrollment has declined by 35%, and the University of Michigan keeps rolling along.
Not all higher education institutions will survive
If are takeaways from all of this, they include:
- Higher education institutions can succeed, even under trying circumstances.
- Doing nothing is not a good strategy.
- Competition can kill you if you don’t know how to manage it.
Competition is going to become more important in the very near future, largely because the number of college-age students is about to take a big drop. For a community college, this should be manageable because a large percentage of community college students have aged out of the 18-22 year-old crowd.
UM isn’t going to suffer. It’s likely to fill its freshman class year in and year out indefinitely. But it will pull in students from other states, and other state universities. That increases the need to be competitive for the remaining state universities, and to a lesser extent, Washtenaw Community College.
Higher education institutions that know how to compete are those that know how to attract and retain students. At the community college level, this means preparing students who want to transfer to a four-year university well enough to get them in someone else’s door. For students who want occupational/vocational education, it means building programs that lead to high-wage, high-demand jobs in one of Michigan’s most expensive counties.
That is literally THE ONLY STRATEGY that will keep students coming into WCC. WCC has to make prospective students a better economic offer than the current job market does. If it doesn’t, students will simply enter the workforce with no concrete plan for higher education later on. When the job market is good, there is no pressure for students to be strategic and intentional about their career choices. Any job that pays the bills will work just fine.
Effective competition doesn’t involve wasting money
WCC’s administration should have spent the last few years figuring out how to increase its graduation rate, how to wean itself off of certificates in place of degrees, how to deliver degree programs faster and better, and how to offer more high wage learning opportunities. It should have built up its occupational education programs and improved its academic facilities.
Instead, it has wasted millions of dollars on executives, built a gym that the community didn’t ask or approve funding for, shopped out a $26M no-bid contract on managed IT services that required it to spend additional millions of dollars on IT infrastructure purchases, literally threw away a multi-million dollar website redesign project, slipped a ludicrous hotel project into its virtually worthless Master Plan, and allowed its physical facilities to slip into disrepair.
Successful competition means survival. None of what WCC’s administration has done in the past decade has set the institution up to compete successfully. If WCC’s survival is important, then doing nothing is not an option, and doing the wrong things will simply hasten the institution’s demise.
Photo Credit: undeklinable, via Flickr
