Although she leads an institution that is often called an ivory tower, Michele Perkins’s plan to survive a perilous future sounds pretty down-to-earth.
“We know we’re in a challenging environment. That said, we are pleased with where we are. We need multiple revenue streams, and we have multiple revenue streams,” said Perkins, president of New England College, in a conversation with the Monitor about how the Henniker school is dealing with challenging times for small New England liberal arts colleges.
How challenging? Plenty.
The underlying problem for the 71-year-old Henniker school is the same that faces most private, non-profit colleges in the Northeast: A long, continuing decline in the number of public high school graduates who make up the bulk of their students.
“In New England and the upper Midwest there’s a demographic challenge. That makes it more difficult for institutions,” is how Barbara Brittingham, president of the higher education commission at the New England Association of Schools and Colleges puts it. Over the next decade, New Hampshire will see the sharpest drop in public high school enrollment of any state – a decline of 15 percent, according to estimates from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Schools like New England College have trouble dealing with declines in enrollment because they are so dependent on annual tuition payments, rather than income from endowments, to keep going. New England College’s 2017 budget calls for $40 million from tuition and $13 million from other sources, of which barely a quarter of a million will be from investment income.
“Almost every institution in the U. S. is tuition-dependent,” Perkins said. Schools like Harvard and Dartmouth “are the exception. You have to have close to a billion-dollar endowment to say you’re not tuition-dependent.”
NEC’s endowment has doubled in five years to $12 million, but Perkins admitted “even if we added another zero on, we’d still be tuition-dependent.”
Compounding the problem are concerns about rising tuition and student debt that affect the discount rate – the percent of tuition that average students actually pay. Undergraduates at NEC pay, on average, much less than half the $35,000 tuition because of discounts and grants from the school; the college spends more on financial aid ($18 million) than salaries ($14 million).
As if that’s not enough, there is also uncertainty about the role of liberal arts in a changing economy, and concerns that changing policy on immigration will hurt schools’ ability to enroll the international students that have increasingly been a financial lifeline.
The resulting strain can be seen in many of New England College’s peers in the state. In Rindge, for example, Franklin Pierce College has cut back on majors and staff and its financial straits have drawn federal attention; in New London, a multimillion-dollar shortfall led Colby-Sawyer College to stop offering English as one of its majors, leading to debate about the nature of liberal arts; and most disturbingly, in Chester, years of financial problems led Chester College, long known as White Pines College, to shut its doors in 2010 after 65 years. Its buildings may become a private high school for Chinese students.
But Perkins, who has been president at NEC for a decade and with the school twice as long, says the trustees and administrators at the college have been preparing for these challenges for years. New England College is making the transition from being just a set of beautiful buildings nestled alongside the Contoocook River where young adults can get a four-year degree.
“If we were undergraduate only, nothing but residential undergraduates – with all the services we provide, it would not be viable,” she said. Hence that push for other revenue streams.
“There’s always volatility in revenue streams. The economy changes, students preferences for specific majors or masters change, practices change,” she said. “With all of those in place, some will go down and some will go up. That’s what keeps us secure.”
Perkins ticked off four sources of income that the college has developed.
1. Undergraduates living on campus. Consider these the college equivalent of a store’s loss leaders – items that might not make much money but which help bring in other customers.
NEC has about 900 undergraduates on campus, compared to about 600 a decade ago, and is trying to boost that number to 1,500. Perkins said that figure is based on surveys asking people what size they thought would suit the campus.
“This fall we enrolled 350, our goal, in freshmen and transfers. We could comfortably enroll 400 or so … without having to build more (housing),” she said. Going to 1,500 would require more dormitories; NEC occupies 230 acres with 36 buildings, and has more than enough land to fit new dorms.
Like many of its rivals, NEC is wooing high schoolers well outside its core markets of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, extending not just throughout New England but down to New York and New Jersey, and places like Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
“We’ve had a 150 percent increase over last year in applications,” Perkins said. However, the number of applications is not the guide to enrollments that it was in the days when paper forms had to be mailed in. Students now apply to five, 10 or even more schools, so it’s far from a certainty that they’ll attend even if they’re accepted.
2. Campus-based graduate students, most of whom live elsewhere, including a contingent of south Asian students who live in Hooksett, where rents are cheaper. Graduate students receive little or no tuition discount.
International students are an important part of NEC’s future: The school reported 389 international students this academic year, including a three-fold increase in international graduate students, many seeking business degrees.
3. A small but growing “hybrid” graduate program that combines online and in-classroom work.
4. Perhaps most importantly, the lucrative world of online-only education, both for undergraduates and for graduate students, who total about 1,400 students this year. They are older – average age about 37 – and are taught both by faculty who teach on campus as well as adjuncts hired just for online sessions who are paid per class.
Many colleges have been expanding into online education, following such examples as Southern New Hampshire University, the Manchester-based school that has developed a large national following via internet classes, but it requires a delicate balance, to not dilute the essence of the college that attracts students in the first place.
NEC hopes that its approach, such as limiting most online classes to 20 students or fewer, will maintain the connection and bond for students, even those who don’t set foot on campus until they get their diploma.
“When our (online) students started showing up for graduation you could see they knew each other, even though they had never met. They had high attachment to the institution. It’s so obvious, so clear that they are deeply engaged with each other, with the professors, with the institution,” Perkins said.
Even with all this change and new technology, NEC believes its small-town New England look and feel remains key.
“We identify as a small college. Even if we have many more students online, that’s not going to change, because of our campus,” Perkins said.
As part of that image, Perkins said NEC will not be doing what many schools have done and change its name to “university,” even though it offers advanced degrees. Many schools have adopted “university” to lure international students, because overseas the word “college” frequently denotes the equivalent of a private high school, but Perkins said NEC decided that “college” better reflects its personality.
And New England College certainly isn’t giving up on its campus – much to the relief of Henniker, which collected $205,000 in NEC property taxes in December (educational facilities are tax exempt but support structures aren’t), and which gets a huge boost for businesses and apartments from the school.
The most visible sign of NEC’s investment is the John Lyons Center, a $9.5 million, 19,000-square foot academic and student center that opened in the fall, the first new building constructed here since 2001. The college is moving closer to building a 350-seat theater as part of the multi-million-dollar Rosamond Page Putnam Center for the Performing Arts, and down the road it has plans for a new athletic facility to aid its many Division III teams.
And the school has launched its first capital campaign, to gather big funds for future projects. The original goal, the school says, was $25 million but it has raised $31.5 million so far.
“We’re in a growth mode,” Perkins said.
Yet even while NEC embraces change, she said, it won’t change some things.
“Liberal arts is central to our mission. Even if you are majoring in business, you are going to get a dose of liberal arts; we are adamant about that,” she said. “The liberal arts have been kind of under assault. But solid liberal arts preparation and career preparation, too, the two are not mutually exclusive. … We like to say we don’t prepare you for your first job, we prepare you for your last job, prepare you for life.”
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
