Why small schools need strong systems

This is the cultural moment for the small, the local, and the specialized.  Craft beer has more cultural resonance than Budweiser, artisan bread is more attractive than Wonder Bread, more people would rather shop at a farmer's market than at a Food Lion. Local bookstores are resurgent; Barnes and Noble is fading. In politics, people distrust the national government but trust their local governments; they perceive the quality of "public schools" and "teachers" to be in decline, but still like the neighborhood school and  their kids' teachers.

It is easy to see why this is the case.  Local things carry both a perception of value and of quality.  They are more personal and more connected to their audiences.  They are more authentic than big, distant, hard-to-understand organizations. They have values rather than brands.

But the change that makes this the age of the local has less to do with perceptions and more to do with process.  Today, for the first time, small organizations have access to excellent systems.  A jewelry-maker can sell his wares on Etsy or Amazon, take payments through a plug-in Square device, and print new models on a 3-D printer.  Local growers have greater access to heirloom varieties, specific information about their land's microclimates, and simple ways to get their products to market. And all of them have inexpensive ways to draw attention to their products. Each of these systems allows small producers and organizations to be excellent at what they do.

It is ironic, then, that in the age of the small, small schools struggle so much.  There are many explanations for the attractiveness of big colleges and universities--Division I sports, a huge variety of majors, the prestige of their faculty, the dollars generated by tens of thousands of students and alumni. And there are plenty of reasons why small schools struggle--low visibility, small-town locations, and a perception that the value isn't worth the cost.

All of these are true, to be sure. But an equally important reason that small schools haven't flourished in this local moment is that they tend to have weak systems, or in some instances, are hostile to good ones.  We pride ourselves on personal interactions with students, but too often those one-on-one meetings happen because the student has a problem caused by a broken system--they got a bill they shouldn't have, or were advised into the wrong class, or can't graduate on time, or are in a conflict because they can't get away from the antagonist that is in every class in their small major.  We save money by not spending on infrastructure, even though spending on infrastructure protects against catastrophic failure and massive bills. And we don't build good policies and practices for problem-solving or innovation because we have long made decisions in idiosyncratic, one-off ways. In short, we believe that good systems are too expensive, or too impersonal, to be worth the time.

For students, faculty, and staff, though, these small school system problems mean that the experience of being at a small school is too often about working around failed transactions rather than building deep, authentic relationships.

The challenge for small schools, then, is to think more like the craft brewers, local growers, and artisans enjoying the prominence of this moment.  Obviously we need to focus our efforts on those few things we can do really well, and take pride in our specialized nature.  We need to contrast ourselves with our larger, more generalized peers.  But even more, we need to build strong systems, both within and outside of our institutions--systems that provide ongoing cultural support for small schools, and that free the faculty, staff, and students of small schools to attend to learning rather than patching broken systems.

The "new normal" is the old normal for small schools

Search the phrase "new normal higher education" and you will come across hundreds of links to articles arguing that concern about cost, debt, enrollment, tuition increases, and graduation rates have made running a college a risky business.  This period of uncertainty and rapid change is the "new normal."

This may in fact be true for public colleges and universities and for mid-sized privates, but for small, non-profit colleges and universities, the new normal is simply, well, normal.  We, the "old normal" schools, have always been institutions for whom the loss of a few students is cause for concern, where every penny gets counted, and where modest increases in cost both provide a bit of marginal revenue and heighten the risk that students will be unable to afford college.

The remarkable thing about the new normal, then, is not that there is such a thing, but that higher education analysts and the press have paid so little attention to schools that have proven their ability to survive the new normal for years and years.  What are those practices?  Here are a few:

• Denying the distinction between the liberal arts and professional training.  Schools struggling through the new normal are often committed to either a liberal arts education or a focus on professional and graduate training.  Old normal schools, like Barton College where I work, or the New American College and Universities, have always understood that the liberal arts are training for professional life, and that professional training is but a way of providing meaning for graduates and their families.  
• Acting in the public interest even as a "private" institution. New normal schools are struggling to attract students from outside their regions in an effort to bolster flagging local enrollments.  Old normal schools, because they have always drawn most of their students from nearby, understand their local settings, and are seen as acting in the public interest in their towns, cities, and region.  For instance, Barton College is building articulation agreements with local community colleges because our communities understand that expanding access to higher education is not just an abstraction, it is essential for the actual places where we live and work.
• Acting sustainably.  Many "old normal" schools aren't green in the current sense.  But they act sustainably in that they re-use, re-make, and restore most things.  Old computers get new processors, old chairs move from the library to offices, old buildings get remade.  This behavior is more than frugality.  It is a sign of a culture of tinkering and of comfort with traditional things.
• Avoiding pretense.  Old normal schools can never compete with larger, more successful, richer schools just now facing the new normal.  Our buildings will always be older, our technology more fragile, or residence halls less luxurious, our salaries and budgets smaller.  But acknowledging those limits has made us modest places, and thus places that feel welcoming to the new demographic of college-goers--those for whom size, scale, and aspiration indicate class divisions, not "the cutting edge."
• Acknowledging limits.  To overcome the limits of the new normal, higher education is forced to make ever more grandiose claims about its abilities--we promise transformative global experiences and world class learning and ever higher-paying jobs.  Old normal schools are less effusive.  We are working on the hardest problems in education--the effects of poverty, a crumbling K-12 system, the decline of rural towns, a shifting economy.  We don't claim to solve any of them.  But we do know how to make life in this context meaningful for our students.  We know how to help them to a moderately better future.  And in so doing, we acknowledge both the difficulty of creating a good society and the modest ways in which small, hard-working colleges and universities help do just that.