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.