Closing down a college… and churches?

/ 14 January 2009

There was a fascinating piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed recently (sorry, it’s locked behind their firewall) written by a former college president who’d had to close down the college he was leading. I thought his advice was really interesting:

  • frame the message early and often
  • add humor whenever you can
  • get to know your accreditation and regulatory agencies if you have not already
  • be everyone's chief motivator
  • realize that you are no longer in control of your fate
  • remember that students will watch and learn
  • unplug every now and then </ul> There was also a list of 20 indicators that your institution is at risk:
    • Tuition discounting is more than 35 percent.
    • Tuition dependency is more than 85 percent.
    • Student default rate is more than 5 percent.
    • Debt service is more than 10 percent of annual operating budget. The ratio between endowment and operating budget is less than 1-to-3.
    • Average annual tuition increase has been greater than 8 percent for five years.
    • Deferred maintenance is at least 40 percent unfinanced.
    • Short-term bridge financing is regularly required in the final quarter of each fiscal year.
    • Less than 10 percent of operating budget is dedicated to technology.
    • Average alumni gift is less than $75, and less than 20 percent of alumni give annually.
    • Enrollment is 1,000 students or fewer.
    • The conversion yield — the percentage of students who attend the college after applying — is 20 percent lower than that of primary competitors.
    • Student retention is 10 percent behind that of primary competitors.
    • The institution is on probation with a regional accreditor.
    • The majority of faculty members do not hold terminal degrees.
    • Average age of full-time faculty is 58 or higher.
    • The leadership team averages more than 12 years, or fewer than three years, of service.
    • No complete online program has been developed.
    • No new degree or certificate program has been developed for at least two years.
    • It takes more than a year to approve a new degree program. </ul> (This latter list is apparently from a book entitled Turnaround: Leading Stressed Universities and Colleges to Excellence.)

      Quite apart from how interesting some of the later items on this list are -- "no complete online program has been developed"? -- I can't help thinking not only about how this might apply to seminaries, but even more importantly, what are the indicators we ought to be paying attention to with churches? I know there are lists of financial indicators, but what might be the theological and educational ones? Things like "less than 20% of your congregation is actively engaged in lifelong learning," or "fewer than 1/4 of your congregation speaks of God in active verb forms," etc. etc.

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