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
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.

(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.