“Innovate or die” is a phrase that Jeffrey Docking, president of Adrian College in Michigan, often uses to chalk up today’s epidemic of college closures and withered balance sheets.
South of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Adrian College is a small, private, tuition-dependent liberal arts college—key indicators of an institution slowly trudging toward a “crisis point.”
“Something big needs to happen, a tectonic plate change almost, or it’s just going to be more of the same, and these places are going to go down,” says Docking, president of Adrian since 2005.
Over the last seven years, Docking has helped build a new course-sharing consortium that empowers financially limited colleges to offer competitive academic majors, minors and certificates online at a fraction of the price of in-house programs.
Over 130 institutions are now subscribed to Rize, which supplies over 600 majors to 10,000 students nationwide.
Operational savings: A textbook case on how one university is saving students $10 million
Layoffs and program cuts have become a popular strategy to reduce staff size, the most significant expense for many cash-strapped colleges and universities.
By sharing courses with other institutions, Adrian has reduced its academic budget by 13% without a layoff, all while launching 38 new academic programs in subjects such as supply chain management to cybersecurity, data analytics and public health.
“These are just amazing majors that we can now afford to offer in a small classroom setting, and we can control—if not, reduce—our costs,” Docking says. “It’s a win all the way around.”
Docking believes cutting expenses will eventually pay dividends for its students. Over the next several years, the college aims to reduce tuition by 20-30%, Docking says.
Adrian’s commitment to reducing student costs spurred the U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce to invite Docking to testify before Congress last November.
“I think the federal government is willing to be generous with financial aid and with Pell and SEOG and work study, but they want to know that colleges are doing their part to rein in costs and to be more efficient,” Docking says.
Last year, 84% of students reported that courses they enrolled in through the consortium were as good or better than their traditional on-campus classes, Docking says.
Unlike MOOCs, Rize’s class sizes remain below 30 students. New cohorts are formed with a new adjunct professor for each successive class.
“This helps us remain in the tradition of small, private, liberal arts colleges, which is to preserve individual attention on students’ needs. Personal attention is a function of size,” Docking says.
While remaining dedicated to the student, Adrian has “organically” reduced personnel costs by replacing in-house courses offered by retiring faculty with the online course-sharing model.
“I tell my professors that I’m not worried about the jobs that we haven’t hired for,” he says. “I’m worried about making sure my professors on campus have a job and that their students have opportunities for a traditional person-to-person education.”
