HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Liberal Arts Heading For A Crash?

Our business model is built on all kinds of assumptions that don’t hold anymore,” said Richard Holmgren, associate dean and CIO at Allegheny College. “Over the last 40 years of the last century, we built a model based on the assumption that net revenues per student would go up every year.…We have a culture built on that assumption,” Holmgren said. “Over the last 10 years, we’ve been struggling because net revenues have been flat.”

None of the participants in the daylong business-model workshop that followed seemed to dispute the basic premise that liberal arts programs are plagued by twin threats of inertia and economic unsustainability. To make matters even more grim, one self-described envoy of “the corporate world” — Kit Stinson, a vice president at the telecommunication giant Avaya — spoke up early on in the conference to testify against the truism that liberal arts graduates make for more creative and critical-thinking workers, setting off a parallel discussion about whether today’s incarnation of liberal education, sacrosanct to many, actually increases students’ employability outside academe.

Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Plus, bringing tuition shock home: “Eugene Tobin, a program officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and former president of Hamilton College, agreed that faculty members tend to hold relatively unsophisticated views of the business of higher education until their children begin applying to college.”