Published by The Chronicle of Higher Education
Beloit College was in trouble. Prospective students and their parents were increasingly skeptical that a liberal-arts education, the core academic offering at this private college in Wisconsin, was worth the investment. Enrollment had dropped by nearly 25 percent over a decade.
In the spring of 2023, the college could see that it would once again miss its enrollment targets for the next academic year.
Around the same time, Eric Boynton became Beloit’s president. Boynton sat down with the departing president, Scott Bierman, who’d led Beloit for the previous 14 years, and started to think about how to better sell the college to prospective students.
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Institutions like Beloit are grappling with the demographic cliff and public doubts about their value simultaneously. Some have tried to reimagine themselves in recent years, and the results have been mixed.
It’ll take time to see how Beloit’s efforts fare. But Boynton, a philosopher by training, believes the college has a compelling pitch. “Liberal arts and the humanities are not dead,” he said.
David Strauss, a principal with Art & Science Group, a consulting firm that works with colleges, said that “organizational changes” on their own are usually not enough to confront the demands of an ever-changing market.
Colleges need “to do more than be good at the liberal arts,” Strauss said, and they must find ways to “make changes in the student experience” to raise enrollment.
Boynton agreed, adding that liberal-arts colleges shouldn’t “shy away from” career-oriented language.
The college plans to measure success through its annual student-experience survey, Boynton said. Responses as to whether students feel they’ve had access to internships, faculty mentorship, and career preparation will provide the college feedback as to whether the schools are doing what they’re intended to do, he said.
In a few years’ time, Boynton said the college will be able to look at whether the students who engaged with Beloit in the application process were interested in the same areas offered by the new schools. Even further down the road, the college may seek input from alumni of the schools, Boynton said.
If Beloit sees results, other colleges might have a “model” to follow, Hayot said. Beloit’s ideas, he said, might allow the humanities to “grow rather than continue to shrink.”