Southern Vermont College

I participated in a recent conference sponsored by the New England Board of Higher Education, aptly titled “After the Crash: A New Reality for Higher Education.”  At this event, there was considerable discussion about how to navigate today’s educational landscape, given the state of the economy, state capacity to fund higher education, the costs of higher education, changing demographics and the Administration’s push for more degree recipients.

The data documenting the state of higher education do not paint a pretty picture, as observed by Dennis Jones, the president of the National Center for High Education Management Systems, a presenter at the conference. His most recent data for NCHEMS, which analyzes data on higher ed policy decisions, can be reviewed here. The Delta Project develops data and policy tools to improve productivity and public accountability for performance in secondary education. Click here for their latest reports.  

At the NEBHE conference, I suggested the power of partnerships as a partial answer to the myriad of problems within the higher education arena. The range of beneficial potential partnerships is limited only by our imagination; there can be partnerships among institutions of higher education (this includes public and private, two and four year and four year and graduate institutions), between colleges and the private sector (both for profit and non-profit) and government (local, state and federal). Chart #1, presented at the conference, visually presents the wide range of partnership possibilities.

However, partnering – of all sorts – presents sizable hurdles, the two most significant of which are the need to change academic culture and time.  Rather than prizing autonomy and independence, institutions of higher learning need to relinquish power and elitism in favor of wise, fiscally beneficial and empowering partnerships.  This is no small task.  Chart #2, also presented at the conference, shows a ring of challenges before partnering can become a reality.

With the enormous potential of partnering and the sizable impediments to implementation, I think the best approach is to speak concretely and often about actual working partnerships, adopting the adage that deeds speak louder than words (or charts). The issue of partnering in higher ed has been garnering attention in the media. A recent article in the Boston Globe, which cites the NEBHE conference, talks about colleges partnering with other colleges to hold down operating costs.

Let’s keep the conversation going. In this blog, I plan to highlight some concrete examples of working partnerships.  Whatever one’s affection is for independence, partnering sure beats the alternatives: obsolescence and dissolution.