Higher education in the US is facing a crisis of increasing operational expenses accompanied by increases in the cost of attendance for students. These concerns are especially relevant for the non-elite public and private institutions. Small independent institutions without large endowments are having especially difficult times trying to maintain the quality of their programs while facing serious enrollment challenges due to the changing demographics in this country as well as having more people questioning the value proposition of higher education.
In response to this situation, the presidents from eighteen private colleges and universities from around the country have formed the “Lower Cost Models for Independent Colleges (LCMC)” consortium. The consortium was formed under the leadership of Michael Alexander, president of Lasell College. The goals of the group are to work collaboratively to address the challenge of increasing expenses by 1) supporting each other in efforts to implement innovative programs that reduce costs both institutionally and to students; and 2) engage in collaborative projects to broaden curricular opportunities for students and lower individual institutional costs for such programs while passing along the savings to students.
The group, with support from the Davis Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation have begun work on three projects:
- Development of an eight-course curriculum in coding to meet the demands of the market
- To offer the courses necessary for students to sit for the Certified Financial Planning exam. The LCMC is the first consortium to navigate successfully the application process for a group of institutions to present students for the National Certification Examination and Board Certification.
- Working with Google, a group of schools in the consortium has designed two courses, one in applied computer science and data science for students in the liberal arts – Applied Computing 101 (Foundations of Python Programming) and Applied Computing 201 (How to Think Like a Data Scientist). Google is partnering with these schools as well as with a few other small liberal arts schools in order to help spread needed skill sets to students at institutions without computer science departments. According to Cristin Frodella at Google, the goal of this project is to give people who are not computer scientists the skills to make data informed decisions. Google’s approach is to train faculty in other disciplines which are STEM adjacent to offer these courses so that students can gain the knowledge that they need to make data informed decisions. The courses are project based and Google and the schools are learning together. In addition, Google has developed a 10 week intensive boot camp which a few schools are offering in the summer.
In each of these initiatives, schools can opt in or out of participating. The schools that do participate will jointly offer the curriculum in each program with faculty from the various schools participating. The course delivery will use on-line, hybrid and traditional models depending on the best way to serve the students involved.
This initiative is beginning on a small scale but has promise for increased program offerings in areas where collaboration makes sense. The schools are from across the country which provides them with more degrees of freedom to collaborate as they tend not to compete with each other. The presidents noted that they would be unlikely to be able to do these joint activities with neighboring schools. The initiative has the support of the presidents at each of the institutions as well as other administrators and faculty. The broad support, starting at the top, along with a willingness to thing outside the box and to trust the other schools, gives promise that this initiative will continue to grow and gain traction among these schools.