Table of Contents
The Future of St. Lawrence
Adapted from President Daniel F. Sullivan's concluding remarks at the Campaign St. Lawrence on-campus celebration, Sunday, October 5, 2003.
When I meet with students, as I did recently in Professor Ron Flores' and Professor Fred Exoo's class, the topic is often the University—how it works and why we do what we do. After we talk for a while, I ask them to imagine that they are the czar of the University, with complete power to transform it any way they want, instantly and permanently.
In all of the years I've asked this question of students I don't think I've ever heard a proposal for truly fundamental, systemic change. Someone will say, “I'd make sure there is hot water in the showers.” Another will say, “St. Lawrence costs too much,”
a third that we don't provide enough courses that train students for a first job, or for careers.
I get these kinds of responses, I think, not because our students have no imagination, or don't know how to think institutionally, or don't understand why we cost so much, but because getting this kind of institution right is such a very hard problem. There are no simple, one-dimensional answers. One has to think systemically—understanding why the University is put together the way it is, how the parts are meant to fit together, and how change in one part of the system affects the rest of the system (and thus) the overall outcomes for students. Our lenses for viewing at least some aspects of the modern liberal arts college have been colored by how the for-profit sector works, and those lenses make it hard to see and understand some fundamental realities of our situation in private higher education.
So I've learned to approach planning for the future of St. Lawrence by thinking systemically, and by adopting a kind of self-conscious humility because the issues are so complex and the stakes so high. With that as context, let me say something about the enormous challenges I believe lie ahead and where I think we need to go as an institution in this next cycle.
Our Challenges
In my view, we face three interrelated, difficult challenges in the years just ahead:
We must engage in a kind of continuous quality improvement in the education we provide our students. We must be dogged in our commitment to deeper understanding of what we mean by excellence in undergraduate liberal arts education in the diverse and multicultural world of today, and dogged in our efforts to create and sustain the kind of learning community in which this education can happen most fruitfully.
Then we must locate and attract to St. Lawrence increasing numbers of students prepared for and intending to take with the utmost seriousness the amazing opportunity we make available while remaining the same overall size in enrollment, while continuing to increase the diversity of our students, and further, while decreasing the percentage of tuition revenue we must in turn provide for student financial aid.
Finally, we must find a way to finance that opportunity in a fully sustainable way.
The opportunity I'm referring to is, of course, also an opportunity for leadership development, for the development of written, oral and electronic communication skills, for the development of the interpersonal skills that allow one to traverse with dexterity increasingly complicated organizational situations characterized by growing diversity of many kinds. It is co-curricular and extracurricular as well as curricular.
I don't for a minute want to minimize how hard the first of these challenges is—the challenge of understanding and pursuing excellence—but I believe we have the ability in our faculty and staff to do that. St. Lawrence has been a national leader in defining the liberal arts education appropriate for today and tomorrow, and a national leader in the creation of learning communities and co-curricular programs that facilitate liberal arts education. I have confidence that we—especially our faculty and student life staff—know how to engage in the necessary continuous quality improvement.
Let's turn to the issue of attracting the right students. The students who thrive here—who take maximum advantage of the multidimensional richness of this place—are, to use an old term gone out of fashion, the “well-rounded” ones. Our most selective independent competitors talk of seeking a well-rounded class by attracting a wide diversity of individuals with one or two specific strengths. St. Lawrence, in contrast, recognizing that life's challenges also require people who are multidimensional and who have multiple competences, has always sought students who have many and different strengths. It seems obvious to us that there should be demanding liberal arts colleges to which such students are attracted and in which they thrive.
We have literally hundreds of such students now, and the number is growing every year. Nonetheless, attracting more and more of the most able at a broad range of competences is one of our largest challenges. It is increasingly challenging because of the transformation of the market for college education in America into what Hoxby has called a national, integrated higher education market. In Reclaiming the Game, Bowen and Levin explain, “since 1940 . . . . higher education has been transformed from a series of local autarkies to a nationally and regionally integrated market in which each college faces many potential competitors.” The factors responsible for this transformation include the advent of modern standardized admissions testing in 1943-48 and of standardized financial needs analysis in 1956.
After demonstrating that measures of geographic integration are clearly related to the increased stratification of students by aptitude, Hoxby concludes, “The changes in market structure are due, at least in part, to fundamental changes in students' costs of geographic mobility and the amount of information that students and colleges have about each other. These changes are beyond the control of any individual college and they are unlikely to be reversed.”
The emergence of a national integrated market for higher education has made it far more difficult today than it was in the 1960s and 1970s to change one's institutional position in that marketplace—or, in our case, to restore a partially lost position in that marketplace. And yet, restoring our market position is exactly what we have been accomplishing. The effort required has been huge, both financially and in terms of time and commitment on the part of everyone associated with St. Lawrence—faculty, staff, trustees, alumni, parents—everyone. Despite the inertia against which we must now push because of the much greater stratification, we have made significant strides in a very short time.
Since 1999, the year our applicant pool was only about 2,200, applications have grown almost to 3,100 and the mean SAT score of our applicant pool has grown 40 points. We are getting a higher percentage of top students to apply. The mean SAT score of enrolled students has increased 20 points.
In 1998 we decided to energize our admissions recruitment efforts with what we called a “blue sky” admissions budget, and renewed our commitment to making the kinds of investments in the quality and performance of St. Lawrence for students that you all have seen these last five years. Most of these investments took some time to implement, and there is always a lag before the word gets out and one sees the impact on admissions recruitment. Nonetheless, we are now seeing that impact as more and more prospective students are attracted to a liberal arts university—our University—that has rapidly become both more demanding academically and significantly more student-centered. Now is not the time to flinch.
At the same time, we have pushed the envelope financially. We have raised more money in charitable gifts than anyone ever thought we could. We have also borrowed tax-exempt capital for facilities construction and renovation, to supplement what we have raised in gifts, to improve the physical environment here with an eye both on teaching and learning and the overall student experience, on the one hand, and admissions attractiveness on the other. And finally, we have been willing to run a non-cash deficit in our operating budget resulting from the rapid growth in depreciation—a non-cash expense—in order to move even faster than we otherwise could.
So, where do we go from here? And how can you help?
What Next?
St. Lawrence is not just any liberal arts college, and that's not just because it's our liberal arts college. In a North-eastern private college and university marketplace full of the most elite institutions in the nation, we are rare in our simultaneous commitment to being both very demanding academically and highly student-centered. We increasingly see our most selective competitors, all demanding academically, becoming less and less student-centered as they pursue a mission more and more like that of the research universities. Some even call themselves “research colleges.” And yet, research on the outcomes of higher education shows clearly that the selective residential liberal arts colleges that have the greatest impact on students are those few that are both highly demanding academically and very student-centered. St. Lawrence is one of those.
And we are unusual and very visible nationally in the extent to which we take the idea of the “learning community” seriously, from our First-Year Program to our approach to study abroad, to the highly diverse living-learning environments we make available to students on campus, to our burgeoning programs of student-faculty research.
We are a special, and I believe also especially worthy, liberal arts college. We take our fiduciary responsibility—our sacred trust, our vocation—with the utmost seriousness. We have a clear mission—“to provide an inspiring and demanding undergraduate education in the liberal arts to students selected for their seriousness of purpose and intellectual promise”—focused directly and single-mindedly on the education of students. And we are getting the job done.
Somehow, we must find a way to keep up the momentum—to keep financing the transformation of this University on which we have embarked.
Financing Continued Momentum
Our financial plan, combining continued spending discipline to keep costs under control with continued revenue enhancements, has us coming back into full balance and to a sustainable financial equilibrium, fully funding depreciation, within five years. We would be in balance now with anything like normal endowment investment markets. It is my view and that of my staff and the trustees that five years is too long a time frame. We must get to a sustainable financial equilibrium faster than that, and yet we must also keep moving forward because our admissions results tell us that what we have been doing is working.
So how will we do it? First we must recognize that investing at the speed with which we have has made it difficult simultaneously to ask hard questions about things we should stop doing. But we have been asking those questions over the past year and will continue to do so. We will take over $1 million in recurring costs out of the operating budget, not including an additional $1 million in savings we will capture by replacing retiring senior faculty members with junior faculty members who will begin at lower salaries.
But we must also increase revenues faster. We have been successful in the last several years at attracting strong students who can afford to attend
St. Lawrence without financial aid even as we have continued our generous financial aid policies and increased student diversity. We will need to be even more successful at this.
We must hope that our endowment investment strategies and the broad investment markets at least stabilize and hopefully improve so that endowment spending may once again grow.
Finally, we must continue to raise more money from charitable gifts, both for support of current operations and to finance endowment growth and facilities improvements. Your gifts to Campaign St. Lawrence got us this far. It is our fond hope that, as you can, you will want to do more. We need you more than ever. We are committed to continuing to earn your trust and support.
Change
Much has changed at St. Lawrence in the last seven years. But it has been our intent to accomplish this change so that the essence of St. Lawrence—the best aspects that give St. Lawrence its distinctive character—can remain the same.
In my first year as president I wrote in the St. Lawrence magazine about the way I hoped change would happen on my watch. I said:
“In my experience, knowing the genes of a place—how it is wired, if you will—is essential to managing change so that it feels right. All institutions must change with the times … but institutions that change guided by their most central values are really simultaneously changing and staying the same. Their values are a road map which guides them from one place to another. By checking in with their values along the way, they know if they are on the right path. When even profound change can be seen as continuity with the past, institutions can make their way to very new places with surprising ease.”
What are these values that can be our road map? For me they have always been a wonderful blend of North Country , frontier values with those values we associate with the Universalist Church . I said it this way in that same St. Lawrence magazine article and wouldn't change it almost eight years later:
“While shaped and nurtured by the North Country, St. Lawrence is yet a place much in and of the wider world—a place which gives its students North Country roots, but which also teaches them about and connects them, via first-hand overseas experience as well as through books and talk, to the big issues in the world today, and to the little people as well as the big people of the world. The North Country side of our character includes, in my view, a kind of simplicity, directness, lack of pretension, honesty, fairness, and willingness to forge ahead and face the unknown squarely. . . . One can feel it on campus, and in the town, and it feels right.
“At the same time, there is here something cosmopolitan, worldly, progressive, and reformist, committed to equality, equity and truth-telling—Universalist values joined to the frontier character just described. What this means is that struggles like our quest to be more diverse, inclusive and multicultural are really about continuity with the past—being true to our nature—rather than about striking off in a new direction. We pursue these and other changes in the present and future of St. Lawrence not as a rejection of the past, but as an attempt to remain true to the values most central to our character—values brought together in this institution in the middle of the 19th century.”
We are both adapting to and seeking to have a major impact on the world of the 21st century by educating worthy, committed students in the liberal arts. That, I believe, is work truly worth doing, and you—the most generous supporters a university could ever want—make it possible.