Coordinating Colleges at the City Level

Could we create metro-area councils to better organize the work that postsecondary providers do for their communities’ learners, employers and citizens?

It might seem counterintuitive to envision colleges in a metropolitan area cooperating (rather than competing) more in an era of financial pain than in times of plenty. But I’d argue that the old way of operating—vying for traditional-age students right out of high school—is going to be an insufficient strategy for most colleges going forward. The more fruitful approach for most will include providing new kinds of programs and services for learners they haven’t necessarily served before (like working adults), and most institutions are going to be better off doing that work with partners than on their own.

What might greater coordination around a metropolitan area or region actually look like? It could obviously build off models we already have—those that encourage more college-going and workforce and economic development. Daniel Greenstein, who led significant collaboration and regional coordination at the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education and is doing some of the best thinking around about higher education right now, warns that most multi-institution collaborations fail because they “take on too much too soon,” before trust is built, and he’s certainly right that starting small makes sense.

But in my grandest vision, metro areas would aim big. They’d not only collaborate on encouraging more people to go to college and preparing workers for local employers, but they’d work together in deeper (and potentially more difficult) ways.

They’d share data on their existing academic programs and figure out which might benefit from being offered collectively and more affordably, through sharing of faculty members and resources.

They’d work with employers to determine where their hiring needs are now and will be tomorrow, and which programs and credentials will be necessary to meet the need. This kind of academic program coordination, when it’s done at all, is most often done at the state level, but there’s enormous variation in how much authority state coordinating bodies have and how willing they are to use it (especially if it involves saying no to a flagship or land-grant university).

They’d go beyond institution-to-institution articulation agreements and build out common platforms for learning mobility (like my colleagues at Ithaka S+R have with their Transfer Explorer).

They might even create local or regional systems, in varying degrees of formality up to and including mergers, in which multiple institutions share leadership, infrastructure, programs and more. Like the Auraria Campus in Denver (which the Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and the University of Colorado at Denver share), only on steroids.

The big questions, as they almost always are, would be about who’s in charge—of bringing the institutions together in the first place, of deciding what they do together—and how formal the structures are.

Read the full article here!

Doug Lederman  is the co-founder of Inside Higher Ed and a principal of Lederman Advisory Services, where he works to try to make higher education better. Before helping to launch IHE, Doug worked at The Chronicle of Higher Education from 1986 to 2003, and he has won three National Awards for Education Reporting from the Education Writers Association. This excerpt is posted here with permission. You can reach Doug via email here.

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