The news landed with a thud on the last day of May 2024. Following the failure of a last-gasp appeal to the Alabama state legislature, the board of trustees at Birmingham-Southern College voted to close the liberal arts institution after 186 years. Shuttering the college was not a total surprise to administrators at similar institutions — Birmingham-Southern was drowning in debt, fiscally bruised by accounting errors and hemorrhaging students. By the time the closure was announced, the total enrollment had cratered to just more than 700 students, down from 1,346 for the 2014-2015 academic year.
Yet even for those who were fully plugged in to the small college scene, it was sobering news. Similar institutions had closed, but Birmingham-Southern sat in a well-populated area with an extensive network of alumni and a good deal of athletic success following a 2007 change to NCAA Division III (nonscholarship) classification. For many, the message was crystal clear: If it could happen at Birmingham-Southern, it could happen anywhere.
“We had been watching them try to navigate that for a couple of years,” said Karen Petersen, president of Hendrix College in Conway. “The challenges facing higher education are legion, and they’re facing every institution. All of these institutions that you would never think are in these situations are cutting budgets. Most of them are responding that way.”
Higher education in America is in the midst of a correction not seen since, possibly, ever. The size of high school graduating classes has been on a steady decline, triggered partially due to the sharp drop in birth rates during the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009. Because smaller private colleges are more reliant on tuition, schools with a profile similar to Hendrix have taken the greatest brunt of the decline. According to a recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, about 60 colleges are closing each year.
Along with the numbers comes something unquantifiable but possibly more troubling. A miasma of anxiety and uncertainty hangs over campuses big and small as the ascendant generation of students finds itself graduating to a world where employment, even below market value, is far from guaranteed. According to the Economic Policy Institute, unemployment for college graduates sits at 5.6 percent, well above the 4.3 percent affecting the rest of the country.
It is amid that environment that Petersen — and Hendrix in general — is rolling out a change to the college’s curriculum designed to answer those worries.
“We are not keeping the pace,” Petersen said. “We are setting the pace.”
Petersen is not just making noise. Following a comprehensive examination of prevailing trends and likely future outcomes, Hendrix announced in the spring that the small liberal arts college will operate under a new curricular approach dubbed “Via Hendrix,” a massive change in philosophy and operation with the goal of making the college more responsive to the needs of today’s brand of student.
Under Via Hendrix, every student will be required to complete a “co-op” of real, full-time professional work or research tied to that student’s major. The process begins with freshman students being assigned to integrated teams of advisers to assist not just in academics but career placement too. The second year will consist of hands-on preparation for the student’s work experience before a 12-to-14-week co-op provides a full-on professional assignment during students’ junior year. Students will be advised and guided through the co-op by Hendrix faculty and professionals working in the same field before a senior year dedicated to cementing postgraduation plans with faculty and advisers from the workforce.
“For this program that we’re ultimately launching, there is no model similar to Hendrix,” Petersen said. “There are very large institutions like the University of Cincinnati and Northeastern University [in Boston] who do co-op programs, but in the liberal arts space, in a small residential liberal arts college, we’re it.”
If Via Hendrix is a certified step forward, it is also a carefully considered wager. Should the move resonate with future students, the college could position itself as a successful statistical outlier with a healthy enrollment and a proven school-to-work pipeline. Hendrix is working in more of a comfort area than other liberal arts schools with enrollment hovering around 1,150 after a 2014 high-water mark of 1,358, but if Via Hendrix is not enough to punch back against dwindling nationwide enrollment, the very future of the college could be at stake.
To give Hendrix a fighting chance, administrators from the academic side devoted countless hours to combing through data and asking students past and present to share what is working and what is not. A big part of the effort involved reaching out to students who had left the college and those who opted to go elsewhere after being admitted to Hendrix. Sure enough, the same concerns and worries about job placement bubbled up.
“I think the job thing is really big,” said Teresa Garrett, the college’s executive vice president and provost. “There’s a lot of anxiety with both students and parents about why this is worth the time and money, the blood, sweat and tears. Why is it worth it? And that is the question that is seeded in them both by just the cost in terms of time and money but also things they’re hearing out in the world about whatever prevailing narrative there is around the good, bad or ugly about college education.”
In other words, higher education currently exists in an echo chamber. Even if a college is making strides toward accommodating the needs of today’s students, news about the overall decline in enrollment is never far away. In that sense, administrators at colleges across the country find themselves in the same role as CEOs delivering a quarterly earnings call — clarity is important, but so is painting an overall rosy picture.
Petersen believes in Via Hendrix but is not Pollyanna about the future.
“That fear is real, and it is reasonable,” Petersen said. “I’ve seen the data, and I understand it, but most people don’t, and we have to address that fear.”
That fear is lumped in with traditional stereotypes of the liberal arts experience that have proved maddeningly hard to quell. While the foundation of the entire liberal arts philosophy is to provide students with a broad and well-rounded educational experience, the students themselves have to believe their respective academic paths will lead them to a sustainable postgraduation future.
When the 18-month process of gathering data and researching curriculum kicked off, Petersen made a point of addressing areas of the Hendrix experience that remain sacrosanct.
“When I met with the board and interviewed for the position and talked to faculty, the only preconceptions I brought was, one, the liberal arts are nonnegotiable,” Petersen said. “Two, the residential experience is also nonnegotiable because it’s what sets Hendrix apart.”
Just about everything else has been fair game.
“We needed to rededicate for what this incoming set of students really need right now,” said Todd Tinsley, associate provost of academic affairs and a Hendrix alum, “which is to address some of their anxieties about a career after college.”
One immediate difference, Tinsley said, is that career preparedness will be part of each student’s everyday life at Hendrix. Colleges traditionally have career services departments available to counsel and assist students with internships and job placement, but it often falls on the individual student to reach out.
That was the standard operating procedure when Tinsley was an undergrad, and those days are over. Whether a student is listless or aimed like a missile at a specific career, every student at Hendrix will receive individualized, no-two-ways-about-it career guidance.
“That is still the model for career services,” Tinsley said. “You go see career services when you need something, and so what you end up doing is you end up serving a narrow band of your student body, the ones that are already thinking about those things. What’s unique about this is every one of our students is going to do this.”
Will it be enough? Getting an answer may require some waiting. The first cohort of students to have a four-year Via Hendrix experience will arrive in the fall, and it will take all four years before that first batch can provide data on how the program is progressing, but there is more at play than just the viability of a single small college. For those who see the issues affecting higher education as a crisis within a bubble, Petersen has a warning: You’re next.
“It’s been remarkably refreshing and easy to get partners excited about this,” Petersen said. “It’s pretty simple. I mean, if you own or run a business of any size, the demographic cliff is coming for you too. It’s here for us now. In four years, you get to face it. Either you create a talent pipeline now and you have access to these really bright, well-educated students sort of built in, or you’re going to be fighting tooth and nail against your competitors for the best workforce.”
The first of many litmus tests for Via Hendrix has been the reaction of the professional community. Ever since the Via Hendrix initiative was announced, both alums and nonalums have reached out to offer support and guidance for students going through the curriculum.
Tinsley cautioned that Via Hendrix will not eliminate good old-fashioned intellectual curiosity. It is certainly not uncommon for students to enter college with one career plan only to leave with another. Hendrix is not turning its back on that quintessential experience; a student’s advising team will be in constant communication and prepared to change course if need be.
“It starts in August when these new students arrive,” Tinsley said. “The big gem that garners a ton of attention, as it should, is the co-op full-time work experience in the third year of college. The secret ingredient to that is an integrated advising approach. Not only will they have a faculty adviser, they’re going to have a career counselor along with them. What they will be doing starting in August is figuring out what their needs are. Perhaps the things you’re interested in are not the things you thought you were going to be interested in.”
Petersen is adamant that Via Hendrix is not about survival. It is about reimagining how the college can benefit students by providing a clear, personalized and meticulous path toward life after college. It is also about continuing to make Hendrix a place for growth that also benefits the surrounding community and beyond.
“We’re going to thrive because Arkansas needs us to thrive,” Petersen said. “Arkansas needs Hendrix to be the place that it’s been for 150 years, this sort of talent-generation factory for the state. The country needs institutions like us to do really, really well, not just hang on. That requires you to be bold, right? It requires you to do other things that people aren’t willing to do.”
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