Should We Coordinate Higher Ed at the City Level? (column)

A lifetime ago, when I was overseeing reporting projects at The Chronicle of Higher Education in the early 1990s, my colleagues and I had what struck me as a brilliant idea for a major editorial undertaking. We would send a team of reporters to a reasonably sized American city—we pictured Pittsburgh—to examine how the various colleges and universities in the region were competing to serve students, businesses and others.

This was at a time when enrollments and college-going rates were slowing but still growing, while a recession was beginning to pinch state and federal funding for higher education. Competition for students was intensifying; for-profit higher education was ascendant and community colleges were hitting their stride. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see which institutions were gaining ground, which were lagging and why?

The project never happened (for a variety of reasons), but I remembered it recently while talking with college and university leaders in urban areas about both the opportunities and the limitations of greater cooperation with other institutions in their regions.

I thought of the project not because it was so brilliant, but because, in hindsight, my framing at the time shows that I, too, was trapped in the traditional way of thinking about higher education: as a zero-sum marketplace in which a bunch of individual actors compete for students and revenue. Some institutions win, some lose and barely a thought is given to cooperation, let alone coordination.

I’d like to think we’re in a different era now, given the cascading pressures (which I’m getting as tired of listing as you probably are of reading), and several of my recent columns have been ruminations about the desirability of more cross-institutional collaboration and “systemlike” behavior in our nonsystem of higher education. A sampling:

One thing my never-accomplished project got right, despite its flawed framing, is that while some of higher education’s opportunities and challenges are “national,” it may be more fruitful to try to address them at a smaller scale.

There’s an enormous amount of higher education policy and other work that gets done by states, of course; among other things, they are primarily responsible for coordinating the behavior of public and sometimes private nonprofit colleges, though they have greatly varying power and wield it differently. But statewide policy may not be the best tool in places that have cities and regions with wildly different needs and resources, as most do.

I’d argue that there’s enormous potential for us to narrow the focus even more: to drive greater cooperation and coordination among education and training providers at the metropolitan or regional level. That’s today’s topic.

Why might such an approach make sense?

Metropolitan areas are the country’s economic centers, home to the overwhelming majority of economic activity and employment in the U.S. While we treat the economy as a national one, “we really have a series of regionalized, specifically metropolitan economies” with distinctive emphases and sets of employers, says Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro.

The vast majority of Americans live in metro areas, and that proportion continues to grow, though the pace is slowing. And most people who want education or training seek it within 50 to 100 miles of where they live.

Given that they are both population centers and economic hubs, it’s unsurprising that most urban areas have a lot of postsecondary providers, because there’s significant need and opportunity. But I’d posit that the more colleges and universities there are in a given area, the less collaboratively and more competitively they have traditionally operated.

There’ve been exceptions. For nearly 20 years, promise programs have developed in scores of communities, unifying colleges and other partners in a shared goal of increasing college-going and success through scholarships and better designed pathways. A related set of organizations, embodied by Cincinnati’s Strive Together, focus on “cradle-to-career” advancement for young people in specific geographic areas.

Most cities and communities also have at least one, if not several, government agencies or other entities responsible for economic and workforce development, and they convene institutional leaders, employers and others to meet the needs of employers, including by ensuring an array of education and training for a pipeline of workers.

This urban-centered focus was fueled within the last decade by investment from the Biden administration’s Build Back Better program and the CHIPS Act, Muro of Brookings says, citing initiatives in cities such as Syracuse, Indianapolis and others. The massive federal financial awards were an incentive for institutions to overcome individualism and provincialism to collaborate.

Crisis can also provide that kind of incentive. Shannon Gilkey is commissioner of postsecondary education in Rhode Island, which, while a state—duh—is so dominated by Providence that no community is more than 40 miles away from the urban center.

Gilkey cites several recent moments of collaboration by the state’s colleges and universities. As was true in many areas, they came together during COVID as never before for planning and joint initiatives.

They also joined forces last fall at the urging of state officials when Rhode Island faced losing one of its most significant employers, the toy company Hasbro, to neighboring Massachusetts. Although the wooing failed to keep Hasbro in Rhode Island, the state’s postsecondary institutions—from the Community College of Rhode Island to the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University—“put all of their intellectual capital together” to develop a collaborative package of talent pipeline and research offerings.

“When the shit hits the fan, we can move the ball,” Gilkey said. One provost told him, “We should be doing this all the time.” But of course the reality is that colleges—like most of us—move faster and more aggressively and possibly more collaboratively when they feel like they have to. We’re less inclined during “normal” times because collaboration often requires compromise and loss of control; who wants to do that when you don’t have to?

I’d make the case that many colleges and universities might be in a perpetual state of emergency now, given the stew of financial pressure, demographic change, loss of public confidence, etc. (We need an acronym for that list of woes—maybe something that spells out “shitstorm”?)

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.

Any formal government involvement, in terms of control or decision-making, may be a nonstarter in many places—most colleges don’t want more bosses.

But I don’t think we can count on institutions in most places to do this on their own; many are too self-focused. In my ideal, someone—a local foundation or some other entity with a deep and long-term interest in the region, perhaps a chamber of commerce or an association of employers—would convene a conversation involving business and nonprofit leaders, college and university presidents, citizen groups, and government representatives.

They would develop a shared understanding of the city’s or region’s goals and its problems, with the ultimate goal of determining how the collective set of institutions, employers, funders and policy experts might best use their assets to achieve the goals and address the problems—and, importantly, whether new partnerships or alliances or structures might help do it better.

If this all seems vague or undoable or undeveloped, that’s because, as usual, I have more questions than answers. But if you see some promise to this idea of a more metropolitan or regional approach to coordinating the work of postsecondary education, I’d love to brainstorm about it.

You know where to find me.