Trusteeship - November/December 2023 - 27

-in order to succeed
Higher Education
W
To navigate the path forward,
higher education institutions
need to play offense.
To do so will take a long view.
And that's where trustees
play a critical role.
BY BRIDGET BURNS
HEN SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIVERSITY
(SNHU) rolled out its College for America a
decade ago, it planned to crack the code on the
$10,000 bachelor's degree for tens of thousands
of working adults. Its enrollment never achieved those heights,
and it has since closed shop. But in those same ten years, SNHU
learned a tremendous amount about what works and what
doesn't when it comes to serving adult students in new ways-
and it expanded into one of the country's few mega-universities
with 175,000 enrollments today.¹
Why? SNHU learned from its failures, and it kept experimenting.
And over time, that formula has helped it thrive.
Those same interwoven threads run through many of modern
higher education's greatest success stories: experimentation,
failure, tenacity, and growth. Georgia State University-which
has dramatically increased success rates for first-generation college-goers,
students of color, and those from low-income families-has
tried many things that failed to make a difference.
" Student success is not finding something that turns a switch
from 35 percent graduation rates to 100 percent, " said Tim
Renick, executive director of the National Institute for Student
Success at Georgia State, during a University Innovation Alliance
(UIA) podcast. " What we're doing on a day-to-day basis is
trying lots of different things, some of which may be successful,
others of which will be entire failures. "
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Trusteeship - November/December 2023

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