Facing an existential crisis, some colleges do something increasingly rare: Adapt

Just beyond the entrance to the onetime department store that serves as the home of the Maine College of Art & Design is a long room with high ceilings in which students in the gaming and animation programs work.

What sets this room apart isn’t just the colorful sketches and storyboards everywhere, the shelves of action figures or the ubiquitous technology. It’s that there aren’t any interior walls, and the desks and other furniture can be easily rearranged as students’ interests change.

It’s a metaphor for the way this tiny college is adapting to demographic realities that have been shrinking enrollment in higher education for 10 years, and that have only gotten worse in the pandemic, with declining birth rates now frustrating hopes of any rebound.

Ian Anderson, vice president of academic affairs and dean at the Maine College of Art & Design. “The numbers are undeniable,” Anderson says. “You have to innovate your way off of this demographic cliff.” Molly Haley/The Hechinger Report

As the enrollment crash becomes an existential crisis, what’s happened at this nearly 140-year-old art school shows that colleges and universities can, in fact, transform themselves in response, including by more quickly adding programs that students and employers demand, better connecting academic offerings with workforce opportunities, and generally challenging a culture that resists change.

“The numbers are undeniable,” said Ian Anderson, vice president of academic affairs and dean of the college. “You have to innovate your way off of this demographic cliff.”

So the Maine College of Art & Design has loosened up and done something higher education hasn’t always been particularly quick to do: Given students what they want.

“All of these students want animation and gaming. So let’s give it to them,” said Laura Freid, the college’s president. “We all need to look at, what does an 18-year-old want?”

Demand for traditional arts and craft majors has fallen nationwide, according to the National Association of Schools of Art & Design, while interest in game design and animation has soared; where 30 percent of Maine College of Art & Design’s students 10 years ago majored in design, now 60 percent do. So the school has amped up those programs and created spaces like the flexible workroom that can quickly adjust to future changes in interest.

It printed up recruiting materials for prospective applicants that, instead of listing majors, list the jobs graduates go on to get, and it changed its name in August, adding “& Design.”

Jessica Tomlinson, director of the career counseling office at the Maine College of Art & Design. “There’s much more attentiveness to how they will be using their degree in the world,” she says of students. Molly Haley/The Hechinger Report

It absorbed the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, which teaches the hot subjects of podcasting and documentary film, and added a minor in music – the only music minor at a freestanding art school – and another in entrepreneurship.

“There’s much more attentiveness to how they will be using their degree in the world,” said Jessica Tomlinson, director of the career counseling office, called Artists at Work.

The college started what it calls & Lab, a course run in another open space with rolling walls and collapsible screens where students can solve real-world problems and get practical experience, creating work that they can add to their portfolios; among other things, & Lab created the college’s new magazine & in conjunction with its name change.

And it opened its building to students 24 hours a day, seven days a week, a seemingly small step that acknowledges real-life time commitments, but that at other institutions might be met with disdain, Freid said.

“Most of those beautiful campuses, the lights aren’t on between 8 p.m. and 10 a.m.,” she said. “But creativity doesn’t come only at 10 a.m. Our students love that they can be connected to the tools they need when they need them.”

Enrollment has increased from a low of fewer than 330 in the last recession to nearly 500 now, and was up this fall by 15 percent, federal and college data show. Other higher education institutions saw their numbers drop by 3.2 percent on top of a 3.4 percent decline last year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Maine College of Art & Design President Laura Freid says that, while small colleges have faced some of the greatest challenges from the enrollment decline, their size means they can adapt more quickly. Molly Haley/The Hechinger Report

Students “are voting with their feet,” said Anderson, looking very much like an art school dean in a plaid purple suit, a yellow knit cap and red Adidas sneakers.

It seems like an obvious idea to attract students by giving them what they want – “modernizing the program portfolio to be responsive to the real needs of the market,” as Huron Consulting Group managing director Peter Stokes, who specializes in higher education, puts it. But Stokes said many colleges and universities still aren’t doing it.

As enrollment continues to erode, “there’s a lot of dialogue going on and many, many more senior leadership teams are confronting the big questions,” he said. “That does not mean that the faculty are ready (for change) and it does not mean that the alumni are ready, so there are still all kinds of speed bumps and obstacles in the way.”

Among some of these constituencies, “there isn’t yet the widespread recognition that we need to trim, we need to reinvest, we need to focus on this and not that,” Stokes said.

This lack of urgency persists despite the fact that, in the last five years, more than 60 colleges have closed, merged or announced they will close, including at least 13 since the start of the pandemic.

An animation storyboarding class at the Maine College of Art & Design. Molly Haley/The Hechinger Report

Another small school, private Hartwick College in New York, provides a similar case study. There, enrollment troubles were compounded by that state’s Excelsior scholarship, which provides free tuition at public universities to residents who meet certain income cutoffs. When the program took effect in 2017, Hartwick’s enrollment fell 13 percent – enough to force “a top-to-bottom change,” President Margaret Drugovich said.

“We saw the writing on the wall,” Drugovich said. “We sat down and said we need a much bolder plan than nibbling around the edges.”

The result is a new approach Drugovich called “radical” for a small, liberal arts college for its focus on postgraduate employability: FlightPath, in which students from the time they arrive are put into classes and experiences on and off the campus to assess their strengths, figure out their goals, get work experience, create digital resumes and network with alumni, all under the supervision of a “guidance team” that includes career and success coaches and a faculty adviser.

That, too, is what students say they want. More than eight out of 10 first-year students say getting a good job is why they are in college, according to a national survey by a research institute at UCLA.

Annabelle Richardson, a 21-year-old senior at the Maine College of Art & Design, at work in the & Lab. “It felt like the other art schools were big and impersonal and focused on one medium,” Richardson says. Molly Haley/The Hechinger Report

There are other colleges and universities “where the leadership understands they need to push those buttons but there are faculty who still believe it’s art for art’s sake or education for education’s sake and it’s not their job to get you jobs,” Stokes said. “It is remarkable just how long some of these positions can persist. But parents are absolutely looking at those outcomes.”

Enrollment at Hartwick has begun to inch back up, college figures show – though slowly.

Oscar-nominated and Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning animator Adam Fisher teaches animation at the Maine College of Art & Design. Molly Haley/The Hechinger Report

At Maine College of Art & Design, a student in an animation storyboarding course presents the stills she’s drawn for her short feature, as classmates wearing superhero T-shirts and fluorescent hair await their turns.

“Most of these jobs are still here in the U.S.,” the instructor, Oscar-nominated and Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning animator Adam Fisher said, explaining why every seat is filled. “It’s definitely an area we want to capitalize on.”

Isaac Kestenbaum, director of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, which was absorbed by the Maine College of Art & Design. “Audio is obviously having a moment right now,” Kestenbaum says. “There’s a real demand.” Molly Haley/The Hechinger Report

Upstairs in an audio classroom, Salt Institute head Isaac Kestenbaum is saying the same thing about the podcasting program: “Audio is obviously having a moment right now. There’s a real demand.” Among other things, he said, “A lot of students want to lift up voices that aren’t usually represented,” telling stories about race and climate change.

While small colleges have faced some of the greatest challenges from the enrollment decline, their size means they can adapt more quickly, said Freid, who is unusual among presidents in that she has an MBA.

Smallness is also something many students say they want.

“I don’t like a huge campus. I didn’t want to have to commute 20 minutes to my next class,” said Lucas Cadena, a sophomore from Dallas, who said he also appreciates the tutoring, counseling and mentorship.

Lucas Cadena, a sophomore at the Maine College of Art & Design. “I don’t like a huge campus. I didn’t want to have to commute 20 minutes to my next class,” Cadena says. Molly Haley/The Hechinger Report

“It felt like the other art schools were big and impersonal and focused on one medium,” said Annabelle Richardson, a 21-year-old senior from Austin, Texas, as she worked in the & Lab. Here, she said, “there are rules, but there aren’t as many rules.”

Freid wonders why more colleges aren’t making changes like these.

“It’s so interesting to me that an industry that’s so transformational for students is itself so conservative, so rigid,” she said.

She declined to speculate about the reason higher education is so change-averse.

“You’d have to talk to somebody else,” Freid said. “A therapist or someone.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.