The challenges facing small private colleges are very real—but they’re not the whole story. In this episode, we talk to Scott Novak, former CEO of Underscore and Chief Development Officer at Carnegie, about how small colleges across the nation are adapting to enrollment trends and industry changes.
Explore Scott’s latest project: The Small College Movement
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Transcript
Jarrett Smith:
You’re listening to the Higher Ed Marketing Lab. I’m your host, Jarrett Smith. Welcome to the Higher Ed Marketing Lab. I’m Jarrett Smith SVP of Strategy at Echo Delta, and I’m glad you’re here. In this episode, we’ll be talking about small colleges. You don’t have to look far to find dispiriting news about the state of small colleges today. A headline from The Hechinger report earlier this year said that colleges are now closing at a pace of one per week. And this month, CBS News reported how colleges are canceling majors to cut costs, which of course is leaving many students scrambling. Today’s guest says that the challenges facing small private colleges are very real, but they’re not the whole story. His name is Scott Novak. He’s the former CEO of Underscore and Chief Development Officer at Carnegie, and most recently is the creator of the Small College Movement.
We discuss Scott’s latest project, the Small College Movement, his thoughts on how to move beyond the cliches of small class sizes and close-knit communities when selling the value of a small college experience, the necessity of questioning our industry’s widely held assumptions, and some of Scott’s favorite examples of how schools are innovating in course delivery and student retention. Scott’s an enthusiastic promoter of the small college experience, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Now before we jump in, I do want to remind you that the Higher Ed Marketing Lab is brought to you by Echo Delta, a full service enrollment marketing agency dedicated to helping colleges drive enrollment, increase yield, and find more right fit students. To find out more, visit Echodelta.co. And now without further ado, here’s my conversation with Scott Novak. Scott, welcome to the show.
Scott Novak:
Thank you. Really looking forward to speaking with you today, Jarrett. I appreciate the opportunity.
Jarrett Smith:
Yeah, looking forward to our conversation. To get things started, I would love it if you could tell us a little bit about the story of the Small College Movement, how you started it and what it’s all about.
Scott Novak:
Sure. So I’ve been in higher education in a number of different capacities since the early 90s, and along my time, especially over the last 25 years or so, I’ve had the great pleasure of working with a number of small colleges around the country. I also attended one in Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, and I’ve been a consultant mostly in the enrollment marketing space over the last 20, 30 years. And I have just thoroughly enjoyed my career and the opportunity to work with small colleges. And I was at a company called Carnegie for a few years, and I started to see over the last couple of years, a lot of the small closing, right?
There was a number of closures and there’s some discussion about financial troubles and whatnot, and I just wanted to change the narrative about small colleges. I felt like someone needed to lead the charge on saying, Hey, yeah, there’s a lot of discussion about small colleges and closings and whatnot, but the reality is the majority of small colleges just provide a tremendous educational experience for their students, their alums. There’s great connections. I mean, I could go on for days about the advantages of a small college just because I love and what I do, but I wanted to start the movement and that’s sort of where this was born out of.
Jarrett Smith:
Very cool. Very cool. As a small college graduate, I totally understand. I went to Florida Southern College myself down in Lakeland, Florida. Go Mocs.
Scott Novak:
Know it well. Yeah.
Jarrett Smith:
And yeah, great school. And it was, as I’m sure your time at Susquehanna was for you, a life-changing experience. I don’t know if I would’ve had the same experience at a much large, going to a big state flagship or something like that.
Scott Novak:
Yep. Yeah, I mean, I tell that story all the time. I toured a couple of large institutions back in the 80s, of course, and I was just completely overwhelmed every time I stepped on one of those large cap, it just wasn’t for me. And I knew that. And going to a small college, it brings out a lot of that, right? You learn how to communicate because you’re forced to. You’re forced to engage, and I needed that as an educational experience for me and really just it changed my life.
Jarrett Smith:
So you mentioned it is a tough time in higher ed in general for small colleges specifically. I went back and looked at the statistics and I think since 2020 there’s been 56 public or nonprofit colleges that have closed, merged, or announced closures, and we know inevitably there will be more institutions that will close. You said, Hey, I kind of want to change the narrative around that. So I’m wondering if you could expand on what’s missing from that story.
Scott Novak:
Yeah, I think there are just a lot of misconceptions about small colleges in general. I think we’ve been trained as a society to think about college in the large flagship state institution and or top tier Ivy League schools because that’s all anyone talks about. And I think that unfortunately when anytime a small college is mentioned, the only time it is mentioned is because a small college is closing. That needed to change. So that’s kind of the whole rationale and the reason behind it. And I think football Saturdays and everything else, all University of Michigan, University of Oklahoma, all of these big flagship states, not enough gets spoken about the value of the educational experience that students have and what that brings to them to their professional lives. And that was really the basis from behind it. And so hopefully I answered your question, but that’s kind of my thought process.
Jarrett Smith:
Yeah, you saying that kind of reminded me of some survey work that I think Purdue and I want to say it was Gallup, that they were working together on for a few years. I hope I got that right. Basically one of the findings was that, if I remember it correctly, that it wasn’t so much about the school you attended. Did you attend a super elite top 20 school? In terms of outcomes, I mean, there is some difference there, but in terms of outcomes, but for the most part, for most students most of the time it’s really about what you did in your time in higher ed that really made the difference. Did you have a faculty mentor? Did you take advantage of internships? Were you involved in student life and on campus? And those sorts of things were really what determined how satisfied you were going to be on the back end and sort of your ultimate outcomes out of higher ed.
And I think that’s a great, that to me sort of dovetails with what you’re saying, is like we are so hyper fixated on this 0.1% of schools that so few students are going to get into. I don’t know if you follow Scott Galloway, the business professor from NYU. He’s got this whole thing about the amazification of higher ed. We’ve turned it into this luxury brand and that’s not really what it should be about at the end of the day.
Scott Novak:
No, it really should not. And I think we’ve gotten away from what higher education and the college experience is in general. There’s so many factors that play into it, right? Online classes and things that have changed the landscape a fair amount.
But you said it well in that you think about, it’s not necessarily about where you went, but what you did on the time that you were there. Who did you connect with? Who were you able to have exposure to as a faculty member or administrator that you normally would not at a large state institution that at a small college you get the opportunity to do that? Sitting in a classroom with 15 students taught by a PhD is a heck of a lot different than sitting in a classroom of 200 being taught by a grad assistant. And I’m not saying that’s every case because it’s not, and that’s probably a little cynical, but at the end of the day, small colleges afford you this opportunity to connect with individuals that can help you not just on your time on campus, but give you the skills to have let you be successful when you’ve graduated.
Jarrett Smith:
Yeah. So I know that you are a long time enrollment marketer, so kind of want you to put on that enrollment marketing hat.
Scott Novak:
Yeah.
Jarrett Smith:
And I’m sure you saw this in your career and I’ve definitely seen it in the folks that we work with over, I would say over the past 10 years or so, I think the number of schools recognizing like, Hey, we actually have to go out and tell our story. We have to promote ourselves.
Scott Novak:
Yeah.
Jarrett Smith:
We can’t just sit around waiting for the students to come to us any longer. I think higher ed as an industry has really woken up to that fact. Small colleges are part of that, but unfortunately, I think when they go to market, a lot of times what they’re saying, they’re sort of trotting out the tried and true tropes of small colleges, small class size. Let me remind you of our teacher-student ratio. Let me remind you that you’re not just a number here. And it is true, it is valuable, but it also starts to sound the same because everybody’s saying the same thing in the same way. So as an enrollment marketer, how do the small colleges that want to promote the things that are legitimately true and valuable about their institutions, how would you recommend maybe they approach that so they can maybe have a better chance of standing out and breaking through the sort of sea of sameness that exists out there?
Scott Novak:
Yeah, that’s a great question. And something over my time, I learned how to engage different people at the institutions when I’m asking them questions about, let’s really talk about the value proposition of this institution. And in my early days I would start with, tell me what’s different about your institution. And inevitably, exactly like you said, they would say, well, we really get to know our students and we care about one another and we give them our course syllabus at the beginning of class and we give them our contact information, they can contact us directly. And that just got so tired. And while I love higher education, I get frustrated by higher education because there is just this inability to change. There’s an inability it seems to push.
So I started learning after all of that time to say, “Let me ask you what’s different about your institution, and I’m going to take off the table the ability for you to respond with small class sizes, getting to know your students. We care about our students. It’s a close tight-knit community. You cannot have that as an answer.” And so normally I would get a lot of blank stares back at me saying, “Well, what am I going to say?” But it was really pushing right? And what would happen is they would start giving very specific examples. They wouldn’t explain it well, but they’d give an example of what they meant.
So a faculty member might say, “I had a student in my class two years ago who I really got her to come out of her shell. We talked about different internship opportunities. She’s now interning at this great business in town, or whatever it was.” And it was really the stories that they would tell to explain what the value of the institution was without trotting out the same old, same old. And so I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s kind of what these schools need to get to, is pushing themselves to think differently about how to position their institution versus the same old, same old.
Jarrett Smith:
Yeah. I love the idea of putting some constraints because sometimes I think when you box yourself in, it forces you out of your comfort zone. So that idea of we’re just going to take certain vocabulary off the table, I think can be really, really powerful in getting them to get specific. And I guess it’s not that within the course of marketing your college or university that you should not mention small class sizes and that sort of thing, but it’s table stakes. It’s not enough to set you apart.
Scott Novak:
No, and it’s also just embrace who you are. Right. There’s so many schools that would say, well, we’re two hours from Philadelphia and three hours from New York and four hours from Washington. I was probably in the school in that range. I never once went to any of those cities. You’re a small town in a rural area. Talk about why your town is great. Talk about the restaurants and the experience around campus. Don’t worry about a student that might not want to go to a rural area because you know what? For every student that doesn’t, you can find another one that does. So embrace who you are, talk about the advantages of what you are versus trying to be something you’re not.
Jarrett Smith:
I think there’s so much power in that, Scott, and what I sense is that, and I honestly, I think any organization that is trying to position itself and that cares about needs to attract people to it, there is this notion of like, well, we don’t want to alienate this audience, or we don’t want to turn off the kids that want this. And it’s like, well, guess what? You can’t credibly, whatever it is, if you’re in a rural campus, it’s like, no, you cannot credibly replicate the experience that you would get in a major metropolitan urban environment.
Scott Novak:
No.
Jarrett Smith:
It is a completely different experience. So stop even trying to compete on those terms, double down on what makes you strong and unique and where you truly can offer something unique.
Scott Novak:
And we’re talking obviously mostly about the traditional age student, but for graduate students, adult students, transfer students, the same thoughts hold true. It’s not just the one or two different pieces, it’s really thinking beyond what you provide and being honest with who you are. And I think small colleges play an incredibly great role for those other types of students as well.
Jarrett Smith:
Yeah. So I want to ask a big picture question that has the risk of being above both of our pay grades, and if you sense that that’s the case then, I think just set expectations accordingly. You mentioned that a lot of schools really, they struggle to change, to view themselves differently. I think there’s a case to be made that there are in a lot of ways, some of what higher ed is experiencing is a bit of a self-inflicted wound, especially when it comes to innovating and changing. I’m just curious, do you have any thoughts on that? Are there any things that you kind of point to of like, Hey folks, this is kind of our doing and we need to really look carefully at that?
Scott Novak:
Yeah, that’s a really good question. It probably is above my pay grade, but what I will say is that higher ed, and I sort of alluded to this earlier, very much suffers from that’s the way it’s always been done. I had a discussion with a CFO from a small college just the other day, and he was not from the higher ed world. He came from banking. And I spoke to him about it and he said, “I cannot believe the amount of discussions I’ve had to have with numerous people on campus over the last few months in my time here where I would ask the question is, why are we spending money on this certain thing? Or why do we continue to try to recommend these types of programs that are not enrolling enough students to support it if it’s not been successful?” And kind of the response is, “Well, we’ve always done it that way.”
And so higher ed in general suffers from that big time. And I think it would be good for administrations at colleges, universities to enlist the help of those maybe outside of higher education too, as a way to help them better understand what their value is, where they can make changes, what cutbacks can they do without having to sacrifice positions, or programs, or classes, or things like that. It’s really just making sure that the student experience doesn’t change, but at the same time being a little more resourceful with the dollars that you do have.
Jarrett Smith:
Yeah, I would agree. I don’t know what the solutions really are, but I think when we, and again, I think that’s well beyond my pay grade. I’m a marketer at heart, but I think when you look at, I mentioned Purdue earlier, I think when you look at a large university, and I know we’re talking to small colleges, but you look at a large university like Purdue, they just said, Hey, we’re not going to raise our tuition. And I don’t know, I’m so curious about what the behind the scenes was that and how that was possible. They sort of drew this line in the sand and then clearly did what they had to do behind the scenes to make that possible while also maintaining and improving their rankings and the quality of their outcomes and all of that. So there are ways, there are,-
Scott Novak:
There are.
Jarrett Smith:
There are ways that exist, and maybe to your point, it comes to looking at, part of the answer is breaking outside sort of the higher ed box and thinking broader and bringing in voices from the outside. I personally always admire Aldi. And I’m going off on a tangent here.
Scott Novak:
I got one right down the street, so I know Aldi very well. Yes.
Jarrett Smith:
Okay. So I back in the day, used to work in the corporate office of a large retail grocer early in my career. And you think about that model of a big store with 40,000 skews and all the staff and all the people that you need to operate in that way. And then Aldi comes and it’s completely different model where it’s like, we’re going to have 5,000 skews on the store and we’re going to cross train and we’re going to, and just a fundamentally different sort of approach. And in that industry, what it kind of showed me was like, oh, you don’t have do it this way. There’s sort of a failure of imagination to see that it could, a lot of the things that we take as sort of hardcore assumptions or locked in laws about the way it has to be don’t actually have to be that way.
Scott Novak:
They don’t. And in fact, I read an article today and very glad that I read it just before coming on the podcast with you, but I love what St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy in Iowa just announced, which is a strategic partnership that allows students to take courses at the other institution, either online or in person or hybrid, whatever the case may be. But now what that does is it allows both of those institutions to really look at, and I’m not saying this is what happened. So if any mistruths out there, I’m just giving a hypothetical example. St. Ambrose says, well, we’re not enrolling a lot of history students majoring in history. I majored in history, but Mount Mercy is. So great. We can supplement courses that we have here. We’re able to fine tune our offerings and we can still enable our student to live here on campus and enjoy the college experience at St. Ambrose, but they can supplement it with classes from Mount Mercy. I would love to see more of that.
It’s so creative and different and smart, and there’s a lot of these small colleges that are right next to one another that if they would work together, they could find solutions like this that are challenging the norm, which we need to have more of. So whether it’s consolidating the campuses into one, or at least leveraging the opportunities at one school down the street as a way to supplement the experience for your current students, why not try more like that? So I think your Aldi example is sort of like that, right? Something different that I think is going to work.
Jarrett Smith:
Yeah, I am optimistic that, I love hearing that. That’s such a great example. And who knows. Is that the right solution for a lot of schools or a piece of the puzzle? Maybe. Maybe not.
Scott Novak:
Maybe. Maybe not. Right.
Jarrett Smith:
Maybe. But the fact that they’re open to doing it, taking a calculated risk that this is going to be beneficial for the institution, that seems so smart. And I am so hopeful that for our industry, necessity is the mother of invention, that as we sort of, some schools maybe enter a crisis mode or see it on the horizon, that that really becomes the catalyst for the change that needs to happen. I hope.
Scott Novak:
Yeah. I mean, higher ed colleges are a business. Right. I mean, they are, at the end of the day. Right. They need to really run their operations like a business and better understand what the market is calling for and provide that product to what the market is calling for. And just trotting out the same old, like we said, and we’ve mentioned a couple times in this podcast, is just not going to get it done and things need to change in the coming years.
Jarrett Smith:
Some other things that I have seen, I want to circle back to this idea of differentiators. And some areas that I have seen that I thought were super interesting from some of our clients over the years are when institutions, I think a lot of institutions really kind of, they talk about being student centric. It’s a very popular thing to sort of talk about how student centric we are. But then you see schools that make a meaningful operational changes in the way that they serve their students. And you can point to on paper and say, this is demonstrably different than the experience they would get. And maybe it’s, I’ve seen some interesting academic advising models and peer mentorship and these interesting ways.
One of the ones that you just kind of slap your forehead and you’re like, why aren’t more schools all over this is one of our clients really just acknowledge the fact that most of their undergrads, their traditional undergrads are coming in undecided. And the old model is like, well, you throw them in, you pressure to pick a major, hope you got it right and good luck with that. And what they were saying is like, no, we’re actually, they developed a credit course and they branded it, gave it a name. It wasn’t just like undecided class, but they created a course.
And the whole idea was like the first half was about self exploration, understanding yourself and your talents better. And then the last half was, Hey, let’s try on some majors that based on what you’ve learned about yourself might actually be a good fit for where you want to go. And what they were able to show is the outcomes for the students, their ability to complete on time, to graduate on time. Their satisfaction with their ultimate choice was higher, and where they ended up as a major and they had better overall outcomes and what an opportunity, right?
Scott Novak:
Absolutely.
Jarrett Smith:
And in a way to really, to actually demonstrate we are going to be more student centric in this unique way that a lot of schools aren’t.
Scott Novak:
Yep. And I’ve worked with a lot of just incredible enrollment folks in my time, right, enrollment, enrollment, marketing. And they will say, we can get the students there, but you got to keep them. Right.
Jarrett Smith:
Yeah.
Scott Novak:
And I think retention for so many years was the forgotten about piece. And it can’t be now because the amount of students going to college is less. There are less students from more seats, and if you get them, you got to keep them. And by keeping them, it’s putting in innovative resources while you’re on campus to ensure that they do end up graduating and going on to a meaningful career in life. There are some schools, like you said, they’re doing some really great things. I think it was Maryville University in St. Louis has life coaches or something assigned to every student, things like that where you’re providing more than just, here’s your classes, sign up, go to the classes and graduate. But we’re going to provide you with the resources to better learn who you are as a person, how you need to evolve as an individual, what types of skills do you need to accumulate to make yourself a better applicant for jobs in the future? And the schools that are doing that are the ones that are going to be successful.
Jarrett Smith:
Yeah, here, here. I definitely, definitely on board with that. So we’ve talked about, and we’re all aware of sort of the headwinds facing our industry, but there are schools that are doing well that are thriving. They’re trying in innovative things. So to the extent that we can generalize, do you see sort of a recipe of success right now or something schools should be really thinking about in terms of securing the sort of long-term future of the school?
Scott Novak:
Yeah. I don’t think that there is the silver bullet solution, right? Because if there was and I had that, I would probably be still doing that, right? But what I will say is that for the small college that continues to ask the right questions to the right people and adjust their offerings accordingly are the ones that are going to be successful. The ones that sort of just sit back and hope for the best without really trying to be innovative and creative and really evaluating everything from faculty to courses to academic programs and majors and looking at the marketplace, what’s it calling for? What are students enrolling in? And there’s a lot of companies out there that can provide this type of research to help them make strategic decisions on how to set themselves up for success. The ones that continue to do that and continue to self-evaluate constantly are the ones that, in my opinion, will be successful and the ones that don’t are the ones that are going to fall by the wayside.
Jarrett Smith:
Yeah, yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense. I noticed on LinkedIn a while back, you posted an article from Higher Ed Dive, and I think it was about Northland College. They were unveiling a plan to downsize and a while back, that caught my attention because a while back on our own blog, we wrote a little post called something to the effect of Downsizing: The Answer Higher Ed Doesn’t Want to Hear. I’m curious what your thoughts are on that. If we’re laying out all options on the table and really thinking critically about what can we do with our institutions, do you think this is something that is going to become more common or that more schools need to take a serious look at? What’s your take on downsizing?
Scott Novak:
Unfortunately, it’s probably just the reality of what we’re dealing with, and it’s something that we’re just going to have, some schools are just going to have to consider. And I applaud Northland College for trying, because I think when you think about small colleges, small college closures, everyone thinks, oh, the poor students, which is very true. But think about the faculty and the staff people and the alums that are affected by the loss of their institution, especially me as an alum of a small school. That holds a big piece of my heart is my alma mater.
And when you lose that and that you haven’t exhausted every single opportunity to keep the doors open, then I think you’re doing a disservice to more than just the students. It’s anyone associated with those organizations. And I think the schools that are, like sort of goes back to what you used to ask before, is what can they do moving forward? Northland are asking the right questions. They probably got some dollars to help keep the doors open, but they really need to think about where are we going to put our dollars that makes the most sense? And if downsizing is part of it, that’s just what it’s going to have to be, and that might just be more common moving forward. I hope not, but sadly, it probably will be.
Jarrett Smith:
Yeah. Yeah. Again, I hope that the necessity creates sort of the invention and innovative thinking that we need. For sure. So Scott, you clearly have a huge heart for small colleges, and I love it because I think they’re so important. So I know you’ve got a podcast, Small College Movement. If folks are really digging this conversation and want to hear more, can you tell us about the podcast and what you’re doing there and also where people can find it?
Scott Novak:
Sure. So I started the podcast as a way to talk about the successes of small colleges, and it’s not just I’ll interview someone from a certain school and talk about that school. It’s more about, I’ve had a CFO on there, I’ve had a director of financial aid, I’ve had someone from college board, I’ve had a vice president of enrollment. And we’re really digging into more than just small class sizes. What is unique about small colleges? What are some things that some schools are doing that other small schools could learn from?
And the hope is that the podcast gets forwarded on to others. Maybe it’s parents, maybe it’s students, maybe it’s administrators at different schools, that they might pick up an idea or two that might help their institution, or it might help a student say, Hey, I wasn’t considering a small college, but I listened to this podcast. And there’s a lot of great things going on at small colleges, which coincidentally is my tagline. Great things happen at small colleges. So that’s what that for. I have different interviews of different types of people, and we’ll continue to do that for as long as anyone will continue to listen.
Jarrett Smith:
Good deal. And I assume you can find it on all the places where you normally find podcasts.
Scott Novak:
YouTube, and Spotify, I’m on currently. You can go to smallcollegemovement.com and there is a link to all the different podcasts. I’d also point out too that this summer, July 30th and 31st is the National Small College Enrollment Conference, which I am a host of. That’s going to be in Charlotte, North Carolina. So anyone listening, go to NSCEC.com to register. It’s a great conference for small colleges to come together, talk to one another, learn from one another about how to navigate the very tough landscape that we have right now in higher education. I also have a Twitter feed or X @_smallcolleges is there. And I try to post daily positive articles and tips and things about small colleges that are going on that I can find and hopefully, again, spread the good word about small colleges.
Jarrett Smith:
If someone wants to connect with you directly, what’s the best place to do that?
Scott Novak:
So see, obviously I’m all about small colleges. My email is smallcollegeguy&gmail.com. You can email me there. You can also go to Smallcollegemovement.com and fill out a form on there or connect with me there. This is my life passion of small colleges professionally. So yeah, I hope to continue down this vein for a long time.
Jarrett Smith:
Great. Scott, it’s been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much.
Scott Novak:
Jarrett, I appreciated the opportunity. It was a great discussion.
Jarrett Smith:
The Higher Ed Marketing Lab is produced by Echo Delta, a full service enrollment marketing agency for colleges and universities of all sizes. To see some of the work we’ve done and how we’ve helped schools just like yours, visit EchoDelta.co. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. And as always, if you have a comment, question, suggestion, or episode idea, feel free to drop us a line at podcast@echodelta.co.
