Ensuring Higher Ed Remains a Public Good
In her nearly three decades in public higher education, Laurie Bernotsky has navigated many of the existential threats facing colleges across the country — plummeting public perception, declining enrollments, and financial crises that have triggered severe cuts to academic programs at many institutions and outright college closures.
For nearly two years, Bernotsky served as interim president of Pennsylvania Western University, which formed in 2022 with the successful integration of three public universities located in the western part of the state that were facing budget deficits and tumbling enrollment: California University of Pennsylvania, Clarion University, and Edinboro University.
And now, she’s back on the campus where she launched her career as a political science professor and spent most of it — West Chester University, in West Chester, Pa., the largest R2 university in Pennsylvania's State System of Higher Education. After serving as its executive vice president and provost, Bernotsky took the helm as president on July 1 of this year.
As Bernotsky sees it, higher education’s duty is to reclaim the ground that it has lost and to create a stable and thriving operating model that ensures financial sustainability. A viable framework exists, she said. But the change required can be difficult, she acknowledges, especially in a sector that has tended to lean on past practice and status quo.
Achieving success requires the courage to admit that enrollment challenges won’t resolve after a few admission cycles, to make hard choices, and to shift mindsets about how institutions serve students.
“It takes honesty,” said Bernotsky. “It takes a willingness to look into the institutional mirror and say, ‘maybe we’re not what we were 10 years ago, but what can we be to continue our mission, to continue to serve.’ There’s a huge opportunity.”
Here’s Bernotsky’s formula for building financial sustainability on campuses.
1. Analyze Data Holistically
A framework for establishing that path to financial sustainability starts with examining institutional data. Key metrics to track include financial indicators such as primary reserve ratios and operating margins, along with admission, enrollment, completion, and retention trends, Bernotsky said.
Those metrics have often been considered in divisional silos. When analyzed together, however, they can help leaders assess where they are on the continuum of financial sustainability, uncover signposts that trouble is ahead, and allow for a pivot.
Ongoing data analysis and proactive planning are key. “The crisis moment is often just too late,” Bernotsky said. “When you’re in a crisis, it’s almost always an unrecoverable spin. The key is trying to figure out what’s going on in time to make a significant course correction.”
For example, many institutions celebrate a 75 percent second-year student retention rate, she said. But, when that rate is compared to the high cost to enroll students, it means the campus is losing 25 percent of the new first-year students it spent time and energy recruiting. A more student-centered (and more efficient) strategy is to strengthen retention efforts.
“Your first-year class is really, really important,” she said. “And to get a student to the university is far more expensive than keeping a student at the university if you can do retention right.”
2. Embrace Change Management
Monitoring trends isn’t enough on its own; leaders have to do something. Bernotsky provided a viable framework for financial sustainability, built around the relationship between three factors: Enrollment, the budget that’s built around that enrollment, and the academic program array, which is often a college’s single largest non-auxiliary expense.
What institutions often get wrong, said Bernotsky, is failing to adapt strategic and operational decision-making with the ebb and flow of enrollment, budgets, and programming. “For many institutions, in spite of enrollment declines, academic offerings don't reflect that decline. There hasn't been a streamlining of the academic program array.”
Bernotsky isn’t advocating for the arbitrary cutting of entire programs simply based on enrollment numbers; those decisions have to reflect the mission, commitments and priorities of the institution. What’s required is a deep understanding of the breadth and balance of programs that the institution can support at its enrollment floor, the lowest number enrollment will drop to before it stabilizes.
“You build your budget from there, and your program array reflects that enrollment, not where you were at your height,” she said. “That’s the secret to getting all of that framework organized in a sustainable way.”
Bernotsky led this kind of change management at PennWest, which integrated three public universities into one institution. Under her watch, the university made progress toward stabilizing enrollment and reduced the structural deficit from $54 million to $10 million.
PennWest synthesized about 60 undergraduate and 30 graduate programs across the three campuses in two years. Right-sizing its academic programs involved some difficult choices through a shared governance model that required deep collaboration with faculty, but students still have access to the programs they need through course sharing and hybrid learning options.
“If we would have [cut programs] to the level of how much enrollment had been lost, we would have probably lost 15 to 20 programs on each campus,” she said. “By synthesizing, it actually maintained and in some cases expanded student choice.”
3. Be Student-Ready
Amid the looming enrollment cliff and a shift in perception about the value of a college degree, keeping student choice and their needs in mind is key to financial sustainability too. And meeting today’s students’ needs requires a mindset shift.
“Until recent times, we have lived under a growth mentality in higher ed,” Bernotsky said.
When student demand is greater than supply, campuses weren’t forced to shift the way they structured program arrays, educational strategies, or support services. The focus was on whether students were college-ready, not whether colleges were student-ready. To stay afloat, higher education can’t continue with that model.
“If universities now aren’t student-ready, they’re not going to retain students,” she said. “It becomes an existential financial crisis.”
Bernotsky has done this work already, including during her previous leadership roles at West Chester. The university’s Moon Shot for Equity, for example, aims to remove barriers to student success through a partnership with EAB and Delaware County Community College. Barriers include housing and food insecurity and providing more academic support to ensure students have access to what they need to learn.
“Higher ed, to me, is a public good, and public higher ed, in particular, is a public good. If we're really going to do what we should be doing in this sector, then removing the barriers for all students to achieve success is critically important.”
A ‘Privilege’ to Lead
Bernotsky perhaps understands the needs of students, particularly underrepresented ones, more than other college presidents. She was a first-generation student who once considered skipping college to work at a grocery store and now holds a D. Phil. in politics from the University of Oxford.
As an undergraduate student, she navigated imposter syndrome and feelings of not belonging. She believed that college was only for those who wanted to be a doctor or lawyer. So, after getting a ‘C’ in organic chemistry and thinking she’d ruined her chances at medical school, she shifted to pre-law. A professor during her junior year steered her towards academia.
“He is the one who said, ‘I think you ought to try to be something that you never imagined you could be,’” she said. “He’s the reason why I’m doing what I’m doing.”
Today, her drive to address the threats facing higher education is informed by the needs of students like her — “the 99 percent” who can’t afford to pay cash for an elite institution, but deserve a top-notch education, regardless. It’s higher education’s duty to continue to provide it by making the necessary changes to their operations so they can carry on, Bernotsky said.
“Maybe we have to change our mindset. Maybe we have to do some hard things,” she said. “But we will still be here, producing graduates who are going to be the ones who are serving and leading. And that's a privilege.”
This content was paid for and created by West Chester University. The editorial staff of The Chronicle had no role in its preparation. Find out more about paid content.
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