There is no shame in shrinking

Finally, the waive of declining college-age population reached California. For years we were an exception because of the growing immigrant youth. And yet the trend has reached us after all.

The reaction is predictable: public universities are gearing up for a more competitive environment: rethinking their recruitment and marketing operations, developing more appealing programs, reaching out farther to non-traditional populations. These are all good; a little competition helps to boost productivity, creativity, and helps to attune better to the demands of labor market.

The one strategy I do not see is preparing to actually shrink enrollments. The imperative to grow was so strong for so many years, that it maybe difficult to adjust. Yet indeed, if the demographic changes will be as serious as we expect, none of the above strategies is going to not help much. CSU is too big to steal students from the other two public systems and from private institutions. While there are many people with unfinished degrees, not too many of them will come to complete their degrees. And we are not geared up to accommodate all of them.

Organized retreat is the most difficult operation, and yet it is much better than disorganized retreat. As student body shrinks, the staff and faculty body cannot stay the same. We can wait until the next financial crisis, of course, and then go through a very painful fast shrinking ordeal, with hiring freezes, furloughs, layoffs, etc. Or we can try to spell out a mid-range strategy of organized shrinking: evaluating programs, streamlining services, eliminating redundancies, automating workflows, increasing efficiency, etc. Let’s face the fact that shrinking will increase our costs per student while reducing our tuition revenues. Should we at least run a few models for various scenarios? In other words, we can arrive at a smaller size in better shape and avoid painful shocks to the organization.

I fully realize, learning to be a smaller institution is not as much fun as growing. Growing pains are much more tolerable than shrinking pains. The problem is, we may not have a choice whether to experience the latter. If you know you cannot avoid something bad, a responsible thing is to prepare and mitigate consequences. Let’s not talk about modest reduction in size in funeral tones. It is not the end of the world. We are an overcrowded campus with aging physical plant. Perhaps something good can be gotten in the worsening situation?