by Judy Z. Ellett &
Daniel Tyler Gooden
Dan Lambert of Baker University, Dan Carey of Benedictine College and Mike Redwine of MidAmerica Nazarene discuss trends in private education.
Yet is this the primary role that the private institutions fill today? How do they fare in comparison with their public counterparts in terms of enrollment and funding? What weapons do they possess to capture their share of a growing student pool?
Of the more than 4,000 two-year and four-year colleges and universities in the United States today, 1,700 are public and 2,300 are private. Private schools tend to have smaller student enrollments, of course—in Missouri, for example, the headcount at independent institutions totaled over 95,000 in 2000 compared to just over 200,000 for public schools. Still, the growth in private enrollment-67 percent in the last 20-years-has outstripped growth in public enrollment of only 18 percent.
Potential students tend to fall into one of three categories: those looking for larger, research-based (often public) institutions, those looking for specific skills development, and those looking for a well-rounded liberal arts and sciences course of study. Private schools, for the most part, administer to the latter.
"A broad-based core curriculum with an emphasis on educating the whole person helps prepare graduates who will be changing careers several times during their working years," says Daniel J. Carey, president of Benedictine College. Many students entering college today barely remember the recession of the early 1990s, but with planned layoffs in the first half of 2001 three times higher than those a year earlier, Carey's lesson is one worth learning.
Aside from offering a foundation for the future, many of the private schools-especially those lying outside the metro area-provide a campus-living environment that public, commuter schools can't duplicate. "We serve the traditional student who needs the comprehensive, 24-hour-a-day educational experience that we provide," says David Sallee, president of William Jewell.
The term "traditional student," shorthand for the student seeking a baccalaureate degree straight out of high school, raises the question of how well private schools compete for the "nontraditional student." Park University competes quite well for the older, non-traditional undergraduate student. Thirty percent of Park's undergraduates are over the age of 34, according to Paul Gault, special assistant to the president at the university. Park made a decision forty years ago to go after the military student and started its Bootstrap Program at Fort Leavenworth in 1961. In the early 1970s, the school began expanding to 34 campuses in 19 states, connecting the campuses to selected military bases.
As for serving the needs of older graduate students, Daniel Lambert, president of Baker University, believes private education has never been more viable. "Independent colleges still provide more Ph.D.s and research scientists than the public sector," he says.
Statistics from the Missouri Department of Higher Education bear this out. The number of certificates, associate's, bachelor's, master's, doctorate, and first professional degrees awarded by public institutions in 2000 totaled 30,000. Those same degrees at
But for postgraduate degrees—master's, doctorate and first professional-public schools handed out 5,185 compared to private schools with 9,400, a nearly two-to-one ratio.