You have what it takes!
Every college in the Ontario system is reviewing budgets and making cuts in order to try to reset the short-term financial landscape. The question is how many are doing so while also resetting fundamental approaches to the delivery of applied learning. About 12 years ago, when I was an Associate Dean of a School of Business, we were facing similar but less severe concerns about enrollment. Domestic enrollment was declining and expected to continue declining for the foreseeable future. Our biggest concern was in the core business diploma programs (business, marketing, human resources, accounting). We were seeing declining enrollment on the horizon, and retention was a concern. We needed to do something to slow or reverse the enrollment concern.
Step 1: Know where you are going.
I knew that my ability to impact declining enrollment due to demographic changes was beyond the capacity of the team in the School of Business. So I decided to focus on retention where we had some ability to affect the success of students. However, I also knew that in my role my individual capacity was limited and that the professors had the greatest ability to positively impact the retention of students. Setting the final destination was relatively easy; however, choosing the path to get there was much more difficult. I knew where we needed to go, but I also knew I could not get there alone, and I also knew that I did not know all the elements that needed to be experimented with to get to the destination. We had to break down the larger goal into more manageable and achievable smaller goals that, if achieved, moved us closer to the larger goal.
Step 2: Align your network.
I started this determination of a path with a workshop with the program coordinators of the core business programs where I simply laid out the challenges that we were facing and what was coming. I needed to instil some urgency to the challenge but also tap into their experience and expertise in the classroom to figure out how we could increase retention without negatively impacting quality. After laying out the destination, I asked a simple question that, in my view, opened up the path and began to illuminate the network needed to get to the destination. I asked the faculty, “Describe a class that has had good retention.” There were responses about the quality of the student, about the maturity of the student, the level of engagement, scheduling, hours of contact time, and the specializations of the students (accounting students tended to have better retention than the other specializations). These were not unexpected responses. One response that triggered an exploration of the path we chose was that students who started in our January intake seemed to have better retention than those who started in September and, more specifically, those January intake students in their second semester did better than they did in the first semester. What was unique about that spring/summer session? Students were on a 6-week scheduling system. They took two courses every six weeks instead of six courses over 15 weeks. That insight from the faculty led to the path we took and outlined the extended network that was needed to reinvent how we delivered the common first year of the core business programs.
Step 3: Making starting effortless:
We had an idea of how we might be able to impact retention, and we had started building the network needed to bring the idea to fruition. We needed to get started. Getting started is about catalyzing people to change their behaviors. It is hard to make a change, especially when the outcome is not certain. My first task was to get a group of faculty to be willing to try a new approach to our common first year. The proposed approach was to have a compressed delivery model for our common first year - students would take only three courses at a time for seven weeks, regardless of the intake period. I knew the task was going to be difficult, but I also knew that once we got started, we would progress rapidly. I was surrounded by talented and motivated faculty. So getting started was to find a group that was willing to take the risks and try a new approach. I prepared some drafts of the plans, I did some research on compressed delivery, and I pitched the idea to the faculty who taught in the common first year and the core business programs. I essentially asked for volunteers at a large group meeting. We had several faculty who declared they did not want any part of this experiment, and I had others who were eager to try. I think ultimately what made starting effortless for that initial group was the feeling that they had control of what was going to be done and we had a strong and trusting relationship among the group. So on we went to change our entire approach to delivering our common first year of the core business programs.
Step 4: Change your beliefs.
We knew our primary goal, we had built a starting network, and we got started. But our success was ultimately based on our belief that we would succeed. Self-efficacy is such a strong force in change management that it can be the most significant factor in the ultimate achievement of our goal. Our group had to sustain our belief but also had to convert the beliefs of many others. We had to work with the support staff that was responsible for the scheduling of classes, we had to work with the registrar’s office on records and programs of study, the approach impacted the financial aid process, we had to explain the model to students, and we had to inform and gain support from the faculty union. Changing the beliefs of everyone connected to this change took a few years and seemed like a constant cloud hanging over our success.
What we did in that first delivery of the new system was to take four of the five sections of the common first year and convert them to a seven-week compressed delivery. The fifth section followed the traditional 15-week semester. As we gained momentum for this approach and began to see success, there was a natural acceleration in exploring what else could be done to improve that common first year.
Step 5: Manage decision fatigue.
Change, even positive change, is mentally exhausting. It requires a regular source of fuel and a controlling of the burn rate. And every person involved has different sources and amounts of fuel as well as different burn rates. Decision fatigue is not always evident, as it can be masked by behaviors that don’t show as fatigue in our normal understanding of fatigue. In our case, we started to see fatigue as resistance, which was expected. But I also saw decision fatigue as a desire to do more experimenting (an increase in motivation) but less creative and impactful outcomes (less value in the outcome).
As we moved into our second iteration of the compressed delivery, we gathered input and feedback on things that worked and things that did not work. We continued to make tweaks to the initial model. The steps above were cycled through many more times as we moved forward with the evolution of the delivery model. So where did we end up?
After three years of this implementation, we ended up with what we call the 7-1-7 model. All first-year students in the core programs would be in this delivery plan. We split the math and accounting courses so that one was in each group of seven-week blocks. We added hours to both of those courses to support students who struggled with those courses (math and accounting had the highest failure rates - about 20%). We made some specific scheduling adjustments so that math and accounting were not scheduled on Mondays (too many hours lost to holidays). We made further scheduling adjustments to be intentional on spacing so that students would not have two hours of class one evening and the next two hours be the following morning. Faculty had to adjust assessment approaches to be evenly distributed over the seven weeks. There was a lot of hard work involved by many, many people to achieve this success, but we supported each other, and that gave us the courage to reinvent our approach and achieve our goals.
Where did we end up? The model resulted in an increase in the average student GPA of 0.5; failure rates for each course went from double digits to single digits, and attendance improved. The 7-1-7 model also allowed for students to enter the program after the first seven weeks. This allowed students in non-business programs to switch programs in the middle of a semester instead of completely withdrawing from the college. Did we figure that the impact of this change would be so positive? No, we did not. But I did figure that at worst we would see minimal change in the success of the students. I, however, did believe that attempting this radical change would make our team better at implementing change for the entire School of Business. We did become better at all the steps in “Getting Things Done,” which led to many, many other areas of innovation during my tenure as the Associate Dean. So my advice to administrators of academic programs is to fight the urge to simply increase class sizes, reduce sections, and maximize the work loads of faculty as the approach to dealing with the current crisis. There are other approaches to be considered now that can build your future. Define your goal and get it done.
When I left that role, I took the lessons I learned in “How to Get Things Done” into my new work in Innovation and Business Engagement. When we are bold and courageous and are able to do all the small but significant stuff that happens behind the scenes, we can build high performance, resilience, and the leadership needed to deal with an uncertain future. As colleges navigate the current uncertainty of enrollment and their financial stability, realize that you have to build the future and not just react to current dilemmas. If there are any lessons in innovation and leadership I can share on a more detailed and direct level, please reach out. I believe our province and country need a robust and comprehensive applied learning model for the well-being of our citizens.
