Category: Highered

December 29, 2025 – Editor’s Note by Dean Hoke: This fall, Small College America convened two significant webinars bringing together college presidents, merger experts, and strategic advisors to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing small institutions. What emerged were not just conversations, but frameworks, insights, and patterns that deserve close attention. This article synthesizes what seven leaders shared across both sessions.

Insights from Small College America’s Fall 2025 Webinar Series

Featuring conversations with seven leaders navigating the most critical decisions facing small colleges today

When Tarek Sobh arrived at Lawrence Technological University as provost in September 2020, he had a plan. He was going to transform the institution. He had ideas, energy, and expertise from his previous roles.

And then he did something counterintuitive: he stopped.

“The tendency of leaders, in any kind of position, to effect changes immediately is, in my opinion, the wrong decision,” Sobh told participants in Small College America’s “Guiding Through Change” webinar this past August. Instead, he spent his first semester meeting with every single colleague on campus—literally hundreds of people. “Learning the culture of the institution was immensely important and crucial.”

Eighteen months later—not three months, not six, but eighteen—Sobh became president of Lawrence Tech. And because he had listened first, he knew exactly what needed to change and what needed to stay the same.

This isn’t just one leader’s story. It’s a pattern—and a warning—for every college president, provost, and trustee navigating today’s enrollment pressures, financial constraints, and partnership decisions. The institutions that will survive aren’t the ones making the fastest decisions. They’re the ones making the most informed ones. And that takes time, most colleges think they don’t have.

That eighteen-month timeline wasn’t just personal wisdom. It’s a pattern that emerged across two webinars hosted by Small College America this fall—one featuring college presidents navigating uncertainty, the other bringing together experts who’ve guided dozens of institutions through mergers and partnerships.

What they revealed is that small colleges aren’t just facing challenges; they’re facing them in a way that’s unique to them. They’re learning to navigate them with a sophistication and strategic clarity that larger institutions might envy.

The State of Play: No Surprises Allowed

“There should be no surprises. Not in this business, there should be no surprises.”

Dr. Chet Haskell has seen enough college budgets to know when an institution is headed for trouble. As a former two-time president and provost directly involved in three significant mergers or acquisitions, he’s learned to read the warning signs.

During Small College America’s December webinar on mergers and partnerships, Haskell laid out the early indicators with the precision of a surgeon: enrollment declines, graduation rate declines, multiple years of unbalanced budgets, the need to dip into unrestricted endowments to make budgets work, declining net tuition revenue, and expenses increasing faster than revenue.

All well-known data points. The problem? Too often, leaders avoid confronting their implications.

“At the end of the day, no matter what you’re trying to do, the financials do matter,” Haskell explained. “Too often, I would argue, a balanced budget—revenue equals expense—is defined as success.”

But that’s not success. That’s survival. Barely.

“You don’t have a margin, you don’t have a mission,” Haskell continued. “You need resources for investment in new initiatives. You need resiliency in the face of external factors like COVID or recessions.”

He offered a sobering example: two well-regarded Midwest colleges, each with endowments exceeding $1 billion. One has had eight successive years of operating deficits in the order of $8 to $10 million annually. The other has consistently generated surpluses.

“A billion dollars can last a long time,” Haskell noted. “It’s still a finite number.”

Which would you rather lead?

The Composite Score Deception

Stephanie Gold, head of the higher education practice at Hogan Lovells and a veteran of nearly three decades guiding colleges through transformative transactions, added a critical warning about regulatory metrics.

The U.S. Department of Education calculates a composite score (between 1.5 and 3.0) that’s supposed to measure financial viability, liquidity, capital resources, borrowing capacity, and profitability.

“I have seen institutions with passing scores that ultimately are not financially sustainable and are in a place where they will soon be unable to make payroll,” Gold said flatly.

The real indicator? Cash flow problems. When an institution is struggling to pay its operating expenses, that’s the red flag that matters.

The lesson is clear: constant vigilance, not wishful thinking. Know your numbers. All of them. And don’t wait for regulatory metrics to tell you there’s a problem.

The Four R’s: A Framework for Strategic Thinking

While financial vigilance is essential, it’s not sufficient. The August webinar featuring three college presidents—all of whom started their roles post-COVID—revealed how successful institutions are thinking holistically about their challenges.

Dr. Andrea Talentino, president of Augustana College in Illinois, described her institution’s strategic planning process as driven by what they call “the Four R’s”: Recruitment, Retention, Revenue, and Results.

Talentino explained how they use this framework across campus: “We try to kind of preach that around campus to get everybody thinking about the Four R’s and really use them to drive strategic planning and enrollment goals.”

It’s a deceptively simple framework. But its power lies in integration. Recruitment isn’t just the admissions office’s problem. Retention isn’t just student affairs’ responsibility. Revenue isn’t just the CFO’s concern. Results aren’t just the provost’s metric.

Everyone owns all four R’s.

This matters because, as Talentino discovered to her surprise, institutional thinking doesn’t happen naturally.

“I think I really overestimated the extent to which people have awareness and appreciation for institutional needs,” she admitted. “Focus on self and focus on own department rather than institutional-wide awareness was a little bit of a surprise to me.”

She’d come from “pretty open departments that were quite supportive.” The reality at many institutions? People are siloed, focused on their immediate concerns rather than the big picture.

Building that institutional awareness—getting everyone to think about the Four R’s—is leadership work. It doesn’t happen by accident.

COVID’s Long Tail and the Transfer Opportunity

The presidents also spoke candidly about enrollment realities that data alone doesn’t fully capture.

Dr. Anita Gustafson, the first female president in Presbyterian College’s 144-year history, described what she calls “COVID’s long tail.”

“Our class of 2025 was a very small class,” she explained. “They were seniors in high school when we had a full year of COVID, and hence we never recruited well, or maybe they didn’t even attend college in large numbers.”

That class just graduated. And Presbyterian is finally seeing enrollment growth—about 8 to 10 percent—as that COVID cohort cycles through.

But the recovery isn’t automatic. It requires strategic adaptation.

For Presbyterian, located in growing South Carolina, that’s meant focusing on a population they’d historically neglected: transfer students.

“That’s a population we have not really targeted in the past,” Gustafson said. “A lot of that is hard with the traditional liberal arts education program, because we have very robust general education requirements.”

So they’re working with faculty to be “more transfer friendly”—adjusting requirements, smoothing pathways, removing unnecessary barriers.

It’s the kind of strategic adaptation that requires both data and cultural sensitivity. You can’t just mandate that faculty change requirements. You have to build an understanding of why it matters and bring them along.

Which brings us back to culture, and to the eighteen-month rule.

Eighteen Months to Know an Institution

The December webinar on mergers and partnerships brought together an unusual panel: Chet Haskell, the consultant and former president; Dr. Barry Ryan, an attorney who’s served as president and provost at multiple universities and most recently led Woodbury University through its merger with the University of Redlands; AJ Prager, Managing Director at Hilltop Securities and an investment banker focused on higher education M&A; and Stephanie Gold, the regulatory attorney.

Together, they’ve seen hundreds of institutions consider partnerships, dozens pursue them, and enough fail to know what separates success from disaster.

And they kept returning to the same timeline: eighteen months.

Haskell emphasized that meaningful partnerships require substantial time—typically around eighteen months—to really understand another institution’s culture, operations, and true compatibility.

Not six months. Not a year. Eighteen months minimum.

Why so long?

Because culture can’t be rushed. Because trust takes time. Because what institutions say about themselves and what they actually are can be very different things.

“Building that trust between the people, the leadership in both institutions—it takes some time to get to know each other,” Barry Ryan explained. “And then you find out, maybe you find out that you have a lot more in common, and this becomes a much easier process to take.”

Ryan has seen it work both ways. He’s been involved in mergers between faith-based institutions that seemed very different on the surface but discovered deep commonalities. He’s also seen deals fail because “they just couldn’t get over the fact that, I’m sorry, you are different than we are. We have our 39 points, and you have your 16, and it’s just not going to work.”

The difference? Time spent building relationships and understanding culture before committing to a deal.

AJ Prager, an investment banker who helps institutions find and evaluate potential partners, emphasized that this isn’t just about mission alignment—it’s about cultural fit.

“We always look at transactions through the lens of mission and accelerating mission execution,” Prager said. “And so oftentimes there is mission alignment between faith-based institutions and non-faith-based institutions.”

The real question is how cultures align. And that takes eighteen months of conversations, campus visits, joint meetings, shared meals, and honest dialogue to discover.

The Hidden Costs Nobody Talks About

When institutions consider mergers or major partnerships, they typically calculate direct costs, including legal fees, consulting expenses, system integration, and facility modifications.

What they don’t budget for—and what can sink even well-planned partnerships—are the hidden costs.

“Management time, in our experience, is the biggest hidden cost of a transaction,” Prager said. “These types of transactions are all-encompassing. They require significant, significant employee time.”

Management time is the most valuable resource an institution has. And mergers consume it voraciously—pulling presidents, provosts, CFOs, deans, and senior staff into endless meetings, planning sessions, due diligence reviews, and stakeholder communications.

“Whether to pursue or not to pursue a transaction is a really critical decision,” Prager continued, “because you’re tying up, if you are going to be pursuing, you’re going to be tying up your most valuable resource for a considerable amount of time.”

And here’s the paradox: passing on opportunities can also be risky. Which is why Prager recommends that institutions prepare before opportunities arise—assessing their position, understanding their options, educating their boards with hypothetical scenarios.

One liberal arts institution on the West Coast recently conducted an exercise with its board: it presented three hypothetical partner institutions and asked, “Would you merge with these institutions?”

“It was very fascinating to see how the board responded,” Prager said. “But it was, I would say, an innocuous exercise to help educate the board to say, here’s what’s happening in the sector, and these are the types of transactions that might be coming your way, and how would you respond to it?”

That kind of preparation —doing strategic thinking before you’re in crisis mode—can make all the difference.

But there’s another hidden cost that’s even harder to quantify.

“Despite being the lawyer, I think there’s a lot of emotional cost associated with these matters,” Stephanie Gold said. “These are very stressful situations for students, for faculty.”

Students worry they won’t graduate from the institution they expected. Faculty wonder about job security. Staff fear restructuring. Alumni mourn the loss of identity.

“I think I am constantly needing to remind myself as the lawyer who’s just working on the deal documents to get the deal done that there are a lot of humans behind this,” Gold continued. “And it is a cost on them.”

Managing those emotional costs requires something lawyers and investment bankers can’t provide: exceptional, continuous, transparent communication.

The Communication Imperative

Early in the December webinar, the panel addressed a question that haunts every institution considering a partnership: when do you tell people?

The instinct is often to wait—to avoid creating anxiety until you have something definite to announce.

That’s wrong.

Gold emphasized the critical importance of managing stakeholder expectations through clear, consistent communication—distinguishing between exploratory discussions and finalized agreements, and being transparent about timelines and potential outcomes throughout the process.

Tell people early. Tell them you’re “having discussions.” Tell them the timeline will be long. Tell them nothing is decided. Tell them what you know and what you don’t know.

And keep telling them, consistently, throughout the process.

The alternative—trying to keep major strategic discussions secret until announcing a deal—creates exactly the kind of anxiety and distrust that makes the emotional costs unbearable.

This communication imperative extends beyond potential mergers. It’s central to the daily work of leading change.

Back at the August webinar, Tarek Sobh—who became president of Lawrence Tech after just eighteen months as provost—spoke about the importance of helping every employee understand their role.

“What is most important, I think, is having all of our leaders ensure that every employee on campus understands her or his role in how the campus runs and how important what they do is to the well-being of the whole campus and its students and its budget and its reputation, and so on and so forth.”

This isn’t feel-good rhetoric. It’s strategic communication.

“The whole concept of somebody coming in at any level to an educational institution to get a paycheck is not what is going to make eminent institutions of higher education thrive or survive,” Sobh said bluntly.

Every custodian, every admissions counselor, every IT specialist, every faculty member needs to understand how their work connects to institutional success. And leaders at every level—not just the president—need to articulate that connection.

Proving Value With Data

Communication isn’t just about process and connection. It’s also about demonstrating value, to prospective students, current students, alumni, donors, legislators, and the community.

And in 2025, that means data.

Sobh has learned to articulate Lawrence Tech’s value proposition with precision: “97% of my students continue on and are employed at this level, and they are guaranteed a job, and 85% live locally.”

That’s not abstract mission language. That’s quantifiable impact.

“Articulating your student outcomes, articulating your impact on the community from an economic impact point and social impact point of view, keeping all of your channels open and continuing to clearly articulate your value proposition is the balancing argument or statement that is desperately needed for institutions in this time and day to prove their worth,” Sobh said.

Economic impact. Social impact. Student outcomes. Employment rates. Local retention. These are the metrics that matter to legislators deciding on state funding, to donors considering major gifts, to families evaluating whether tuition is worth it.

The Partnership Spectrum

One of the most valuable contributions from the December webinar was Chet Haskell’s articulation of the partnership spectrum.

Not every collaboration needs to be a merger. In fact, most shouldn’t be.

Haskell outlined four levels:

1. Consortium Arrangements: Shared services like libraries, bookstores, and food services. These reduce costs without requiring deep integration. They’re relatively easy to implement and maintain.

2. Alliances: Academic program sharing, cross-registration, joint research initiatives. These require more coordination but preserve institutional independence.

3. Affiliations: Closer integration around specific strategic goals. More commitment than alliances, but still stopping short of a merger.

4. Full Mergers/Acquisitions: Complete integration, with one institution typically absorbing another or creating an entirely new entity.

The key is matching the level of partnership to institutional needs and readiness.

Haskell distinguished between crisis-driven partnerships—where institutions wait until they’re running out of money—and strategic partnerships, where institutions proactively explore collaborations that could benefit both parties. The latter, he argued, is far preferable.

But strategic partnerships require something crisis-driven ones don’t have: resources in reserve. You can’t negotiate from desperation. You need time, financial capacity, and leadership bandwidth to explore options thoughtfully.

Which means the best time to start building partnership relationships is before you need them.

Remember the eighteen-month rule? If you wait until a crisis to start talking to potential partners, you won’t have eighteen months. You’ll have eighteen weeks, maybe eighteen days.

Start the conversations now. Build the relationships. Understand the cultures. Then, when opportunity or necessity arises, you’re ready.

State Demographics and Local Adaptation

The August webinar also surfaced an important reality: national enrollment trends matter less than state demographics.

Presbyterian College, in growing South Carolina, is seeing enrollment growth. Augustana College, in declining Illinois, faces different challenges.

“South Carolina is a state that’s growing, and so that does help us,” Gustafson noted. About 60% of Presbyterian’s students come from South Carolina. “But we have to be very vigilant because we can’t guarantee that that will happen another year.”

Meanwhile, Talentino at Augustana is adapting to Illinois realities by adding multilingual enrollment counselors, working with community-based organizations in urban areas, and creating summer bridge programs to support student success.

Lawrence Tech, in Michigan, focused on developing three new graduate programs in high-demand areas—strategic program development based on market analysis rather than faculty interests.

Each institution is adapting to its local context. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

But there are common principles: know your market, track your data, be willing to change, and move before crisis forces your hand.

The Board Challenge: Governance in Crisis

Throughout both webinars, a consistent theme emerged that none of the panelists explicitly stated, but all of them circled back to: boards aren’t prepared for the strategic decisions facing small colleges today.

This surfaced most starkly in the December Q&A session, when one participant observed that “colleges and universities cultivate irrational loyalty to the institution, which runs counter to the thought of mergers and partnerships and alliances.”

Read that again: irrational loyalty.

It’s the same emotional attachment that makes alumni generous donors and passionate advocates. But when an institution faces existential decisions—whether to merge, how to restructure, which programs to cut—that loyalty can become a liability.

Another participant noted that “board members oftentimes don’t know how to act or ask the right questions, given the way that higher education oftentimes designs and recruits their board of trustees.”

This is the structural problem: most small college boards are composed primarily of alumni who love their institution. They’re selected for their capacity to give and their willingness to advocate. They’re rarely selected for their expertise in finance, operations, technology, strategic restructuring, or M&A.

Which means that when a president brings forward a partnership proposal or a CFO presents financial projections, the board often lacks the framework to evaluate what they’re hearing.

They ask questions like, “Will we keep our name?” What about our traditions? How will this affect our identity?

These are reasonable emotional questions. But they’re not the strategic questions that determine whether a partnership will work: What are the combined revenue projections? How will academic programs integrate? What’s the governance structure? What happens to debt obligations? Where are the synergies and where are the conflicts?

The panel’s recommendation was consistent: board education before a crisis.

Run hypothetical merger scenarios when there’s no actual deal on the table. Present three possible partner profiles and ask: Would we consider this? Why or why not? What questions would we need answered?

Help boards understand financial metrics that matter beyond the composite score. Teach them to ask hard questions about cash flow, operating margins, and strategic positioning.

And consider diversifying board composition—not to diminish alumni representation, but to complement it with specific expertise the institution needs: finance professionals who can read balance sheets, technology executives who understand digital transformation, healthcare or corporate leaders who’ve navigated mergers.

Because when crisis arrives—and for many small colleges, it will—you need a board that can think strategically, ask sophisticated questions, and make difficult decisions based on institutional sustainability rather than emotional attachment alone.

The eighteen-month rule applies here too: you can’t educate a board in six weeks when a partnership opportunity appears. You need to start now.

The Bottom Line

When Tarek Sobh arrived at Lawrence Technological University in September 2020, he could have started changing things immediately. He had the expertise. He had the mandate. He had ideas.

Instead, he spent eighteen months listening.

And when he finally became president and began implementing changes, he did so from a position of deep cultural understanding. He knew which changes would be embraced and which would face resistance. He knew whose support he needed and how to earn it. He knew what the institution was and what it could become.

That’s not just one president’s wisdom. It’s the pattern that emerged across both webinars—from college presidents navigating daily challenges to experts guiding institutions through transformative partnerships.

Know your numbers. Build your relationships. Understand your culture. Communicate transparently. Prove your value with data. Give yourself time.

And remember: there should be no surprises.

The challenges facing small colleges are real. The demographic cliff is arriving. Financial pressures are mounting. Political scrutiny is intensifying.

But the leaders in these webinars aren’t panicking. They’re planning. They’re adapting. They’re building partnerships. They’re preparing their boards. They’re quantifying their value. They’re listening to their cultures before trying to change them.

They’re giving themselves eighteen months to get it right.

That’s not paralysis. That’s wisdom.

And it might be exactly what saves small college America.

Looking Forward: Proactive, Not Reactive: Three Conversations to Start This Week

If you’re a president, provost, CFO, or trustee, here are three conversations you can start right now—before crisis forces them:

1. With your board: Schedule a working session on hypothetical partnerships. Present three different institutional profiles (a larger regional university, a peer liberal arts college, a specialized technical institution) and ask: “If each approached us about a partnership, what questions would we need answered? What would make us say yes? What would be dealbreakers?” Don’t wait for an actual proposal to discover your board can’t evaluate one.

2. With your leadership team: Review your financial indicators beyond the composite score. Do you know your real cash flow position? What is your operating margin trend over five years? Your net tuition revenue per student? If a crisis emerged in twelve months, what partnerships or changes would you need to have been building toward now? Move before you have to.

3. With peer institutions: Identify 2-3 colleges (whether potential partners or not) and start building authentic relationships with their leadership. Not transactional networking—genuine understanding of their challenges, culture, and strategic direction. The eighteen-month rule means those relationships need to start today.

These conversations won’t solve every problem. But they’ll position you to make better decisions when opportunity or necessity arrives.

And they’ll help you build the institutional muscle memory for strategic thinking—the kind of thinking that distinguishes colleges that thrive from colleges that merely survive.

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Small College America’s webinar series is moderated by Dean Hoke of Edu Alliance Group, Kent Barnds of Augustana College and featured Dr. Anita Gustafson (Presbyterian College), Dr. Andrea Talentino (Augustana College), Dr. Tarek Sobh (Lawrence Technological University), Dr. Chet Haskell (higher education consultant), Dr. Barry Ryan (university leader and attorney), AJ Prager (Hilltop Securities), and Stephanie Gold (Hogan Lovells). For more information about Small College America, visit http://www.smallcollegeamerica.net.