few years ago, the University of the Cumberlands was a small residential college for low-income students from Appalachia. Then the 2008 recession hit, bringing widespread job losses to the region.
The lost income left applicants needier than ever, forcing the Christian college in Kentucky to discount tuition even more deeply than it always had. The future didn’t look much brighter, with forecasts predicting a decline in the number of high-school graduates nationwide.
To survive, Cumberlands, like many of its private-college peers, would have to find a way to raise new revenue.
So in 2011, the university created an onlinegraduate program. Today, close to 12,000 online learners, most of them in graduate programs, subsidize the roughly 1,400 undergraduates who study in the campus’s traditional red-brick buildings.
The online move has made Cumberlands, which was founded by a group of Baptist ministers in 1888, thefastest-growingdoctoral private nonprofit institution in the country. In the decade from 2007 to 2017, Cumberlands’ enrollment grew 350 percent. That is still well behind the growth rates of Southern New Hampshire and Western Governors Universities, which ranked first and second among master’s private nonprofit institutions and were the fastest-growing over all.
Other Christian colleges have seen similarly sharp gains. Indeed, half the institutions that crackedthis year’s listof the 20 fastest-growing private nonprofit colleges with at least 5,000 students in 2017 identify as faith-based campuses.
They got there by different means, including adding academic programs and expanding recruiting.
The one thing most of the Christian colleges haven’t done is spend heavily on marketing. None, except Regent University, surpassed Southern New Hampshire’s spending per enrolled student. SNHU, which grew by 1,313 percent from 2007 to 2017, devoted more than a fifth of its functional expenditures to advertising and promotion in 2016-17.
Cumberlands, by comparison, spent less than 2 percent ofsuch expenditureson marketing. Jerry Jackson, the university’s vice president for enrollment and communications, says it “doesn’t have the dollars to spend, toe to toe, with those other institutions.”
Of course, the mega-growth of the mega-universities is not due solely to marketing. Leaders at SNHU and WGU cite their strong student- and alumni-referral rates — the result, they say, of their spending on support for students.
Still, this year’s list of the fastest-growing private nonprofit colleges is in large part a tale of two types of institutions: smaller, faith-based colleges that have found ways to distinguish themselves in a crowded market, and nonprofit mega-universities that have built online programs tailored to adult learners and marketed those programs aggressively. Their strategies differ, but both offer lessons for colleges seeking to expand their enrollment.
Paul LeBlanc, Southern New Hampshire’s entrepreneurial leader, doesn’t seem to like to talk about marketing much. He prefers to focus on the university’s student supports.
In 2016-17, SNHU devoted more than 40 percent of its spending to student services — nearly five times theoverall rateamong four-year nonprofit institutions. It employs more than 500 academic advisers.
But if SNHU is outspending its peers on student supports, it’s also an outlier inadvertising and promotion. In 2016-17 the university spent close to $133 million on marketing to prospective students, according to a form it filed with the Internal Revenue Service. Almost half that amount went to Mediassociates, a television-ad-buying agency, while $36 million went to Google, for search-engine marketing (the ads that appear when users search for a term such as “online college”).
LeBlanc says that advertising as a percentage of spending has actually fallen.
“We’re making a bet that our years of building a national brand is paying off, and now there is traction,” he says.
The cost per admitted student has come down, too, and is now in line with other nonprofit institutions, LeBlanc says. The university won’t disclose a specific number, but Alana Burns, SNHU’s chief marketing officer, says it has shrunk by a percentage in the double digits. According to a recent report by the consulting firm Ruffalo Noel Levitz, it cost private colleges $2,357, on average, to recruit a single undergraduate in 2018.
Burns says she sees the drop in recruiting costs as a reflection of student satisfaction. Twenty percent of SNHU’s students come through referrals, a spokeswoman says.
Scott D. Pulsipher, president of Western Governors, calls that phenomenon at his institution “the halo effect,” where “you have a large network of happy grads referring people.”
A recent survey of WGU students found that more than two-thirds had been referred by other students or alumni.
In 2016-17, WGUspent $75 millionon advertising and promotion. In the 2016 calendar year, it reported, it devoted $32 million to ad placement through the agency PhD Media and $16 million to lead generation, through Google. Its cost per matriculating student was $1,200.
SNHU, like most colleges and universities, has shifted most of its advertising toward digital media in recent years, though it still spends more heavily on television than do its peers, LeBlanc says.
“No one has given me a better way to get our name out there,” he says.
Still, SNHU thinks it can purchase TV ads more efficiently on its own. This summer, it ended its contract with Mediassociates, bringing the work in-house.
Asked what other colleges might learn from SNHU’s successes, LeBlanc says to focus, laser-like, on the user experience. Consider: How quickly can you respond to those time-crunched adult learners? And: Are you willing to be open at hours that work for them?
Faith-based institutions that are focused on undergraduates, by contrast, face steep challenges. The number of students graduating from American high schools is expected to drop after 2025, while the share of studentsidentifying as religiousis shrinking.
Many Christian colleges are already feeling the pinch. In thelatest surveyby the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, more than half of its member colleges that responded reported declines in traditional undergraduate enrollments in 2017-18. Meanwhile, the median unfunded discount rate at the surveyed institutions increased to 43.3 percent from 29.6 percent a decade earlier.
To offset those trends, some faith-based colleges are turning to online graduate education, as the University of the Cumberlands has. From 2012 to 2017 the number of graduate students enrolled exclusively in distance education at religiously affiliated colleges increased by 55 percent.
Online education extends colleges’ geographic reach and could help insulate them against a decline in traditional-age undergraduates, says Philip Truscott, who recently interviewed officials at some of the fastest-growing Christian colleges foran articlefor CCCU’s magazine.
“The more they can tap into an older age group, the less they’ll face demographic challenges,” says Truscott, an associate professor of sociology at Southwest Baptist University, in Missouri.
That has proved true at Cumberlands, whose online program has done so well that the institution plans to reduce its undergraduate residential tuition by more than half this fall, from $23,000 to $9,875.
Jackson, the vice president for enrollment, says he hopes the tuition reset will encourage students who were planning to work or to study at a two-year college to consider Cumberlands.
“We wanted to get to a cost point that was not a deterrent for the traditional population to pursue a degree,” he says.
By the fourth week of July, it had 858 new-student deposits for the fall, compared with the 520 new students who enrolled last fall.
But there are other paths to sustainability, too. Among the half dozen fast-growing colleges studied by Truscott, two changed locations, two added football teams, and several created new academic programs or core curricula.
California Baptist University, which grew 163 percent over a decade, added new programs in high-demand fields like nursing, engineering, and aviation science, while starting an online degree-completion program, says Mark Wyatt, its vice president for marketing and communication.
Colorado Christian University, which grew 244 percent, has forged relationships with more than 400 high schools, most of them Christian. More than a third of those high schools offer courses through the university’s dual-enrollment program, which has close to 5,000 students.
Some Christian colleges have taken steps to become more welcoming to students of different faiths and ethnic backgrounds, including expanding outreach to the fast-growing Latino community.
Cumberlands recently broke its ties with the Kentucky Conference of the Southern Baptist Convention but still considers itself a faith-based institution. Andrew Powell, the university’s director of communications and marketing, says Cumberlands wanted to include members of other faiths on its Board of Trustees, something the church wouldn’t allow.
“We’re seeing growth in students of all faiths,” he says. “From a marketing perspective, we don’t want to be seen as of one faith only.”
Marketing has been part of Cumberlands’ strategy, too, even if it doesn’t have many millions to spend. In 2016 the university paid two outside firms $2.7 million to advertise its graduate programs and generate leads (it has since canceled the more costly contract, which was focused on international recruiting). This year and last the university increased its marketing budget by 20 percent.
Though a majority of Cumberlands’ students now study online, its leafy campus will always be part of its identity, Powell says. And its growing number of online learners seem to appreciate that. When they pass signs for the campus driving down I-75, they’ll pull off, snap a selfie, and post it to social media, he says.
Some students “like to be tied to a brick-and-mortar institution,” he says. “They want online delivery, but the security and history we bring.”
