PODCAST | Pain Points In Higher Education

In today’s podcast, William speaks with Tim Fuller, founder of Fuller Higher Ed Solutions. In June of 2020, Tim founded his organization with a deep love for and experience with Christian colleges and universities.

Tim previously spent 27 years with Houghton College and 13 years of consulting at Credo. Fuller Higher Ed Solutions helps institutions create strategic plans that work, recruit students, and find a path forward through their biggest challenges.

In this conversation, Tim shares some of the pain points and challenges that he is currently seeing in christian higher education, along with innovative solutions. We hope this conversation is helpful for you as you navigate changes in your ministry. If we can help you further your mission, please contact us to get started.

Transcript:

Christa Reinhardt:
Welcome to the Vanderbloemen Leadership podcast. I'm your host, Christa Reinhardt, Senior Marketing Coordinator here at Vanderbloemen. In today's podcast, William speaks with Tim Fuller, Founder of Fuller Higher Ed Solutions. In June of 2020, Tim founded his organization with a deep love for and experience with Christian colleges and universities. He previously spent 27 years with Houghton College and 13 years of consulting at Credo. His higher ed solutions helps institutions create strategic plans that work, recruit students, and find a path forward through their biggest challenges. In this conversation, Tim shares some of the pain points and challenges that he's currently seeing in Christian higher education, along with some innovative solutions. We hope this conversation is helpful for you as you navigate changes in your ministry.

William Vanderbloemen:
Well, hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us today for our podcast, and today particularly, on our podcast in Christian education and academic leadership. This is something that God has really put on my heart for quite a while now. I'm a recovering preacher, so I ramble. And when we started our work, we started by saying we're going to help the church, and that means we're going to help pastors and congregations get linked up and help congregations find their pastor. And then God showed me, "William, church is bigger than that." Arguably, people in education get more time in Christian and spiritual formation with an individual than a church does. Kids are in a classroom for a long, long time. You're on a campus of a college for a long, long time. So I've been trying to learn what that whole world is like.

William Vanderbloemen:
We're recording this on Monday, I know that pastors out there are depressed. I could send out an email saying, "Don't quit today. Wait till Tuesday," and I would get like a thousand replies. But what I don't know is what are the things that college presidents are wrestling with, cabinets of college presidents are wrestling with, particularly as we try and reopen from a pandemic. And before the pandemic, the trendlines for Christian higher education were not great for everybody. So it's not like it was rainbows and unicorns, and now it's all of a sudden bad. So, rather than just try and figure this out on my own, I've got a friend, Tim Fuller, who I've known for a while, who's worked with eight, I think it's officially now eight bajillion colleges in his career to try and help them wrestle through these issues. Tim, thanks for joining us today, really appreciate you and making time for us when I know you're in kind of a busy season right now yourself, right?

Tim Fuller:
Yeah. This is, this is February, which seems to be the month when most of Christian higher education travels to warm places and talks to each other. So three conferences in Dallas and now two in Florida, so it's been a long haul here. I'm looking forward to getting home Friday night after conference number five this month. So yeah, it's been a busy season, lots of needs. As you mentioned, William, the industry has lots of needs, had a lot of needs, and then a pandemic happened and that changed the landscape in lots of ways, too. So happy to be part of the conversation today.

William Vanderbloemen:
Well, I appreciate that. I'll tell you, this is my 14th year doing executive search, and I started saying it as a trite little Bible/dad joke, but it's actually gotten traction with churches and schools and nonprofits, in churches particular. I think my job is to make sure that whether it's a candidate or a church, make sure that nobody walks down the aisle with Rachel and wakes up next to Leah. And as you know the story from the Old Testament, it's like, "Oh, whoa! It's not what I signed up for. Now I've got seven years just to get a chance at the thing I wanted." You can go look it up if you don't it. It's in Genesis.

William Vanderbloemen:
But that happens all the time in churches, and it's not a mal-intent. Search committees are full of people that love their church and show the best foot forward. And then the pastor gets there and goes, "Whoo, didn't know things were quite that way." My understanding is that doesn't just happen in churches. That's also true in Christian higher education. Would you agree with that?

Tim Fuller:
Yeah. Let's be clear. It's not just a Christian higher ed thing too either. It's a higher ed thing. What makes me sad about it existing in Christian higher ed is you would hope for a higher level of integrity and transparency and other things like that. Let's call this errors of omission rather than errors of commission when it happens. But yeah, I've had way too many friends and colleagues who become presidents and discover, wow, I didn't realize this was going to be a turnaround. Yeah, it's an interesting challenge.

Tim Fuller:
I had a conversation, not with you, about a presidential search, but with another fairly well-known search firm because I had read through their presidential profile for a campus I was fairly familiar with. And I knew that they had been on a really serious slide enrollment-wise and had frozen salaries and cut fringe benefits and eliminated positions. And yet you read the prospectus and it did sound like unicorns and rainbows and balloons and parades, especially financially. So in the conversation with the search consultant, I said, "I think your firm's integrity is on the line," which kind of got his attention.

William Vanderbloemen:
Wow.

Tim Fuller:
The reaction's "Well, we're just dealing with the material we were given by the campus." I said, "I think you ought to get better material." And that search continued and the person who ended up in that job is not someone I know personally, but I heard recently from someone who does know him [inaudible 00:06:32] "Yeah, I was really surprised at the level of turnaround that was necessary for this institution." So it happens. I have a fairly good friend of mine who had served on the board of the campus where he now serves as president, and about six months into his presidency, he called a town hall meeting for faculty and staff and apologized to them for all of culture issues that existed that as a board member he had no concept were going on at all.

Tim Fuller:
So yeah, I do think there is something there about what presidential candidates need to do, the old buyer beware thing, to make sure you have the right people around you. I have an MBA, but one of the things I learned in my MBA program is I'm not a finance person. So if I were going into a presidential search, I would get some people who know finances to look at the institution's finances with me and arm me with the right questions to ask. I think boards need to do the same thing. I think search consultants need to do the same thing, not just about the finances, but get at some of the cultural issues too, to say so what's the landscape into which this new person is going to enter and what are the challenges they face? What are the resources they face? But what are the assets they have at their disposal? I think is all pretty important.

William Vanderbloemen:
Let me drop back. Let's tell people what you do when you go into a school so they have some sense of the knowledge base that you're working with. Tell us about your work.

Tim Fuller:
Yeah. So Fuller Higher Ed Solutions is 18 months into its history. It's now 15 years I've been on the consulting side, William, helping colleges, really with, especially with a focus on Christian higher education, which is my exclusive focus now, but really helping in three specific areas. One is in enrollment where I've spent my 42-year career, in some way, connected to Christian higher education enrollment. Second would be strategic planning. We're here. We feel called to go here. How do we get there? I mean, we're higher ed, so we can make it a lot more complicated than that, but that's in essence what strategic planning is. And then the third area is what I call leadership counsel, which is a bucket where interesting things emerge. A board saying, "Do we have a path forward as an institution?"

Tim Fuller:
I don't know everything, that's pretty clear. I have lots of Moses at the burning bush moment for my token Old Testament reference this morning. However, I've been hanging around Christian higher ed for a long time. I have a lot of really talented friends that enjoy being rented for projects. So when the board asks the question, "Do I have a path forward or do we have a path forward?" I rent a couple of talented friends. We dig into the numbers and the finances and the culture and all of that and say, "Yeah, but here's what it's going to take."

Tim Fuller:
So leadership counsel is interesting projects like that, or "We used to have 1200 students and a hundred majors. Now we have 650 students and a hundred majors. The math doesn't seem to be working out. Help us figure out what we ought to do now." So that's basically the context. Your eight gajillion or whatever your number was you gave before, it's probably, it's less than 200, but it's up there in that range of places, campuses with which I've worked in some capacity.

William Vanderbloemen:
That's pretty close to bajillion.

Tim Fuller:
Yeah, that's right. We can round. We'll round up.

William Vanderbloemen:
I'm not a math guy either, right? I hope listeners are hearing that you've been underneath the hood and are hearing what's happening. One of the questions I get when I go out, wherever it is, probably the number one question I get is "What's everybody else doing? What's going on out there?" Because whether it's a church and it's a senior pastor, they get burred into their parish, or a CEO in a nonprofit, I think the same is true with schools. Now that schools have been open for a while and we're in whatever form we are, either after the pandemic or life with it or whatever, what are you seeing as new pain points and challenges for Christian higher education and where are you seeing some innovative solutions?

Tim Fuller:
Yeah. Some of the pain points are the same ones that have been there before for campuses that are reliant on 18-year-olds making decisions to choose their institution. There are fewer of them. Yeah, there [crosstalk 00:11:26] was a point...

William Vanderbloemen:
If my life depended on 18-year-olds deciding whether they liked me or not, I don't know that I'd make it very long.

Tim Fuller:
Yeah. I collected these things over a career, 27 years, 27 enrollment cycles at Houghton. Toward the end of my career, an admitted student told one of my admission counselors. "I like Houghton, but I don't know if I want to be that far from a Walmart for my entire college career." Houghton's kind of rural, absolutely love the place, marvelous place to raise a family, marvelous place to go to college, all those kinds of things. But when my ability to feed my family is dependent on people making decisions, and ready access to deep discount retail is becoming one of those factors and those decision, and I'm in Houghton, New York, it's time to be a consultant, let me tell you. I mean, I joke mostly about that, but yeah, it is... I heard a speaker at a conference one time say that admission counseling is the toughest selling job in the world with traditional students because you're trying to sell a high-priced, future-oriented intangible to an 18-year-old making the first major decision of their life.

Tim Fuller:
Now, as Christ followers, we would say, well, the most important decision of their lives, which hopefully they have made by that point in time, is decision to follow Christ. But still, it's a big decision. So I think those factors haven't changed. They've gotten more complicated as a result of the pandemic. I think the belt tightening that's going on as a result where, again, higher education is really good at adding typically and pretty lousy at subtracting, and that's part of what's had to happen in the last few years. And the reason why that's so hard is because we're a labor-intensive industry, and when we subtract, we're talking about brothers and sisters in Christ. These are not just robots or something on an assembly line. This is people who care about the mission and care about students and all of those kinds of things. But that makes it challenging too.

Tim Fuller:
The competition has been there and it's gotten tougher, I think. The financial challenges are, I think, in many ways, some of the government aid that came during the pandemic kind of provided a timeout for some institutions. I'm not sure it fixed things for lots of them. I think it rather created a pause in what I think will be some degree of thinning of the herd, and not just in Christian higher education, but more broadly too. Supply is certainly exceeding demand at this point in time. It's a buyer's market and there are probably too many institutions. And so I think we'll see some thinning of the herd going forward.

Tim Fuller:
I think one of the biggest issues is... and this changes over time, William, about how this case needs to be made. But I do think the case for why a Christian college is worth choosing has changed in recent years as well, too, as our society has moved into much, much more almost post-Christian in many ways. And even within the church itself, there's a lot of changes occurring. Two weeks ago at the IACE Conference, I listened to John Basie and Phil Alsup from Impact 360 make a really, really good presentation on Gen-Z thinking, especially as it relates to matters of faith and the church and the implications for college choice. And I would encourage anybody who's listening... I think you can download their PowerPoint from the IACE website. But go to Impact 360 and look at all the great research they've been doing in conjunction with the Barna Group on gen-Z, really worth reading and staying up on.

Tim Fuller:
But I do think this generation is looking differently at matters of faith and that has them looking differently at Christian colleges too. So the case for a Christian college, how you make that case in 2022 and beyond is different than you might have made it 20 years ago when there were certain assumptions in play that you that are no longer in play.

William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah. We've seen that. Our Christian secondary education practice is growing like crazy, much faster than we anticipated, and it's not because we're that smart. It's because the market's growing that fast. I think everyone had a different opinion on everything during the pandemic and the first six months of it, on who should be president, on whether you should wear a mask, on blah, blah, blah, blah. But everyone agrees children need to be in classrooms. Zoom doesn't work with teenagers and younger. The local school systems that are publicly run, the ones that shut down, man, the Christian education just jumped right in and enrollment is doing very well and the whole segment is growing. I wonder if some of that will trickle out into the Christian higher education, or at least... I'm a sales guy. When I was a pastor, I was more interested in overpopulating heaven than maturing disciples.

William Vanderbloemen:
I wonder if it's an opportunity for Christian higher ed to say, hey, the landscape around here is changing so fast, and what you used to think was in education is now becoming... everything's being redefined. And that might be as simple as hot button politics or how many types of bathrooms you have or whatever the thing is. I wonder if Christian higher education has a chance now to say we have a why behind our what that makes us a different option than some of the... Is that a fair statement?

Tim Fuller:
Yeah, I think so. When there is more parting of the ways between maybe traditional norms and what we would consider to be... And boy, we get a lot of argument about exactly what does Christ-centered lifestyle and values look like? You could have some interesting debates about that too. But as there gets to be a wider divide, I think Christian higher education has the potential to stand out as more distinct and more valuable to a segment of the population that in the past might have said, "Yeah, that's nice, but my kid needs to get a good education." Well, I think there are tons of Christian colleges where you can both be in a nurturing discipleship-making, appropriately challenging and yet Christ-centered environment that's supportive and encouraging of your values values as opposed to being in a place where you're getting an equal education but having those values attacked, if not be ridiculed, on a regular basis [crosstalk 00:18:41].

William Vanderbloemen:
My alma mater is perfect example, Wake Forest University. If you'd ask my aunt and uncle who went there, they'd say it's a Baptist school and there was a code of conduct and a chapel requirement and all these things. When I went there, that was fading off the scene a little bit. My high school senior will be enrolling there in the fall. I love the school. I think it's going to be a great education and a great four years for him, but we did not pick it based on its Baptist identity. And I think now there's a chance for someone to really step in and say, yeah, and we are a different option, maybe not better, but different. I think people will make a values-based decision, whereas before it might be what's the average starting salary or tell me how many people you placed in law school or whatever the questions are.

Tim Fuller:
Yeah. To paraphrase a former colleague of mine who used to use an example when he talked with parents and students about the core curriculum in his institution, he would say "Here at our university, everybody has two majors. There's the one you pick, which gets your first job. There's the one we pick, the core curriculum, that gets you every subsequent job and prepares you for life." And it feels to me like there's a way for Christian higher education, for us to talk about what we do in that same way, where we talk about major. We make no apologies at all about preparing people well for careers. But we emphasize the point that the biblical foundation, the sense of Christian ethics and values is part of what, to borrow from my friend, prepares you for life in every subsequent job that you will get. I think that's got to be part of our case making going forward in an increasing way.

William Vanderbloemen:
Let's jump forward to places you're seeing bright spots. If there's oversupply and fewer demand, where are some shining examples you're seeing of people saying "I'm using this approach to shift the script, if you will, and it's making a difference."

Tim Fuller:
Yeah. When you look at the enrollment numbers, you can find a couple of exceptions to what's been a slide at some other places, and they're not all cookie cutters either. I look at a place like Cedarville, for example, which made a somewhat controversial, at the time, move a few years ago to say, "Nope, we are going back toward our roots, which much more conservative, G-A-R-B, all of those kinds of things. And we're making changes in leadership and expectations and so on." And when you look at their enrollment patterns over the last few years, with a couple of bumps, it is a pretty strong pattern of growth. Now, Cedarville has also long offered programs that are of real interest to people too. Engineering is one in particular where they don't just offer it, but they offer it in an exceedingly and strong program. They have a great campus, it continues to develop. So I think that's been been one approach.

Tim Fuller:
Anderson South Carolina is another example of an institution, perhaps not as conservative as Cedarville, but also has made really good investments in the campus in identifying, "Well, we don't really have a student center. Okay, we need to develop one. All right, let's do it." They were a place, I think, that has made significant gains by recognizing it's not just new student enrollment that matters, but it's retention. And so they've made some major investments in, let's make sure... And good retention is not, let's keep our students. It's more a matter of let's serve the daylights out of the students we have in and out of the classroom, so they can't imagine themselves leaving.

Tim Fuller:
And in both cases, the encouraging thing about that is when you think about that from a kingdom perspective, it's more people prepared to go and do marvelous things for the Lord, wherever God calls them to go. Yeah, yeah, improving your retention is part of your business model, health for sure, but it's also part of making sure you're preparing sufficient people and in increasing numbers for the kingdom.

William Vanderbloemen:
That's great. Well, I really appreciate you taking time with us today. I wonder, Tim, if people wanted to get in touch with you, if they're here and they want to get to here, if they're trying to make that jump or need you for an enrollment plan, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Tim Fuller:
Yeah. My website is fullerhes.com, and my email address is pretty simple. It's just tim@fullerhes.com. The conference season ends, so that means I'll be back on campus and occasionally in my home office in Indianapolis. Yeah, love to talk to Christian leaders and even people who aspire to be in those roles too, to help them figure out what questions should I be asking, is what we're doing working, and how do I know that? And if it's not, how do we get closer to best practice? And best practice is not a laminated sheet, but best practice always has to be customized to say, what are the unique and distinct things here, and how should we do some things differently based on our location, our denominational ties, or lack thereof? All of those kinds of things [inaudible 00:24:41].

William Vanderbloemen:
That's great. Well, Tim Fuller, thanks for joining us today. And if you are interested, you're going to start to see, we have a wonderful new lead team member who has figured out how to segment our email lists, where presidents of Christian higher ed, Christian higher ed, we have a very sort of specialized segment of content for you all. And if you'd like to be a part of that, you can go to vandercast.com and just put your email address in. That also means we will not beat up your inbox with things that have nothing... You probably don't want to know about children's ministry, you don't want to know about. So I think you're going to see a wonderful attention to your world, and we would love to be able to provide you some service to the things we're learning as we go. Thanks for joining us, and we'll look forward to talking to you again soon.

Christa Reinhardt:
Thanks for listening to the Vanderbloemen Leadership podcast. At Vanderbloemen and our sister company, ChristianTeams, we help Christian organizations build their best teams through hiring, succession, compensation and diversity consulting services. Visit our websites, vanderbloemen.com and christianteams.com to learn more, and subscribe to our Vanderbloemen Leadership podcast wherever you listen to podcast to keep up with our newest episodes. Thanks for listening.