Greetings, Talking Out of School readers! This is a long one, but it’s worth it. I’ve broken it down into sub-headers to make navigating easier, and I’ve added a TL:DR. It was originally just about how boarding school can pivot programs, but we wandered around a bit. It was all so relevant, I could not cut it, and it also didn’t feel right to split it into multiple parts. Plus my editorial calendar is already packed for the fall, lucky readers!
And - I think there’s relevance here for everyone, not just boarding schools. Plus Greg and I are just fun (IMO, ha!) and Greg is continually quotable.
Stony Creek Strategy news
I remain delighted with the Stony Creek Strategy website. Let’s talk. I experienced the “a 20 minute chat can make all the difference” phenomenon with someone just this past week.
Next Friday, I’ll have more info both about my appearance on an upcoming podcast and, this just in, an upcoming webinar. The podcast will be generally about enrollment management and the webinar will be about hiring and retention - but here’s the big secret - it’s all related! Let’s practically and “do-ably” shift some mindsets and framing and structures to get some different results.
Communications Directors Cohort program, I’ll be circling back to those interested in the next week to ten days. The limited spaces are being claimed and it’s shaping up to be a great group. Fill out the interest form here or shoot me an email!
A few shoutouts to the Powerful Women of the SCS Alliance: Jane Moulding created a customized case study especially for the Women’s Leadership Cohort group that’s meeting next week, so cool…Ann Spagnola and Gina Malin are out and about in NYC lining up school visits to really listen to what support “on the ground” admissions folks need today… Lauren Castagnola is in the process of writing a post all about our Communications Audit services…
September People Talking interview with Dr. Greg Martin of Vermont Academy (Bio)
If you spend any time in the indy school corner of Linkedin, Greg is likely a familiar name. He always thinks about the future and has written for Independent School magazine, IntrepidEd News and other outlets. He also reposts really good stuff. When I wanted to talk about the next iteration of boarding school, Greg was a natural candidate.
TL;DR - There are serious reasons for trepidation - impossibly high boarding school tuition, falling demographics, cultural relevance, hiring headaches. But there are reasons for hope!
Reconsidering the goal - boarding schools seem to be an interesting position to serve kids who want to get a college-like “prep for independent life in the real world” experience and perhaps earn certificates or do training that would create a pipeline straight into a career and skip college altogether. (Hey, the PG program is already a thing - how could it be a more robust and relevant thing? I’ve been riding this hobby horse since 2019!)
Intentional talent acquisitions and talent management - a boarding school career is an antidote to the general disintegration of community that has led to a loneliness epidemic
Magic - there are unique ways boarding schools can contribute to answering the Big Issues we are struggling with in society right now. And making change is possible, especially as the baby boomers start to leave the scene. (Greg said it, not me! Some of my favorite people are boomers!)
Spoiler alert - We did not solve the tuition expense/business model conundrum. Maybe next time?
High Costs, High Tuition, Where’s the Market, How Did We Get Here?
Julie Faulstich
I'm eager to talk to you about what you see are the big challenges out there today for boarding schools and then perhaps some of the solutions.
Greg Martin
I think operational cost are a big one. Even your small potatoes boarding school is still like a $10 million business, which is not insignificant. energy costs, food costs, transportation costs, insurance, facilities and on and on.
Salaries are still a major issue across the board. They are the biggest chunk of any budget but I think we're still stuck at 1978 salary levels given cost of living increases. So essentially that 3% raise you get takes you nowhere. It keeps you at the same place you were if you're lucky.
And on the opposite side of that pipeline is affordability. So if you look at the rising generation of boarding school parents, they have the least amount of wealth and the greatest amount of debt of any generation. And then I think the other part to go with that is demographic shift. There's simply fewer kids and they're going to be fewer kids. That's not changing.
JF
I'm wondering what you see as the relationship between a generation that went into debt for their education and the situation today. Until the 1980s, going to a state school or small local college and living at home was often the norm. The loans, if any were taken out, were small. In my interview with Beth Cooper Benjamin, we talked about the rise of a middle class notion of meritocracy in white suburban areas and how aspiring to that elite school became more of a norm. Now we have a generation that still aspires to elite colleges, but as tuition prices rise, it ends up in reality being a prohibitive financial cost.
I'm curious how you interpret how cost influences the educational choices this generation is making for their kids, and how it trickles down to choices about attending a boarding school.
GM
That is the entire kitchen sink question. I'm not an economist, but I've done my share of time looking at numbers and data sets.
People used to be getting educated for free or for very low cost. The tuition at UC Berkeley in 1972 was 400 bucks. 400 bucks! Wages were in line with cost of living. So you could be “middle class.” And today's definition of middle class is bizarre. It's a huge range of $40K to 130K in annual income. You also look at the idea that unions were tremendously important in the 1950s, 60s and end of the 70s.
And all of that began to change around 1980. We saw a decrease in labor union participation. We saw a stagnation of wages. We saw an increase in the cost of living and the cost of college. We saw women entering the workforce in areas that they hadn't been in. We see now the two income family as opposed to the one income family. We see a larger increase in the amount of credit card debt. Manufacturing jobs begin to disappear. As a result, a lot of those fields are becoming saturated. We see less people becoming plumbers and electricians and pipe fitters and welders. And the government began encouraging more and more people to go to college.
And the defunding of vocational tech programs - this is all in the early 80s. So all of a sudden, high school education became redefined as “college prep.” And ask anybody what “college prep” means, and you're going to get word salad. It's really hard to define because colleges can't define what they are, let alone what “college prep” would be.
JF
So I guess I'm curious as to what you see are potential solutions for this high cost of boarding school tuition with a market of fewer kids, with parents who may not be able to access this education for a wide range of reasons, especially when they are thinking about funding both high school and college. And then there is the recent NY Times article about how the belief in the need for a college education is sinking. So if that’s sinking, who needs “college prep” anyway?
GM
Schools need to be really clear with what their value proposition is. And again, parents are changing. They want the Honda CRV. Amazing car, will run forever, won't break the bank. That's what they want. They're not “bumper sticker” parents who want that prestige bumper sticker from the fancy prep school.
And again, you have your outliers. You have your people that are very much the traditional boarding school set that want the bumper sticker on their cars. But even when they come to campus, they're looking for different things than parents were 10 or 15 years ago. The ones that do have the money, they're willing to part with that money but for different reasons.
I think we need to become much clearer about how we articulate the relationships we establish as opposed to “we offer 22 AP courses and 18 varsity athletic teams, and we put on two plays per year and we just built a new science center.” That's not necessarily what the rising cohort of parents wants.
Reconsidering the End Goal Beyond College Prep
JF
Before we started, you mentioned that often boarding schools try to solve problems by “doing the wrong things right-er” and we had a laugh. But I think there’s some truth to it. I think there is a school of thought that the problem with boarding school enrollment is that not enough mission matched families are aware of the boarding option. Do you see the lack of visibility as a primary problem or are current boarding schools program offerings the problem?
GM
I think for some schools the answer is yes, of course, offerings are a problem. I think for other schools it is a maybe or an “it depends.” I think for a third segment it's no. You're always going to have your schools that are... I hate using the phrase, “elite.”
JF
I get why you are reluctant to use that term. I don’t think it’s terribly helpful to divide boarding schools into the “elite” and the “not elite.” Any school that has an application process is seen as “elite” to the vast majority of people.
GM
There's 28 “elite” schools as defined by Digby Bateson in the '50s and Ruben Gaztimbedes Hernández in 2000. There's five typologies. It has to be founded before 1900, endowment of over 100 million, located in the Northeast, highly selective and college matriculation list has to be pretty consistently featuring the most elite colleges and universities. A school must hit three out of five to be seen as “elite.”
Schools like Exeter and Andover can pretty much do what they want. They have brand recognition and such deep pockets. And then you get the segment of schools that have always been lean and mean, running a tight budget, well managed cash flow, that deal. And they're the ones that are actually able to make the hard choices out of pure necessity. Like if we don't do something different, we're gone.
JF
Today there is a fluidity as to who is in the second and third group. Given the impact of the pandemic and the pace of change, I think one in the third group could move to the second and vice versa.
GM
With those middle tiers of schools, if you take their websites and cut and paste them, you couldn't tell them apart, right? What is their value? And I think those are the schools that are at most risk right now because what is the product you're offering?
Given the cost of college, with $1.7 trillion in student loan debt right now that’s only increasing, several states have moved away from making college degrees a mandatory part of employment. Lots of companies are now looking at, Okay, that's great, but do you have the certifications in X, Y, and Z, and what can you do? I think broadening the conversation of what a boarding school education means to prepare them to go further than just “college” would be a really good move for some schools.
JF
And do you think there's a market for that with the rising generation of parent consumer?
GM
Yeah. From what I'm seeing and reading and people that I know, there's less of a focus on, “if my kid doesn't go to college, he's going to fail at life.” Because that's just not real. I think there was a time period, and again, if we go back to the 80s and the 90s, there's probably a 20 year time span that was fairly true. I don't think that's necessarily true anymore. And I don't think it will be when we look at the data in 20 years. So I think schools have an opportunity to broaden from “college prep” to “college and career prep.”
JF
There are some advantages that I think we have, again, that boarding school can also provide that “prep for the independent life in the real world” experience.
GM
Boarding school provides both. You could have that living on your own, doing your laundry, organizing yourself, all those important skills, as well as starting to create credentials that you can then use to have a livelihood rather than stretching it out until you're 22.
When I think back to my own boarding school experience, I went to Peddie School - shout out to Peddie in Hightstown, New Jersey - of course I learned a great deal of academic stuff there. But to me, that wasn't the best or most valuable part. The most valuable part was how to live with people from other places in the world, how to have a roommate that you don't like, how to navigate a schedule, how to be on time for things, how to have relationships with people and just get along with people. I know I took US History. Do I remember anything specifically from the class? No. But I surely remember Buffalo Wing Night with my advisor, Sandy Tattersaw. I'll remember that forever. And the fact that I could text my roommate from boarding school right now and he would get back to me within two minutes.
Those are the pieces of the boarding school education that are undervalued and undersold. But I think over the course of a lifetime, they end up being the most valuable.
But at the same time, when you get groups of people that all look, think, live the same, all of a sudden you get a feedback loop, an echo chamber, and there's no divergent thinking. You insulate yourself so that something that's not normal at all becomes normal. That's the joke my wife always makes. She's like, Take you out of a boarding school and you're pretty useless. It's true. I've been in boarding school since I was 13.
So I think that the traditional model of the boarding school is not going to work for many schools - the sit down meals and dress codes and the idea that you throw on your coat and tie and you take your classes and you focus on getting into the most elite of elite colleges you can get into.
I think some schools would be best served by saying, if you want to graduate and be a phlebotomist and step into a career that is going to only be expanding or go into animal care or welding or software design, pick your deal. This is where dual credentialing or dual enrollment comes into play, that you can step out the door of boarding school with a solid education and credentials and instead of going to college and getting in debt, you can step out the door and be making money day one. I think that's sellable to this new group of parents that we see coming up.
JF
And you’ve also had that sheltered transitional experience living away from home, attending college usually provides. I have thought for years that the PG year was an underutilized structure for most boarding schools.
GM
And if I take my own kids, they all had very different post high school educational experiences. My oldest went to college and then left college as he was already working in his field. But now to move up, he’s finding he needs a degree, even though he has all of these credentials and certifications. So he’s going back. My middle son is a landscape architect and has both a BA and an advanced degree. And then my youngest, he was the kid that would get up in the morning and say, What are we doing today? Teach me how to fix that bicycle. Teach me how to glue a tubular tire on a rim. And he's working as an assistant superintendent at a golf course. He loves it and makes an excellent living. So I think that the economy piece is changing. And as a result, the way we approach career paths in education is going to have to look different.
And I think what we’re really discussing here is that large segments of the adult world are not being honest with young people, Not because we're trying to be dishonest, but because what we saw as being “normal” and the way things go is no longer that way. We just can't wrap our heads around, not even a little bit.
JF
That’s a big change. Faculty and staff at all independent schools are all products of the status quo - including us! - with a passionate investment in the way things are that is probably not even fully conscious.
Big Unplanned But Relevant Swerve: The Hiring Struggle
GM
And employees go back to the cost piece of the puzzle, but it's also a culture piece. How many schools are still struggling to find faculty members over the summer?
JF
Way more than there used to be. I am becoming more and more convinced we have crossed over into a full-on existential crisis in the teaching profession. And the longer schools don’t take that threat seriously, the worse it will get. Once a belief really takes hold in the culture…oof. Scary.
GM
The simple reality is people are not attracted to education jobs as a whole. And I think boarding schools don't do a very good job of selling themselves to prospective faculty because we continue to look at the same places for a personnel stream. How are we saying, come work in a wonderful community, live here, work with amazing young people and make a difference. You also have amenities such as a dining hall where not only do you not have to cook, you get to have dinner with terrific people every night. And you're going to have access to fitness facilities and the theater and so much culture. You're going to have solid vacations and summers. It’s a great place to live and work.
JF
We are also in an epidemic of isolation and loneliness so all that seems even more relevant. It's a great place to raise a family. Even if you put aside the main draw which is making a difference in kids’ lives, just the idea of living in a community should be powerful today!
GM
So how do we articulate that? And it's the same thing as when we talk about how we market to parents. Most of the things that we're trying to market to both faculty and families are the intangibles. And I think if schools can do that on both the faculty side and the parent side and be able to articulate that and put that front center, that's a great move. And to toot our horn, Vermont Academy is definitely doing that. Our admissions office is doing that. We're a great place to send your kid. We're going to take care of them.
JF
I want to make it clear I did not put you up to this but what you said about faculty is exactly one of the services that my team and I are offering because we need to really rethink recruiting staff and faculty. You can't have five different “hiring managers.” And many schools have added some kind of HR function but what that means in reality is all over the place. Is the dean of faculty managing the search? Or the department head? Or the head? Is it even clear?
Schools need clarity on who they are, strategy on how to attract the people they need and to retain them as well. They need something more to land great candidates than, you would be so lucky to work here.
GM
You can't just call the recruiting firms and have a parade of people come and even count on the fact that you’ll have someone who's even going to accept an offer.
JF
Recruiting firms are posting on LinkedIn when they have an opening. The big pools of candidates they had in their data bases just aren’t what they used to be. These firms can still be relevant partners to schools but the days when it was basically “set it and forget it” are over - it’s time to be actively partnering year round with these firms. And hopefully these firms can pivot to really work with schools to use a school’s talent branding to assist them in their efforts to find mission matched candidates.
GM
Even here where we're trying to do it well, it's still different people handling different elements of a job search. You see somebody on campus for an interview and you didn't even know they were coming. I've been yelling about this for years that you need a full-time hiring person. That is the primary responsibility. We need to have one person focusing on that talent acquisition.
And other aspects of hiring are changing. You're seeing a rising cohort of faculty members that are maybe not your traditional triple threat. They didn't play three sports in high school. They are maybe a one sport athlete. They're going to say no to a lot of the extra duties we just accepted as part of the deal.
JF
Let’s also be honest - boarding schools ran for years on the unpaid labor at the margins. I never thought about it that way at the time but this generation does and I very much respect that. Of course if you work at a boarding school and you are operating an institution seven days a week for the educational benefit of kids, there are duties in addition to teaching. But schools need to create systems that make some sense, have some transparency and aren’t all based on seniority. And if you are trying, for all the reasons it’s educationally desirable and relevant to do so, to have a diverse workforce, the diversity is likely all among the newer people who get screwed by those systems.
GM
To be blunt, these candidates don’t have to put up with that because they can go grab something else. They have options. My middle kid just took a great job down in Westchester, New York. He turned down two jobs before that. He only has to be at the office three days a week, 100 % medical dental with all the premiums covered, zero deductible plan. He gets four weeks off a year. They gave him membership at the gym and they gave him a signing bonus.
JF
Most boarding schools can’t compete with here are your five preps and you’re coaching two sports, one of which you have no familiarity with, and here’s your weirdly laid out third floor, one bedroom apartment that is semi-heated in the winter.
GM
It was freshly renovated in '93.
I think what we're seeing here is the world has changed in ways that we, old people, can't really fully fathom. And boarding schools are not built for that change.
IV: How Do You Make Change in Hard to Change Places?
JF
Schools move so slowly. You have to figure out what changes you’re implementing in the next year by January, or you have no chance. So this gets to my next question. My continual mission with the newsletter is about how do you name these big issues but also how do you really talk about and name them with empathy, because we need honesty, empathy, and hope. Name it with empathy because I think we both love these schools and we understand why they are the way they are. It’s almost painful to see the opportunities and the need for change and worry about these schools’ ability to pivot.
So how do you take all of these big ideas and the need for change and how do you not just do the “wrong things right-er” and actually implement real change? How do you start to make “on the ground” change? Maybe from the perspective of your role as director of professional development?
GM
Some of it is breaking culture, which can make you really unpopular.
JF
So then does being unpopular undercut your efforts?
GM
Yeah, surely. But I think if you can show that you're doing it for the right reasons and why this is a good move, and then you try to shepherd people onto the bus, and there's always going to be the people that aren't going to get on the bus, and then you have to have that conversation. Here's the bus, and this is the direction it's going. Do you want to be on it or not?
JF
Do you have an example of this process, at any school where you feel like that's worked for you?
GM
Yeah. When I was at Perkiomen, I was one of the point people for the Folio Collaborative. And getting people on board with that, their attitude was, well, this is just another stupid evaluation process. And this is what they're going to use to not give me a job next year. And you basically had to really talk about the fact that it's a growth mindset. And this is about professional growth, not performance. And let's separate the two.
JF
I see this as part of the issue with some of these new “HR” roles. A performance issue is a different conversation than, “How can we help you grow professionally?” HR is not equipped to handle the professional growth aspect in a vibrant or nuanced way as that’s not really what HR is. And I think right now at many schools, these things are kind of mashed up uncomfortably.
GM
Once you keep having the professional growth conversation and it goes through the cycle once and people are like, Oh, well, that wasn't too bad. Or even, That was helpful. That was actually nice. Then it becomes a thing. First year, it's new and novel. Second year, it's let's do it again. Third year, it's normalized. It's a three year thing.
But there's a generational handoff happening everywhere. Government sector, look at the age of people that are running the show, bigger businesses, look at the age of the people running the show, and then look at your schools. What's the average age of senior administration in schools? I think by 2029, every baby boomer hits retirement age. So as that generation exits and the snarky, punky Gen Xers come in as well as the Millennials and Gen Z, I think a lot of the things that we're finding immovable will all of a sudden vanish.
JF
I find boarding schools fascinating and often magical but they do have layers of hard to solve problems. Since they are wonderful places, often employees want to stay way past the average retirement age.
GM
That is a thing. As people move up the chain, they want to do less, which is normal. Weekend duty for me is brutal because I like to be asleep by 10:30. I'm at that point now where when I do weekend duty the next week for me is not great. So how do you be attentive to that change while not overburdening your young and new faculty coming in? How do you care for your community at each stage?
But I think that generational change is going to enable boarding schools to become more nimble and more adaptive to the changes that are going on in economics and demographics. There's going to be less of the attitude of “that’s just how we always do it.”
JF
Schools have to be able to hang on that long, though. And I think that’s a reality for some boarding schools right now.
GM
But there's tremendous opportunity. Tremendous.
JF
So on that note, Dr. Greg Martin, what is the 21st century case for boarding schools?
GM
I think at a time nationally where our society needs to refocus on taking care of people, and solving the big ugly issues, boarding schools are a fantastic place to do that work because you have a community, a built in system where we're forced to be face to face with each other every day in all situations. Students see me in the classroom, eating my lunch, walking my dog, having coffee with my wife, out on the bike, 11 o'clock at night with a head cold, feeling like poop. And it forces us to be empathetic, to be understanding, to be communicative, and to work towards a common goal. And I think if you take that and you extrapolate it, that's what we need as a country. And that's why I think boarding schools have value.
JF
I think there is the potential for magic in a way that is unique. It can get kids out of very complicated day to day family or peer dynamics when they're adolescents trying to develop their identity and they can discover and even reinvent themselves. You take them out of that and you put them into a culture that has the potential to be intentionally cultivated. When I first became head of Westover, I remember this conversation with an architect about the potential of the campus. I got very mushy about how boarding schools can really aspire to be utopian communities. Or at least that's the goal. You never get there. But that can be the goal.
GM
I wouldn't say utopian. I would say more, how would I put it? There's a practical nature to it. Here are the issues in front of us. How do we, as a community, address them in a way that's going to be good for us as a community?
You have to remove the “me” from it. I think if you can distill and bottle that mindset and then when you go out into the greater world, you're able to function at a higher level. You're able to take in more and think, how is this going to apply to a bigger organization, to a neighborhood, to the world in general? And I think if you could give people those glasses to wear in the world, then they're able to do the work that is going to move us forward as a society.
JF
So do you feel hopeful for the future of boarding schools?
GM
Yes. You have to feel hopeful because you look around and overall, things are a shit show. But imagine what it was like to wake up in 1941. You just had the Great Depression. You probably lived through World War I. So it's all relative.
I am also hopeful because I spend enough time with young people. Even though I think they're damaged right now because of COVID, and maybe coming to the realization that the things they've been told growing up aren't necessarily true. Again, not because there was some nefarious lie going on just because things have changed. But they're still pretty hopeful. They really get inspired by doing the right things, which is, again, cathartic and gives you energy and makes you think, we’re going to be all right.
Thank you to Greg - this was a totally fun conversation and given that we had it over the summer, it is interesting to see how we hit on issues that are now heating up this fall, including that NYT magazine piece on attitudes about college and Senator Romney’s recent call for boomers to step aside.
And really, is there a better way to start the weekend - or the school year - than, “we’re going to be all right”?
Have a better than all right weekend,
Julie