Listening In preview - Robert Myers

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: a preview of Listening In.

This week, a conversation with author and Christian college president Robert Myers. Changing demographics, technological advances, and most recently—a pandemic—have forced many colleges and universities to reconsider how they do higher education. Here’s host Warren Smith.

WARREN SMITH: So how have you done it? Given the environment in which a lot of schools are going away or shrinking. What have y’all done?

ROBERT MYERS: Well I think it’s we sort of followed a principle that you might follow in financial investing. You don’t put all your money in one place. There are too many colleges today who really have said—and they’re smaller type colleges, “we’re going to focus on residential enrollment. That’s all we’re going to focus on.”

But if you start looking at some of the trends, and depending on where you are geographically, high school graduates are declining in numbers, fewer people going to college, a lot of environmental factors. So we said we’re going to follow the same kind of model that you would with investing, and that is we’re going to diversify. 

So we said we’re going to not just worry about residential students, we’re going to build online programs, we’re going to build our dual enrollment programs—which are our juniors and seniors in high school who are taking college courses—and we’re going to develop graduate programs. And those first three legs of the stool have happened, and it has paid great dividends for us.

REICHARD: That’s Robert Myers talking to Warren Smith. To hear the complete conversation, look for Listening In tomorrow wherever you get your podcasts.

(Photo/Toccoa Falls College) 

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