Brevard College Plans to Grow as Higher Ed Enrollment Drops Nationally. Can It?

The college is adding majors and raising $12 million for an expanded student center with the aim of boosting enrollment and tuition revenue.

Entrance to Brevard College on North Broad Street

BREVARD — Brevard College’s Myers Dining Hall, like the school itself, is in solid shape but ripe for a big upgrade, said the school’s president, Bradley Andrews.

A planned $12-million expansion of the nondescript, one-story brick building will accommodate five dining stations, a 24-hour student fitness center and several student lounges, all of which will create a much-needed hub of student life, Andrews said, “sort of like a campus living room.”

This project, along with additions to the curriculum and a planned mentoring program, will help the school “buck the trend” of declining college enrollment nationwide, school leaders said. More students — and more tuition revenue — will allow greater future investment in academics and facilities over the next decade.

Though Brevard College will never compete with Duke University or Davidson College for elite students, Andrews said in a two-hour interview last week, it can be the region’s best at doing what it does best — teaching students suited to its model of personalized instruction and “experiential learning.”

“My vision is that 10 years from now we are recognized as providing the best undergrad education in the Carolinas,” he said.

Because of the college’s prominent place in the culture of the city of Brevard, school administrators said, a more vital school will mean a more vital community.

But given the college’s historically tight finances, the planned academic advancement won’t come easily, and among the biggest challenges will be finding funds to pay adequate salaries to its teaching staff.

Though Andrews said previous president David Joyce was able to “right the ship” — shoring up the college's once-shaky finances and deteriorating buildings — lingering low pay hampers faculty recruitment and retention, and has contributed to high turnover in at least one key department.

Like colleges across the country, Brevard is increasingly reliant on poorly paid adjunct professors. And while its non-instructional staff increased at roughly the same pace as enrollment over the past decade, its ranks of full-time professors stagnated or slightly declined.

Pay for this faculty has also lagged behind that of peer institutions and far behind Transylvania’s soaring housing costs.

The college improved its benefit package last school year and raised the salaries of all full-time professors by $2,000, Andrews said, but he also acknowledged it needs to do more.

“One of the big needs we have here is, nobody gets paid enough.”

Hard-Earned Stability

Brevard College President Bradley Andrews describing plans for Myers Hall last week

Andrews pointed through a glass wall at Myers to the school’s library and counseling center on the other side of a paved lane. The future view will be of chairs and tables on a new patio, he said, of asphalt replaced by a pedestrian plaza linking all three buildings. 

“What we’re doing is creating a student-success quad,” he said.

The floor space at Myers will more than double, to nearly 36,000 square feet. The dining stations will offer better food and more variety, including stir fries, salads, sandwiches and omelets. Then there’s the planned fitness center and student lounges, two of them anchored by fireplaces.

The lack of gathering places needed to build community on campus was highlighted by both the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic and the results of student focus groups, he said.

“That’s what students said, ‘We don’t have an indoor hang-out space,’ ” he said. “We need a place to call our own, where we can just be, where we can develop groups, meet people and interact.”

The work will be funded through donations, he said, and will begin “the day after I get the last dollar of the $12 million” needed to complete the project.

Which might not be for a while. It’s too soon to release an architect’s rendering of the project, Andrews said, or publicly advertise the fundraising drive, which has begun with outreach to established donors.

“We’re best able to raise money when we’re able to talk to our best friends,” he said. “Let’s call this the silent phase.”

But it can also be seen as the next phase of a long-term effort to raise the college’s profile and enrollment that, really, began with Joyce’s arrival in 2012.

At the time, the college was “in poor financial shape,” as were many of its buildings, said Andrews, who arrived in January of 2022.

Joyce balanced budgets and addressed deferred maintenance, overseeing jobs such as exterior painting and the replacement of windows, roofs and HVAC systems. Continued improvements to facilities, including the construction of a new dorm, were included in a long-term strategic plan adopted in 2018, and the college has now completed that plan’s “foundational phase,” Andrews said.

“We’re at a point of stability, hard-earned stability,” he said. “Now it’s time to move forward.”

The “Amenities Arms Race”

Myers Dining Hall, which college leaders say is ripe for an upgrade.

That means adding majors in chemistry, communications and computer science this fall. Plans also call for a campus-wide mentoring program that will link students to established professionals in their fields.

But the Myers project is the big-money item, which raises a common question in higher education. Why are schools spending so much on features that have more to do with student comfort than learning?

Institutions such as North Carolina’s High Point University have become known for embracing this practice as a strategy to not just draw more students, but students from families wealthy enough to pay full tuition and establish a future base of generous donors.

And the trend of building, for example, gleaming dining halls, lazy rivers and climbing walls has become so pervasive that it has acquired a name, the “amenities arms race.”

One reason the Myers project has the support even of undercompensated professors: it won’t put Brevard at the head of this competition, just prevent it from being left in the dust.

“I think most faculty understand that if we are going to attract students we really do need to have somewhat competitive facilities and right now we don’t really have a student union or a student center per se,” said longtime mathematics professor Charles Wallis. “There are certain investments that need to be made so we can bring students here, and we need that to survive.”

The source of the money for the project — outside donations — means it won’t impact the operational revenue that pays teacher salaries.

“There’s no robbing Peter to pay Paul — at all,” said Andrew Schmidt, the school’s director of development.

And the main reason this project can’t be compared to those at, say, High Point? Brevard doesn’t go out of its way to cater to children of wealthy families and never will, Andrews said.

Enrollment at High Point tripled between 2005 and 2021, according to a report by Ron Lieber, a New York Times reporter and the author of a 2021 book about higher education finances. Meanwhile, the percentage of students at the school receiving Pell Grants — typically available to families with annual gross incomes of less than $60,000 — has dropped to 12 percent.

At Brevard, that number is 45 percent, and the school was recognized in U.S. News and World Report’s annual college rankings for its high “Social Mobility Index” — a measure of whether students end up more financially successful than their parents.

“We care a lot about accessibility to education and affordability,” Andrews said. “We’re driven to provide a transformational educational experience.”

The Bind

But this commitment to economic diversity also contributes to both financial and — at least according to one former teacher — academic challenges.

Brevard’s endowment is a relatively tiny $32 million. Why? Not only were few Brevard bachelor degree recipients born to wealth, but — because the school became a four-year college only in 1996 — few have had a chance to build the financial reserves that can feed such investment funds.

Without a large base of donors the school depends heavily on student tuition and other fees, which account for 86 percent of its annual $22 million revenue, Andrews said.

This revenue is limited by the cost of attending Brevard — $44,650, including room and board — which is nearly $30,000 less than the amount charged by some nationally recognized private colleges. And because almost all Brevard students receive financial aid, the average per-student contribution comes to less than $27,000.

Even so, robust enrollment will equate to robust finances, Andrews said, and the student body has grown, according to past course catalogs available online, from 627 in the 2012-13 school session to 794 last year.

But to reach the school’s enrollment goal of 850, it must also compete with state schools at the low end of the cost spectrum.

The very low end, in some cases, especially since the institution of the NC Promise program, which in recent years has cut tuition for North Carolina residents at schools such as Western Carolina University to $500 per semester.

“It’s a screaming deal, I mean it’s a really good deal for in-state students,” Schmidt said. “But what they don’t have is (Brevard’s) 11-1 student-to-teacher ratio and personalized learning outcomes.”

The college is using the advantage of individual attention to not only attract but retain students — and specifically to improve on its 40 percent graduation rate.

The foundational phase of the 2018 strategic plan included for-credit classes to teach learning skills to first-year students, as well as a program that links freshmen with “student success mentors.”

These and other efforts have boosted first-to-second year retention rates from 47 to 70 percent over the past decade and will continue to drive up the school’s graduation rate, Andrews said. He added that the college has not compromised academic rigor or integrity to maintain its stream of tuition-paying students.

“We remove students for disciplinary and academic reasons every semester,” he said.

Some faculty members said they have seen the college act decisively to address such concerns. Not former adjunct professor Claudia Adams, an accountant who taught last fall in the school’s business and organizational leadership (BORG) program.

When she discovered seven students had colluded to cheat on their mid-term exams, she said, she was told to handle the problem herself.

“I felt I was left out in the cold and had no assistance with regards to helping me figure out the best way to handle that problem,” she said. “It kind of left a sour taste in my mouth.”

She was also told to slow the pace of instruction in one class after students complained to administrators that she was moving too fast.

Because of such incidents, “I kind of felt like (the college) put more emphasis on passing students than learning,” she said. “Maybe that’s a trend at schools, to make sure a good percentage of their students pass so they can get tuition.”

Pay and Staffing

The need for that revenue is maybe shown most clearly in the size and salaries of its instructional staff.

Though the school is adding four professor positions along with its new majors this fall, the number of faculty members has remained at 51 over the past ten years. That, at least, is the number presented in course catalogs from both last school year and from a decade earlier, but the tally of full-time professors named in those documents dropped from 53 to 50, while the number of listed non-instructional employees climbed from 99 to 134.

The growth in administrative staff is in line with a national trend in higher education driven partly by the ever-growing level of regulation, Andrews said. The school has also added workers to address increased “out-of-classroom needs,” he said, including mental health counselors and advisors to help students secure financial aid and apply to graduate programs.

But the stagnant hiring of full-time professors suggests an increased dependence on adjunct faculty, which is indeed the case, at least based on the observations of Wallis, the mathematics professor, who has taught at Brevard since 2006.

“The college has relied on more and more adjuncts,” he said.

He said they are used appropriately in his department, teaching a remedial math class and, last school year, covering classes normally led by a professor who was on sabbatical.

But the campus-wide trend still increases the likelihood that classes will be taught by teachers who are less experienced and not as well-paid as full-time professors. Though the college did not provide information about salaries paid to its adjuncts, Andrews did say they didn’t receive a raise last year.

Adams, 71, who signed on as an adjunct to remain engaged in the community as she scaled back her tax practice, said she earned $1,800 per class, per semester. Figuring in the time required for teaching, grading and class preparation, she said, her compensation came to less than the state’s minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

Full-time professors are also underpaid, said Tim Powers, who helped build what is now the college’s most popular major, criminal justice.

Enrollment in the program climbed from about 20 when he arrived in 2015 to more than 200 in 2022, when he left for a job as a captain-in-charge with the police department at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Brevard College’s best professors tend to be, as he was, at or near retirement age, drawing on outside sources of income and attracted to living in Brevard, he said. Because Powers and his wife both receive pensions after long careers as law enforcement officers in Florida, he said he didn’t need a high salary — and he definitely didn’t get one.

“My salary — for a tenured professor with a PHD — was $51,000,” he said. “It was pathetic.”

That wasn’t the main reason he left, he said, and instead cited an organizational alignment that left his program under the supervision of a sociology professor with little expertise in law enforcement. She also oversees BORG, another of the school’s biggest programs, which has cycled through a half-dozen professors since the fall of 2018, according to staff lists in course catalogs.

This structure is one reason for the turnover, but pay that has slid behind inflation rates —and far behind housing costs — is also a factor, Paul Morgan, a longtime volunteer at the college, said in an interview shortly before his recent, unexpected death.

The program maintained stability and excellence under a previous coordinator, said Morgan, who retired to Brevard after a long career in business and academics and who developed a mentoring program that linked business students with experienced entrepreneurs.

When Morgan moved to Brevard in 2012, the business department “was as strong as any I’ve seen at a small school. It was humming like a Swiss watch,” he said.

Largely because of the churn in teaching staff, he said, “today’s business major is a shell of what it was five years ago.”

Hands-On Learning

Yes, pay is a problem, and there’s little doubt it hampers staff hiring and retention, said music professor David Gresham, whose role as chair of the school’s faculty council is to take such concerns to the administration.

But he’s also heartened that the college has “tried to move us into a better salary relationship with our peer institutions,” he said.

He added that the instructional staff in his program has enjoyed “remarkable stability,” and the same is true of the mathematics department, Wallis said. 

Why are professors attracted to the school? Why do many of them decide to stay?

The county’s natural beauty is a draw, said Wallis, an avid hiker. He also believes firmly in the benefits of experiential learning and small class sizes. And this intimate teaching atmosphere doesn’t just foster productive relationships between professors and students, Gresham said, but among faculty members.

“It’s a small enough place that we can all meet in one room,” he said. “I find Brevard (College) to be an incredibly collegial environment. I love my colleagues and we collaborate together on a lot of different things.”

Math classes are capped at 30 students, Wallis said, and typically contain far fewer than that.

“In a smaller classroom, we can divide students into groups and I can wander around and talk with different groups as they are working,” he said. “I don’t think I could do that if I had a class with 75 students.”

He can sometimes help individual students in class and always during office hours, he said. Experiential learning — flipping coins to build probability tables, for example — can be applied even to a subject as abstract as mathematics, he said.

It’s crucial, meanwhile, in practical subjects such as criminal justice, Powers said. Though he complained that he had to pay for the crime scene kits supplied to students, these helped convey lessons that could never be effectively delivered by PowerPoint.

“I got blood from a butcher and we threw blood around, and we had blood-spatter analysis,” he said. “They put their hands on it. They measured it. They were able to do calculations. They understood it.”

Because of his continued faith in the program, he said, he has gone out of his way to recruit its graduates for his department in Atlanta.

“I still love them and I love their program. The officers they are producing are intelligent,” he said. “They have skills and they know how to deal with people.”

Not an “Ivory Tower”

Brevard College Director of Development Andrew Schmidt, pictured on a recent family outing, described the school’s role in the life of the community. (Photo provided.)

Local law enforcement agencies also recruit the program’s graduates, and this presence of well-trained officers and deputies is just one example of how the college benefits Brevard and Transylvania, Schmidt said.

“What we’re working for and what we’re striving for is to educate students and have them go out in their communities and make the greatest positive impact they can,” he said.

But even before they graduate, Schmidt said, students shop, work and volunteer in the community. Residents from all over Transylvania, meanwhile, frequently access cultural events at college venues such as the Porter Center for the Performing Arts, which “has some of the best acoustics of any performing arts center in the state,” he said.

People from the neighboring College Walk independent and assisted living community can “literally walk across the creek” to watch the school’s many athletic events, take in a show at an art gallery, or, at Myers, share an affordable lunch or dinner in a sociable atmosphere.

“They can catch a baseball game, and get a healthy meal that will nourish them physically, while the campus community will nourish them spiritually and keep them engaged culturally,” Schmidt said.

Before the pandemic, members of a neighboring church made a practice of reconvening at Myers after services for Sunday brunch.

Public access to campus dining ended with the onset of the pandemic, but Schmidt hopes residents will resume the habit of eating at Myers and that, once expanded, it will serve as a hub for the community as well as the school.

This fits in with a goal that is almost as central to the college’s mission as the commitment to personalized education — running a campus that operates less as a walled-off institution and more like a friendly city neighborhood.

“We’re accessible,” he said, “we’re the opposite of an ivory tower.”

Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com