In the absence of information, what do employees do? Speculate!
Here's the latest: Rumor has it that the for-profit college I teach for is 1) closing; 2) moving; 3) getting shut down by accreditors; 4) being abandoned by students like rats from a sinking ship. The stink of out-of-control speculation filled the faculty office today as we stood around and contemplated our uncertain future. Notably failing to mention that the future is never certain, we hashed and rehashed what little information we had, until we sounded like breaking-news TV anchors, ratcheting up the drama as we got more and more anxious.
Satisfaction will not be forthcoming. The facts will remain hidden from us because the administration's working style is to play things close to the vest. Rarely is information free-range. It's more like Chicken Run at our school. Information sneaks out at night, wiggling under doors and jumping barbed wire fences. You can imagine that the quality of that sneakily obtained information is suspect.
If rumors are true, the school will either be moving or closing by the end of the year when the lease is up. Closing makes sense. Enrollments are down. The parking lot hasn't been full in many, many months. In this the granddaddy of recessions, our classrooms should be bursting. This term I have two classes with only one student. Surely that is not sustainable. In addition, regulations are heavier and sharper than ever, from both the government and the accrediting agency that gives us our license to disburse federal dollars (student loan money). With so many more hoops to jump through, who could blame the owners if they decided to call it quits?
True to our natural process, we feverishly searched for someone or something to blame. Maybe, we wondered, it's the new gainful employment regulations requiring schools to post consumer information about the retention and placement rates for each vocational program. Prospective students are comparing our rates to our competitors and realizing that 18 months at our school won't guarantee employment.
We also blamed various elements in our organization. There is apparently a feud between the directors of admissions and marketing. They refuse to speak to one another. That might be affecting our ability to attract new leads.
We blamed our college president, for being invisible. Once "one of us" (an instructor), he is now rarely seen, and never heard. The silence is perplexing. Maybe we'd be doing better if we had visible leadership.
We could blame the competitive higher education landscape in this area of metropolitan Portland. Three community colleges are in the immediate vicinity, all with much lower tuition and excellent reputations. Public and private universities abound. For-profit competitors butt heads on the late-night airwaves: Everest, Heald, and the University of Phoenix, with pockets far deeper and fuller than ours. We are a speck of a for-profit college. How do we find a niche in this market, when there are so many other attractive options?
We are a motley crew, our little faculty group, a band of misfits that fell into for-profit vocational education sort of by accident at different times over the past 15 years. Some of us are trained teachers; most of us aren't. But we all care about doing a good job. We want our students to learn the skills they need to succeed in their fields. With class sizes of one, two, or three, how can students get the benefit of interacting with their peers,working on team projects, or leading class discussions? So maybe it's our fault too, for losing the spark, for burning out.
I think every school has an energetic tipping point, above which lies profitability, ecstatic facebook reviews, and steady referrals and below which lies empty parking lots, droopy teachers, and muddled, soporific students. When we fall below the tipping point, it does no good to fill the bulletin boards with Valentine's Day hearts or plaster the walls with student testimonials. When a prospective student takes a tour, she sees lifeless hallways and empty labs. Dreary, boring, no place I want to be, she thinks.
The lobby used to echo with the sound of chatting medical students. I used to hear hear armies of students descending the stairs. What will become of us? Will this site close? Or move to be even closer to the shadow of its competitors? We don't know. Speculation is cousin to the gossip mill, which rumor has it is surprisingly accurate. In the absence of information, rumor runs wild with the free-range chickens.
