How Private Universities are Operated – Part 3

Student. Parent and Alumni Expectations

While the title of this blog post refers to “private universities,” we will continue the practice of starting with that segment of higher education for reference purposes, and then comparing their operations with those of public universities.  We will proceed in that way because, despite the challenges imposed by financial privatization, the public universities would be wise to look for guidance as to their optimal and most likely functional future in the example of successful private universities.  Why?  Because public universities are increasingly being forced to compete in the private university arena.

One of the key successes of the best private universities in America is the marvelous way in which they have managed to develop and maintain lifelong relationships with their alumni.  They do that largely by educating and persuading future alumni, while they are still students, to forge a lifelong relationship with their future alma mater.  Cultivating students—with a long term goal of turning them into loyal and generous future donors—is an ambitious but necessary long term strategy for the private universities, because they don’t have, and never had, the option of State appropriation as an alternative revenue source to student tuition.  Therefore, successful alumni relations—defined as those that lead to very high alumni participation rates—has been and can be their only source of alternative revenue.

Public universities must now also pursue that ambitious but necessary long term strategy because their traditional source of alternative revenue—State appropriation—has been rapidly evaporating for the past thirty years, with little likelihood that this troublesome trend will change in the foreseeable future.

So when it comes to the private universities, where does that success with alumni relations originate?  And what are the key ingredients responsible for that success?

In answer to the first question, there can be no doubt that their success originates from the high quality of the relationship which successful private universities forge over many years with their alumni.

For the second question, there is also no doubt that the key ingredients responsible for that success are those which have characterized high quality human relationships since time began: 1) mutual respect, as evidenced by the considerate treatment of each party in the relationship, and 2) the existence of or potential for ongoing mutual benefit.

Thinking Win-Win

Stephen Covey expanded on these ideas in Habit 4: Think Win Win, in his famous book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.”  Habit 4 suggests that universities and their alumni can both become highly effective—that is, accomplish their respective goals on a long term basis—by exploring the possibility of a future win-win relationship.  And that process of exploration begins by each side thinking win-win.

Clearly, being able to generate large numbers of future donors would be a huge win for the universities.  But the corollary question is, What would be the reciprocal win for the students, parents and alumni?

The successful private universities, as seen from some of their daily operations, have already answered that question to their own satisfaction, and their success with regard to high alumni participation rates proves that they have also answered it to the satisfaction of their students, parents and alumni as well.

What key expectations do students, parents and alumni, have for a university?  The best answer to that question may be seen, for example, in what many successful private universities did for their alumni at critical times in the lives of those alumni, for example, in the aftermath of 9/11 in 2001 and, more recently, in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008-2009.

In both cases, many private universities sent teams of their professionals to New York and other cities to help alumni with free professional services when large numbers of them lost their jobs because of the economic downturns that followed both traumatic events.  Not only were some alumni killed on 9/11, but countless more lost their jobs in the subsequent economic downturns that followed both crises.

In Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs with its famous five levels, the “security of employment” is found on the second level, just one notch above basic physiological needs such as breathing, food, water, sleep, etc.  Students, parents and alumni expect their universities—whether public or private—to care deeply about their employment aspirations, and to help them not only with regard to getting their first good job after graduation, but also with regard to having a great lifelong career after their first job.

That expectation is arguably the one that students, parents and alumni care the most about, and hence the one that universities, both public and private, had better be perfectly aligned to deliver without fail.