March 29, 2024

College On A Budget

Jane Tanner | 8/1/1996
What would Florida railroad magnate Henry Flagler think about the strict austerity that has taken hold today at his once ostentatious Ponce de Leon hotel? When he opened the St. Augustine resort in 1888, it was the epitome of extravagance: crystal chandeliers and stained-glass windows designed by Louis Tiffany, hand-carved Austrian chairs and rotunda murals by George W. Maynard. Now, parlors and chambers once graced by the Rockefellers and the Astors are offices, classrooms and dorms for one of the most excruciatingly frugal colleges in the country.

Ranked the most efficient small liberal arts college in the South both this year and last by U.S. News & World Report, Flagler College, which begins its 28th year next month, operates under a philosophy of extreme thriftiness. Consider: There's only one fax machine on campus for the whole administration. School lets out in early spring in part so there's no need to air-condition the women's dorms in the Ponce de Leon. And while garnering markedly less in salaries than counterparts at other institutions, faculty and staff are required to take on heavy workloads. Registrar Darwin White concedes he could be making $20,000 a year more and command a staff of seven at other small colleges, but instead he operates with a secretary and one assistant. Come midterm and finals, White himself spends many an hour sitting at a computer laboriously typing in grades. "If I were at another school, I wouldn't be doing that. I'd be sitting in policy meetings and going to seminars," he says. But staffers like White say you can't beat living in the historic community of St. Augustine, and that's part of the trade-off that keeps them there.

At a time when private college tuitions are soaring, Flagler counters the trend by maintaining rates half the national average while still managing to offer a reasonable standard of quality. U.S. News & World Report's widely regarded rankings put Flagler among the top 20% for quality of small liberal arts colleges in the region. Its average SAT score among entering freshmen is 1,003, up from 861 when it first began requiring the test in 1978. In the past three years, tuition increases at private colleges around the country averaged 6% to 7%, according to figures from the College Entrance Examination Board. Meanwhile, Flagler keeps its reined in at 3% to 4%. While tuition costs alone this year averaged $12,432 at private colleges, Flagler charges less than half that at $5,350. With room and board added, Flagler students pay just under $9,000 a year, well under most private schools.

Joseph White, a 1994 grad in commercial art and advertising, says the low cost relative to institutions in his native Connecticut was a big reason he chose Flagler. "My parents were real excited about the price," says White, whose freshman year came in under $7,000, including his airfare from New England. He admits Flagler's computer graphics equipment lagged in his first years, but by his senior year the school brought the equipment up to standard.

While some of Flagler's measures at keeping expenses down may seem extreme, private and public colleges across the country are similarly having to streamline and make cuts. University of Virginia, for example, has eliminated 49 degree programs and hundreds of professors at 15 campuses, while Yale, MIT and Stanford have been taking similarly draconian measures, according to a recent article in Newsweek. (At the subsidized Florida state university system, resident tuition averages $1,800.)

Flagler's relentless bean-counter is longtime President William L. Proctor, a 63-year-old administrator with an aversion to excess. Phrases as nasty as curse words to Bill Proctor are "program proliferation and staff and faculty proliferation." That along with the controversial practice among colleges of discounting to manipulate revenues are falsely driving the cost of higher education into the stratosphere, according to Proctor. Colleges shouldn't try to be all things to all people, he preaches, but instead stake out a limited scope and operate with the fewest people necessary.

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Faculty's heavy load

When Proctor took over the college in 1971, three years after its founding, there were 160 students, no dorm, no library and it was unaccredited. With the tome "Quality Education for Less" as his bible, he has built enrollment to 1,365 and propelled it to the top fifth among small liberal arts schools in the South. In his office in the Ponce de L?on, he offers a lesson in squeezing the most from faculty and staff. Quality issues aside for the moment, he says the central product colleges produce is credit hours.

At a minimum, he expects each faculty member to churn out 300 credit hours a semester, which translates into five courses with at least 20 students in each. That's a much heavier load than most faculty are expected to handle, and many academics would argue that's too burdensome for quality instruction. "I'm not sure about that," Proctor retorts. "While we expect our faculty to teach, we do not require publication, research or grantsmanship."

Faculty aspiring to tenure at most schools are pressured to publish articles and books and may, Proctor contends, make teaching a low priority. But Flagler doesn't have tenure, instead it can keep or dismiss faculty based on rolling one- to three-year contracts. Around the country other administrators are attempting to jettison fiercely guarded tenure. Besides, Flagler makes heavy use of part-time, adjunct teachers. It has 72 part-timers compared with 48 full-time faculty. Flagler's staff also are expected to tow a heavy line. Proctor limits staff, everyone from dishwashers to secretaries, to a tight two per full-time faculty equivalent, where other schools may employ ratios of five or more. "It means you've got to have a whale of a work ethic on campus," Proctor says. "They don't stay long if they don't." Another cost-saving strategy: Flagler steers clear of pricey academic majors in the natural and technical sciences: "It's too expensive; we can't chase that hardware," Proctor flatly states.

Flagler assistant professor of economics Yvan Kelly muses: "Anything you can't teach with 30 students using just a black board doesn't go." However, the school recently invested in scores of computers for general student use and its commercial arts program. Flagler picks a few majors it can be good at and leaves it at that. Strong suits are majors in exceptional education, especially training teachers of the deaf, business administration and communications. Next in line are commercial art, English and psychology.

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Paring programs

While Proctor concedes larger schools and research universities would have a tough time duplicating his bare bones philosophy, he says many of his guiding principles would remain sound. The number of academic programs should be pared down, instead of perpetually adding to the menu. "Pick what you do better than anybody else or what you have a chance to excel at and cut out the rest," he says. He also says it's a mistake to expect every professor to be a researcher and publisher. "Everyone ought to be a scholar, but there's a lot of time and energy wasted when everyone of them is compelled to write and some of them would rather teach. I'd begin to make distinctions between research positions and teaching positions."

Proctor himself got a doctorate in education administration from Florida State University, where he played tackle for the football team and was an assistant football coach when he began to work with the school's administration. When he was hired by Flagler in 1971, he was assistant to the vice president for student affairs at Florida Technological University in Orlando, now University of Central Florida.

At Flagler for 25 years, the longest tenure of any college or university president in Florida, he retains the Southern charm he developed in his childhood on a small plantation outside Macon, Ga. Proctor peppers his comments with phrases such as "you'll be in high cotton," for a positive turn of events. Appropriately austere himself, his thin, nearly six-foot six-inch frame is typically clothed in a dark banker's suits. Proctor's conservative demeanor seems to set the tone, socially as well as academically, on the 22-acre campus in bustling downtown St. Augustine. There are no co-ed accommodations, and males and females cannot visit each other's dorms. Alcohol is strictly prohibited on campus.

But otherwise the student body is quite typical. Just days before this spring's graduation, students tossed Frisbees on the tree-shaded lawns, rollerbladed in the Ponce de Leon courtyard and walked barefoot through the tiled floors of the once-grand hotel. What would Henry Flagler think, indeed.

Tags: Florida Small Business, Politics & Law, Business Florida

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