Iowa private colleges promise closures if community colleges start offering bachelor degrees

DES MOINES — If Iowa’s 15 community colleges are allowed to start offering four-year bachelor’s degrees — as Republican lawmakers have said is necessary and likely to happen — some of Iowa’s 27 private colleges and universities will shutter.

“Without any question and without any doubt and without being hyperbolic or anything else, if House Study Bill 533 should pass, some of our private colleges will close,” Iowa Association of Independent Colleges and Universities President Gary Steinke told lawmakers Tuesday during a committee discussion on the proposal to allow community colleges to expand their offerings from two-year associate’s degrees and certificates to the four-year bachelor’s degrees that Iowa’s public and private colleges and universities offer.

“Not all of them,” Steinke said about the privates that he expects will close due to lost enrollment from the increased community college competition. “But some of them will.”

The nonprofit advocacy association Community Colleges for Iowa, along with several community college presidents, last week presented lawmakers with their findings of a study into the need for four-year community college bachelors.

“We studied it for a year, and the need is undeniable,” Community Colleges for Iowa Executive Director Emily Shields said in backing the bill and asking the Legislature for $20 million to make it happen.

“We know from national studies that of the students who when they start college say they plan to transfer, only a third actually do,” Shields said. “So that's evidence that we're leaving two-thirds of our potential baccalaureate-degree holders on the table because they don't end up finding that transfer is something that works for them.”

Plus, she said, 203 community colleges in 24 states already are offering 736 bachelor’s degrees — a factor Rep. Taylor Collins, R-Mediapolis, highlighted Tuesday in promising, “We’ll be advancing this bill out of committee next week at the very latest.”

“I understand if you're in the business of offering bachelor's degrees, you'd want to kill any competition out there,” Collins said. “But folks, this is not just a concept. Twenty-four other states have already done this. The state of Illinois and the state of Nebraska are currently considering similar legislation during their legislative session this year.”

Collins said he’s open to considering amendments imposing “guardrails” that might protect the private colleges and universities.

“But folks, you have to be willing to come to the table and negotiate,” he said. “I am willing to look at these additional guardrails, but you have to bring them to me. Until then, we will continue to advance this bill.”

‘That guy goes out of business’

Discussion of opening the four-year bachelor’s degree space to community colleges comes as Iowa arrives at a long-anticipated and -feared enrollment cliff — with a drop in the birth rate during the 2008 recession manifesting in fewer high school graduates this year through 2041.

Although Iowa’s losses are expected to be modest at 4 percent — neighboring states like Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota that send thousands of students over the border to attend college in Iowa are eyeing much steeper losses at 32 percent, 15 percent and 12 percent, respectively.

Iowa’s private colleges and universities already have been feeling the pinch — with 181-year-old Iowa Wesleyan University closing in 2023 and Cedar Rapids’ Mount Mercy University last year falling under new ownership in its union with St. Ambrose University.

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“For 170 years, private colleges have been providing baccalaureate degrees at no cost to Iowa taxpayers, absolutely no cost,” Steinke said. “And today, what that has done for the State of Iowa is that almost half of all the graduate degrees and almost half of all the undergraduate degrees are conferred by the private colleges at no cost.”

Meanwhile, he said, the state appropriates $3.9 billion to K-12 education, $623 million to the Board of Regents’ public university system, and $243 million to the community colleges.

“Private, not-for-profit colleges — zero,” Steinke said. “And that is perfectly OK with us. We've never come here and asked you for operating money to run the institutions. Never. But the payoff for that, or the reason that our private colleges are able to do that, is because of students — students who want to come to our institutions that pay tuition. That is a huge revenue factor, and it's important to be able to maintain that number of degrees.”

Pulling students from private colleges and universities will harm not just the campuses but the communities they sit in and nearby businesses they benefit, according to Steinke — who acknowledged that community colleges’ bachelor’s likely will be cheaper than the degrees available at the private institutions.

“If a hardware store guy has a state-funded, tax-supported hardware store that moves into his area or his neighborhood, the cost of the products of that hardware store going to be a lot cheaper,” Steinke said. “You don't need a degree in economics to understand that. And nobody is going to shop at his hardware store anymore because the prices will be so much cheaper, and that guy goes out of business.”

‘They don’t exist’

When Iowa’s community colleges presented their research to lawmakers last week in support of legislation allowing them to offer four-year degrees, they pointed to “education deserts” in Iowa — areas with “no affordable public four-year options nearby, forcing rural and place-bound students to relocate, pay higher tuition at private institutions, or stop at an associate degree.”

But Steinke on Tuesday rebuffed that assertion.

“There are no such things as education deserts,” he said. “They don't exist. And if they do exist, I have never seen it. I've never seen students being underserved in any geographic location in the state. And how can I say that for certain? Because our institutions are student driven. Our institutions spend an unbelievable amount of time surveying students and understanding what students want and what students need.”

The bill, although just in committee right now, already is impacting the private campuses — including one that Steinke wouldn’t name publicly that he said has paused plans to build a new business building.

“They have raised $18 million in private money to build a new business building on their campus, expanded programs, hopefully to get more students in business to come to that institution,” he said, noting that’s now on hold. “That's the kind of impact that something like this has on economic development.”

‘There's not a demand’

Testifying to the threat the bill poses to Iowa’s private colleges and universities on Tuesday was Brian Lenzmeier, president of Buena Vista University — which for decades has been collaborating with community colleges across the state.

“We have transitioned away from offering face-to-face instruction at most of those community colleges, and it's not because we're not serving those students,” he said. “Between 2017 and 2019, we transitioned out of teaching face-to-face, not because we didn't want to continue that investment, but because we were losing students.”

Buena Vista transitioned much of that programming to online options, he said, “giving them the opportunity to learn with experts and with students from across the state.”

“Why aren't we doing face to face? There's not a demand,” he said. “And so I would implore you to survey your students. Because we ask all the time, how do you want to receive your education? How do you want to work with us? And the percentage of students who say they want to come to campus face to face for us is zero.

“I don't think there's much of a market for face-to-face bachelor's degrees at these sites,” Lenzmeier said. “And I'm saying that with the caution that if you go down this path — if you build it — it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be there.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com