Moderated and reported by Casey Turner, Ph.D. Vice President and Tom Abrahamson, Managing Director & Principal, Lipman Hearne

More than any other segment of the university, continuing education enterprises are market driven. Especially sensitive to bruising from lackluster economies, cultural shifts, societal moods, and political exigencies, continuing education’s entrance into the new century has been marked by the unanticipated challenges left in the wake of September 11. A future different from the one a prosperous and confident country had envisioned has been the legacy of that tragedy—one now characterized by uncertainty, caution, and even fear.

How should continuing education units respond to their varied constituencies—institutions and individuals shaken by a changed world order, threats of terrorism, and a very real financial downturn? With what choices are these enterprises faced as they reach out to meet the needs of their communities? What factors shape those choices? And how do these units communicate with their audiences about the benefits of continuing education in light of our new, shared reality? 

Seeking answers to these questions, Lipman Hearne Inc, a Chicago-based marketing and communications firm dedicated to the nonprofit sector, gathered a group of continuing education leaders for a roundtable discussion. We asked these leaders to explore how their worlds and their assumptions had changed and how they have chosen to respond. Despite the new and more demanding environment in which they are now unexpectedly exercising their profession, they are facing these challenges with a sense of excitement.

Many of the issues they discussed seem, at first blush, to be organizational in nature, but all have ramifications in the marketing of continuing education and in the substance of the conversation that continuing education providers have with their diverse audiences. For nowhere else in higher education are mission, product, and marketing more interdependent than in continuing education.

Participants in our conversation included:

Daniel W. Shannon, Dean, Graham School of General Studies, The University of Chicago

Richard Hendrix, Dean, College of General Studies, University of Pennsylvania

James Sherwood, Dean, University Extension, University of California at Berkeley

Cathy Sandeen, Vice Provost and Dean, University Extension, University of California at Santa Cruz

Robert Lapiner, Dean, Continuing Education and University Extension, University of California – Los Angeles

Susan Kinsey, Dean, College of General Studies, University of Pittsburgh

Patricia Feldman, Director of Academic and Professional Programs, College of Extended Education, Arizona State University

Issues

The need for models

As continuing education leaders look to respond to a rapidly evolving environment, “there are no accepted, agreed-upon program models to which they can turn for guidance,” Richard Hendrix of the University of Pennsylvania offered. A wide assortment of program options and formats—from certificates to degrees, from short courses to one-day workshops—populate the continuing education landscape around the country. Educators have been left to pick and choose those offerings that seem to match the community education needs they endeavor to fill, but better information is required to make the most accurate and responsive choices, especially in a world of reduced resources and higher expectations.

Setting priorities

As with the question of selecting future programming directions within a single continuing education enterprise today, an often confusing—and competing—plethora of programs has sprung up over the years. As enrollments (and revenue) become tenuous, administrators are faced with choosing from among these often equally worthy priorities. Continuing education leaders seek guidance in crafting criteria that will assist them in assigning priorities to these programs and in making the often difficult decisions about which programs to invest in and which to divest.

The new student

Continuing education students of the present, and certainly of the future, are changing. As Patty Feldman of Arizona State University noted, “They are older, more technology savvy, more fearful of their futures, more in debt, and more demanding of responsiveness and flexibility on the part of the institutions that would serve them.” They are, in short, acting more like consumers than ever before. While universities tend to react slowly to market needs, continuing education units are expected to be more alert and nimble. With student expectations changing more rapidly than they have in the past, are continuing education units resourced appropriately to meet those challenges?

Continuing education’s place in the university

Tension—in greater or lesser measure—has characterized the relationship between the continuing education unit and its parent institution throughout its history. Especially in large research universities—such as those represented by our roundtable participants—the dissonance between the university’s mission of undergraduate and graduate education within the context of research and the mission of continuing education to serve its community has never been greater. As resources have become scarcer, the university has focused its attention more sharply on its primary mission, threatening continuing education in the process.

Indeed, some continuing education units in the country have already been dismantled as leaders at these institutions have determined that the purpose of these continuing education units is not central to the raison d’etre of the parent university. Others, such as UC-Berkeley Extension, are “university-centric,” said James Sherwood. “A program cannot be in our catalogue if it would not be in the Berkeley catalogue.” Universities are becoming more insular, circling the wagons, while continuing education’s core is to reach beyond the institution into the wider community, extending the university’s resources to that community.

Continuing education leaders must puzzle out how to sell “our compelling reason for being” even more aggressively to university administrators, while still meeting the university’s bar for relevance to the broader institutional vision and mission. Because applied research—for which continuing education has always offered a well-suited venue—and teaching outside the traditional undergraduate/graduate setting are generally marginalized and undervalued by the institution, making a case for the contributions of continuing education to the overall institutional mission is particularly challenging. Continuing education units within state-supported institutions have an even more complicated situation as they must also bend and sway with external political exigencies.

Mission versus revenue versus relevance

One of the traditional contributions of continuing education to the rest of the university has been in dollars and cents—continuing education as “cash cow.” Today, “in an environment of reduced revenue across the university, the pressure to generate even more income weighs on continuing educators more heavily than at any other time,” offered The University of Chicago’s Dan Shannon. Experienced continuing education leaders know that there is money to be made by offering programs that meet expressed community needs, and these leaders could fulfill the university’s desire to shore up its coffers at the same time it exercises its community education imperative. However, continuing education students often need what a particular university itself cannot offer. How do continuing educators avoid raising the relevance question when they provide programs that meet student needs—fulfilling mission, responding to the market, and generating income—but that do not “look like” the university?

Continuing education’s brand equity

“What does continuing education mean anyway?” This provocative question, posed by Cathy Sandeen of the University of California at Santa Cruz, raises the issue of brand and brand equity for this sector of higher education. If the audience has a fuzzy or incomplete notion of continuing education’s brand as a category, then convincing them of the benefits of a specific continuing education enterprise in a specific university or college will be that much more challenging. When one thinks of a college education, the brand associations—negative or positive—are fairly universal. But when an adult is confronted with “continuing education,” what promise or benefit does that adult relate with the phrase?

Continuing education: to be or not to be?

The mission of continuing education, especially those organized as (primarily) central units, is to open the university to a wider world of learners who do not fall neatly—in terms of age, lifestyle, or need—into the “traditional” undergraduate or graduate category. Given the tensions that exist between continuing education and the parent institution, does the existence of a separate continuing education unit actually function to further insulate the institution instead of opening it? By isolating “community education” or “outreach” within the oft-marginalized continuing education enterprise, do institutions abrogate their responsibility to listen to, understand, and respond to potential students outside their walls? Do institutions, in fact, have any obligation to do that at all?

As Robert Lapiner of UCLA suggested, “If we fade away, does the university become a more open place?”

Responses

Visionary leadership

In the absence of roadmaps and templates, our participants agreed that wise and experienced leadership will be key in meeting the challenges presented by continuing education’s many constituencies. Planning for, mentoring, and educating new leadership, as many key figures in the profession face retirement, will be essential in ensuring that continuing education remains a vital contributor in the advancement of higher education.

Information-grounded program planning

As the content and format of continuing education offerings proliferate, solid research with employers, potential students, and other prospective audiences will be required to chart future programming decisions. So often these decisions have been fueled more by what faculty want to teach than by what the marketplace wants to learn and why they want to learn it. Market research, thoughtfully considered and structured, will give continuing educators the complex information they require to set programming objectives that will truly respond to the external marketplace.

As our participants demonstrated, every market is different, and deciding between certificates or degrees, a wholesale or retail approach, and whether to claim specialty areas or to be a programming generalist can only be determined by discovering what one’s market has an appetite for and the commitment and resources to sustain.

Reconciliation with the university

More than ever, continuing education units and their parent institutions must agree on the role of continuing education within the university. Whether through formal strategic planning or through “gentlepeople’s agreements,” continuing education must have a clear understanding of its mission, what resources are available to it to achieve that mission, and the extent of the latitude it enjoys to further that mission. University leadership must articulate clear and precise expectations, and continuing education leaders must exert the right to participate and negotiate in these conversations.

At one end of the spectrum, issues that disadvantage continuing education—such as faculty’s unwillingness to teach in continuing education because it is either undervalued or because compensation structures mitigate against participation—must be addressed. At the other end, and most importantly, continuing education’s potential to advantage the entire institution—through its unique expertise to advise and guide academic departments that are under increased pressure to be entrepreneurial and to augment their revenue-generating capacity, as well as its ability to incubate new degrees, its sensitivity to market pressures, its agility in exploiting market research, and its comfort with new technological applications to education—must be explored and actively pursued.

Responding to students

Increasingly continuing education must pay attention to issues of responsiveness to students. Whether that is through evaluating customer service systems, adjusting course schedules to accommodate adult students, devising creative financial aid packages, or engaging program alumni more actively in creating a base for development and other activities, continuing education units will need to listen to and answer these student constituencies more intently and more accurately. Again, research can provide clues regarding which paths to pursue and can assist continuing education leaders in instituting structural and programmatic modifications that will win students through attentiveness to their needs and lives.

Building external credibility

In order to best serve a wide world, continuing education units must develop a reservoir of credibility with decision makers in that world. As Susan Kinsey of the University of Pittsburgh noted, “Building partnerships with not-for-profits and with other similar educational institutions that extend efficiencies, draw on consolidated resources, and gain strength through cooperation and collaboration” will be essential as continuing education enterprises seek to compete in a marketplace increasingly encroached upon by the for-profit sector.

In search of a brand

From a communications perspective, continuing education—as a discipline and as discrete operating units within much larger institutions—need a brand. And this brand needs to be one in which the nontraditional consumers of higher education can see themselves. Given the enormous diversity of continuing education products and services, a brand offers the potential of a coherent, unifying message that speaks on behalf of all of those services and speaks to all audiences—a communications funnel that invites all but that directs individuals to appropriate programs that match their specific needs and educational or professional objectives.

The diversity of programs offered by continuing education enterprises and, especially, the traditional “legs” of lifelong learning for personal enrichment and of professional development/education, make clarity of image challenging. And the question of “Whose brand is it anyway?”—the institution’s or the continuing education unit’s—further complicates the way to determining the right brand promise. Despite the complexities, however, continuing education, as a discipline first and as independent practitioners second, must develop a brand presence that is recognizable and that carries genuine, positive associations. In the absence of a clear and compelling brand, continuing education is severely handicapped in fulfilling its potential both internally at its parent institutions and externally in its marketplace.