College Presidents, Public Officials Discuss Role of Education in Rural Appalachia

Leaders of West Virginia’s colleges discuss their roles in the economy and society of their state.

At the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s Annual Business Summit, business interests naturally took center stage. Yet, key to the summit’s theme of “Uniting Business, Igniting Prosperity” is a well-educated workforce. 

Accordingly, The Spectator talked to a handful of college presidents, as well as other public officials and figures, about higher education in the region and its importance in creating a more prosperous future. 

Brad D. Smith, the president of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, discussed his plans for the institution with The Spectator.

When asked about how Marshall University has tried to avoid the rising costs associated with many universities and deliver the most affordable education to its students, Smith said that he was guided by four principles.

“The first is we will grow students, not fees,” Smith said. “The second is we’ll invest in our team, our faculty, our staff, everyone in our institution,” he continued. “Third, we will take care of the house,” and fourth is to “have a strong financial balance sheet so we can withstand another pandemic or a recession.”

Smith was certainly helped in much of this initiative by his former role as the CEO of Intuit. “I am what’s defined as a non-traditional president,” Smith said, while also noting that the number of non-academic college presidents is rising.

Smith specified his principles on efficiency by pointing out, “You can’t keep cost-cutting and then enrollment decline and then cost-cutting enrollment decline because eventually you’re going to have one student and one faculty member.”

“We’re going to have to have a strategy to grow,” he said. Smith exuded confidence about the future of Marshall, despite noting the school was “growing against the headwinds,” whether demographic, technological, or raw doubt.

President Bronny Copenhaver of New River Community and Technical College fervently agreed with this sentiment, arguing that continual spending cuts would leave an institution such as hers unable to provide important programs. “You can’t cut yourself to prosperity, so you can’t just cut and cut and cut, because what you cut out are generally recruiters and advertising,” she said.

“The last thing you want to cut are things related to revenue generation,” she concluded.

Copenhaver later elaborated that she had taken over New River after a series of layoffs, with the institution in “a financial hole.” “The first priority was … we need to start growing our enrollment, because I need money in advertising, and so I put extra money in marketing … we’re going to add recruiters back,” she said. She continued, “I have a cash cushion, now, I don’t have a huge fund of money, but I have enough that I can pay the bills for several months.”

Mark Manchin, president of Glenville State University, concurred with President Copenhaver on the need to recruit students. He also added, “Sometimes, you have to spend a dollar to make a dollar.”

“So what we’ve got to do is reconcile, reconcile the expenditure of every dollar.” Every dollar spent by Glenville State, with the exception of fixed costs, must address “how that’s going to move us, improve us, move the needle in better recruitment, retention, programs, branding, getting our message out.”

“New River, when I came in 2019, had sort of turned its focus inward, and they weren’t paying attention to the outside, but when you’re in a crisis, that’s exactly what you do,” Copenhaver said.

To shift, Copenhaver began “to start re-engaging” with the community, including speaking at “anything I could get in front of … to get myself out there and introduce myself,” as well as joining “some boards and organizations that were pivotal in the communities.”

“When you’re covering nine counties, that’s a lot to do,” Copenhaver said. Copenhaver also increased her team’s connections to each community, placing recruiters at local events.

To increase enrollment at Marshall, Smith instituted a “strategic enrollment management” initiative, including creating tailored onboarding experiences for different types of students, from those coming directly from high school to those attending after military service.

Smith later expounded upon this, describing “a national call to action” to serve students that take non-traditional education routes. By not serving people “who are carrying student loan debt but did not complete their degree, or those who serve our country but don’t get credit for the leadership skills or the experiences they have,” he said, “you’re leaving a whole population of people out who want to and need to continue to learn.”

Copenhaver is involved in facilitating one of those non-traditional routes: community college to four-year college. Copenhaver mentioned that many of her students are former four-year students who, for various reasons, dropped out of those programs. “You do have those high school students that just aren’t ready [for four-year college], don’t want to, or, especially, can’t afford it … so they have to make other plans,” she said.

“We do get a lot of older returning students, 25 and above, who never thought they could go to college, [or] messed up so badly when they tried,” she added.

Smith also mentioned the six pillars Marshall University had begun to build around: six lucrative industries that were underserved educationally in the region. Smith specifically mentioned two of the pillars, cybersecurity and aviation, which have seen ballooning enrollment under Smith’s tenure.

Copenhaver stressed that she worked diligently to stay in touch with the local economy and ultimately provide the most relevant and useful courses for her students. New River and other small institutions that receive few state dollars are more dependent on the tuition paid by students. “And that tuition piece is very volatile,” Copenhaver pointed out.

“I have to make decisions that are what would be called business-based decisions,” she said. If a new program is proposed, Copenhaver and her cabinet of advisors must perform a cost-benefit analysis to determine the proposition’s merit. “It is painful when you know you have ‘X’ amount of money and you have two or three worthy projects … and I don’t ever want to put my staff having to arm wrestle in front of me.”

Copenhaver has begun to tie certain performance goals to the creation of projects, saying, for instance, “If I had hit an enrollment goal halfway through the year, I’ll do this one.”

One part of her job she described as “scary” is creating new programs without knowing how many jobs will truly become available in that field. New River is partnering with Raleigh County Memorial Airport to create up to 600 aircraft maintenance jobs, yet any number of occurrences could turn the project awry.

At Marshall, Smith has also instituted a program that gives “up to 60 credit hours towards your bachelor’s degree for either prior college credit you got from someplace else or even experience you got on the job.”

Copenhaver runs an institution that would feed a program like Marshall’s with new transfer students, and she is proud of her deals with four-year institutions. “We have been renewing and updating all of our articulation agreements, and we’ve added some that we’ve never had before,” she said.

She noted a previous reluctance in some universities to work with New River and other community colleges, but added “they’re understanding now, especially President Smith, who understands that I send him really good students, that not everybody can start at a four-year school right off the bat and be successful.” “Community college students that transfer generally have a higher GPA than native students that started as freshmen,” she added.

“So we will partner with anybody that, number one, I think our students will go to, and that is willing to talk about pathways and degree completion,” Copenhaver said.

Smith also expanded the number of micro-credentials and certificates awarded by Marshall. With technology aiding a rapid increase in the accrual of knowledge, as well as leading to rapid change in many fields, a singular degree may not keep up in the modern workplace, Smith reasoned.

Smith also mentioned small streamlining tweaks his administration made to increase efficiency, including the elimination of software redundancies. He likened his makeover of Marshall to someone trying to get more fit: “We’re going to get ourselves into shape … You’re going to eat healthy.” “It doesn’t happen overnight,” he continued, “but if we do that and we’re consistent and disciplined, we’re going to be strong.”

Copenhaver noted that she does “push to go faster,” as New River evolves to continually serve its students. Copenhaver brought up shared governance as a potential area that slowed her ability to react and change, but also said that it was beneficial for her to hear the opinions of so many around her.

Many other factors have slowed New River’s changes at times, like accreditation bodies, as well as having many faculty members who are not on the payroll during the summer and are thus unable to consent to changes.

H. Toney Stroud, Marshall’s Chief Legal Officer and Vice President for Strategic Initiatives and Corporate Relations, concurred with Copenhaver on the need for flexibility in higher education: the need to “move at the speed of business.”

Stroud, who, like Smith, comes to higher education from a distinguished private sector career, noted that Marshall had become a much more responsive and efficient institution even with a shared governance model. He noted that this was achieved through “bringing everyone together from each of the different groups, student government, classified staff, our faculty, our administration, to make sure everyone understood everyone’s roles and how we can work together.”

When discussing an educational philosophy that revolves around teaching important, marketable skills, and not necessarily education for education’s sake, Smith was quick to clarify that he did not criticize more traditional educational routes. “I do not believe liberal arts suffers from a relevancy problem: it suffers from a branding problem,” he said.

While a liberal arts education may not grant a degree that directly relates to a potential job, Smith noted research indicating most college graduates have jobs outside their degree’s purview. He commended the liberal arts education for instilling “critical thinking, more communication, more collaboration, more teamwork,” all transferable skills useful in jobs that “are going to be here for 100 years.”

Copenhaver was open that her philosophy on funding programs at any of New River’s several campuses was strictly the compatibility a program has with the local economy. “Each of the locations that we have, sometimes there’s only certain programs in certain places … because of the nature of the business industries that are in that location.”

Smith addressed the cultural skepticism of the value of higher education, mentioned elsewhere by West Virginia University President Gordon Gee, by saying, “Universities earned their way into the situation we’re in right now and we can earn our way out.”

Smith proposed reimagining “education for the twenty-first century,” ending the strict adherence to the current model, which according to Smith is showing its age. “We have to make sure our curriculum is in demand for the twenty-first century and for our local economy,” he said. Another way of achieving his goals for Marshall’s curriculum is greater flexibility. For example, providing a recorded version of every class for students who miss.

“We have to recognize that the three things families say they struggle with are affordability, flexibility, and achievement, which is a return on the investment,” he pointed out. Smith then posed a series of hypothetical questions that could weigh whether a potential student would matriculate or not, from the school’s affordability and scheduling flexibility to its effect on how good of a citizen its students become. Smith contended that wildly different outcomes could be considered a “return on the investment.”

Smith asserted that Marshall has kept itself relevant by staying cognizant of industry trends and hiring statistics. “In any university that isn’t doing that, our worry is going to be a part of the numbers I talked about,” he said, referring to the rapidly rising number of colleges and universities that are shutting down. “We have to reimagine ourselves, [because] we are no longer serving society the way society wants,” Smith concluded.

Smith laid out a similar vision for the integration of educational institutions and the job market. According to Smith, Marshall has aspirational goals that “100% of the students have a job and they graduate with no student loan debt.” “To do that, we’re going to get them paid internships and also connect them with jobs when they graduate,” Smith continued.

A new program, Herd Connect, gives students “a peer mentor as soon as they show up on campus,” then “a professional advisor that helps them lay out their curriculum,” and lastly “an academic advisor to help them choose their major and make sure they’re on course,” Smith explained. Finally, students “get an alumni mentor,” who “helps them get an internship and connects them with a job.”

Smith was proud of the fact that Marshall has “doubled our number of alumni chapters in the last 12 months.” Using a former student government president to connect with alumni chapters, Smith has given them all a task: “If you can’t write a check, [then] mentor a student, or connect them with an internship or job.”

Smith has led the charge in creating the First Ascent program for students once they graduate. This connects Marshall and West Virginia University graduates “with the job, whether it’s a remote job … or it's one of the 60,000 open jobs in the state.” The program includes other benefits, like co-working facilities, free outdoor activities, and more.

Stroud added to Smith’s comments, noting “we do not want to hear a parent say … ‘My kid did not have a choice but to leave West Virginia to get a job.’” He also noted the increased level of cooperation between the state government and educational institutions. “It’s paying dividends that the state government is using the universities to assist with economic development,” he said.

Quick access to jobs, whether local or elsewhere, is especially important to first-generation students. Stroud, a Marshall graduate and a first-generation college student, noted that 57% of Marshall students share that distinction. When “you look around the world at the number of successful graduates that Marshall University has produced: it’s a tremendous number.”

The forward-looking outlook and openness to change of West Virginia University Presidents should inspire other Universities across the country, including our own Washington and Lee, to exist symbiotically with local economies, and to prioritize the needs of students, avoiding unnecessary fees, for instance. W&L would be served well to look at less fortunate areas of the country, and less wealthy institutions, who must grapple with the balance of employment outcomes and “education for education’s sake.”