This story was originally produced by The Keene Sentinel. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
Keene State College's interim president Donald Birx says the institution plans a reorganization, marketing redesign and other steps to address years of declining enrollment and operating losses that have forced staff cutbacks.
He recently made presentations on the plan to the Board of Trustees for the University System of New Hampshire as well as to the community and in a meeting at The Keene Sentinel.
This year, the school faces a $3.3 million budget deficit that will only grow if the college doesn’t make changes, which include a redesign of Keene State into three schools — Applied Sciences & Technology; Arts & Sciences; and Education & Health, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Birx said.
The college is now based on what is known as a one-school model, rather than these separate divisions.
Industry partnerships would be offered so that students could gain career skills and pay while going to college, while companies would benefit from the work and innovation of the young people, Birx told reporters and members of The Sentinel’s editorial board during Wednesday’s meeting.
Keene Mayor Jay Kahn, who also attended the meeting, noted that the college already is successful at working with local companies, including in the fields of health care and education.
Birx is also the president of Plymouth State University and holds a doctorate in electrical engineering. He formerly was the chancellor of Pennsylvania State University, Behrend College.
“We did this before when I was at Penn State,” he said. “We had a building that was half for businesses and half for classrooms and faculty offices. That synergy is what I’m talking about.
“Students are actively involved while they are getting educated and they are actually working for companies on projects that make a difference. And as they grow through their career, they are more valuable to the company.”
He said that at Penn State an engineering company had an idea that it didn’t have time to work on. It invested in a team of students who worked on the idea for a semester and then made a presentation on their findings.
Birx wants to leverage Keene State’s reputation as a liberal arts school into one in which every student can graduate with skills to enable them to immediately apply their academic background into a job in their field.
A marketing campaign is planned to highlight the advantages of attending Keene State.
“The uniqueness of Keene State is that it has the liberal arts skills and capabilities that the best liberal arts schools have but it also has the best applied programs that most liberal arts schools don’t have,” Birx said.
“So when you come to Keene State College, you not only get long-term life skills for a career but you get immediate application skills that you can use to make money.”
For example, he said, an art student who graduates with skills in marketing, finance and management would be a better candidate for employment at a museum or an art gallery.
Birx also said there would be strong growth potential in the college’s School of Applied Sciences and Technology, which would include the fields of management, economics/finance, computer science, architecture, safety and construction sciences as well as sustainable product design and innovation.
Enrollment in these majors has been trending up, from 224 in 2022 to 361 this year, according to statistics he provided in a PowerPoint presentation.
Meanwhile, the student population at Keene State has dropped from a high of about 5,000 students in 2015 to 2,800 now.
Factors in that decline include drops in the number of college-age students in the population, drops in the number of young people choosing to go to college and students choosing another institution rather than Keene State.
This school year the school has already reduced 12 faculty positions, nine staff jobs and four executive-level administrators, for total savings of about $2 million. There has been a 50 percent reduction in faculty over the past decade.
Also, Keene State is planning on $300,000 in savings from outsourcing its child care center and reducing five to eight faculty positions over the next two years through incentive packages.
But it can’t cut its way to prosperity, Birx stressed.
“We are going to need to make investments and look at the longer term rather than just continuing to cut in programs and faculty. That will not provide a solution. We’ll just get smaller every year until you finally don’t have the critical mass to survive.”
The USNH Board of Trustees voted last fall to name Birx as interim president at Keene State, succeeding Melinda Treadwell, who stepped down to become president of the State University of New York College at Geneseo.
The initial plan was for Birx to continue as interim president at Keene State through this coming June 30, but USNH trustees decided on March 20 to extend that period through June 30, 2027.
Rick Green can be reached at 603-352-1234, extension 1435, or rgreen@keenesentinel.com.
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