Higher education is witnessing an era defined by distinct highs and lows. For many Christian colleges and universities, recent years have seen record-breaking enrollment. Just this fall, both Missouri Baptist University (St. Louis, MO) and Lubbock Christian University (Lubbock, TX) welcomed their largest-ever freshman class, while George Fox University (Newberg, OR) reached record enrollment and Malone University (Canton, OH) reported its third sequential year of enrollment growth.

At the same time, higher education news often buzzes with reports of campus closures and mergers. According to BestColleges, “At least 81 public or nonprofit colleges have closed, merged, or announced closures or mergers since March 2020.” Last year, Inside Higher Ed noted that most 2024 closures “were small, private, tuition-dependent institutions that lacked robust endowments”—a description that applies to many faith-based colleges or universities that are members of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities.

To support member institutions during this unique season, the CCCU and Education Alliance recently developed a new resource called the Sustainability Index. Utilizing publicly available data, the Sustainability Index presents a unified score intended to help college boards and presidents assess their own institutional sustainability.

The CCCU/Education Alliance’s Sustainability Index divides data into two categories: Financial Resiliency and Sustainability, assessing an institution’s financial metrics, and Educational Quality and Student Success, considering factors such as graduation and retention rates, student-faculty ratios, and more.

Intended to serve as a confidential tool for the presidents and boards of member institutions, the Sustainability Index presents easy-to-understand scores, both at the macro and micro levels. The Index aims to help institutional leaders accurately assess the current performance of their institutions and to support data-informed strategic decision-making for the institution’s future.

The Sustainability Index draws from the work of Dr. James Samels, the founder and CEO of the Education Alliance and the Samels Group, two higher education consulting firms. Dr. Samels is also a prolific writer, authoring books including Consolidating Colleges and Merging Universities: New Strategies for Higher Education Leaders (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) and Turnaround: Leading Stressed Colleges and Universities to Excellence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

The following conversation explores the development and planned implementation of this new resource. Moderated by Ron Mahurin, a leading higher education consultant who specializes in strategic planning and board development, and who previously served as vice president for the CCCU, the conversation brings together CCCU President David A. Hoag, Assistant Vice President for Membership, Grants, & Research Jeff Clawson, and James Samels of the Education Alliance. Together, they discuss the Sustainability Index and its role during a time of increased campus closures, mergers, and overarching financial difficulties for many institutions.

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Ron Mahurin: What prompted the creation of the CCCU’s Sustainability Index? Was there a particular moment or insight that catalyzed its development?

David Hoag: Early in my time at the CCCU, I got a call from Dr. Samels and we had a engaging conversation. I was really taken by the work that he had already done in this space on mergers and higher education. We are in this certain time in higher education in general, and in Christian higher ed, when the headwinds are challenging. There’s a group of our schools that may need to merge or do collaboration or shared services at a whole other level in order to survive in the future. Connecting with Dr. Samels was important because he’s done so much work in this area.

In my first year as CCCU president, I had all these opportunities to meet with boards. Often, I don’t think these boards really understand here they are and how healthy they are as an institution. In my conversations with Dr. Samels, we talked about the need to give boards an index to show how they are really doing. They need something like an annual checkup—you do the blood test and you get all your results back with a range showing how well you’re doing in all these different areas.

James Samels: Christian higher education is witnessing spiraling costs and intense competition from every sector. The craven competition came from both for-profit and then, after they went away, from community colleges and from state colleges as well. People don’t think that they compete with Christian colleges, but they do. All this was happening kind of at the same time. It’s tough sometimes if you’re running a tuition-dependent, small Christian college or university to be able to balance the books every year.

Jeff Clawson: Most of my own experience has been at small Christian colleges and universities that are struggling. I’ve seen mergers from the leadership side, and I’ve seen mergers as a staff person. I think even in those conversations, the conversation is often the press-release version—everybody wants to put their best foot forward, but then you actually get into the merger and it can be a lot more daunting. From that respect, we need a lot more data to drive difficult conversations.

Mahurin: How does this Sustainability Index differ from other widely known tools like the U.S. Department of Education’s Financial Responsibility Composite Score or Moody’s ratings?

Clawson: You know, you have the Financial Responsibility composite score, which is available from the National Center for Education Statistics. You have the Fitch or Moody’s bond ratings, which is an interesting thing because some of our smaller schools that are more in trouble don’t have a public bond rating. But those only give a piece of the information. What we’ve created is an index that factors in those things, but also a lot of other things that go along with it. You could have a strong Financial Responsibility composite score, but if you’re really tuition-dependent or your tuition discount rate is through the roof, it doesn’t matter as much.

What we’ve been able to do with the Sustainability Index is generate a score that we can pull from public data, but that has enough indicators in it that we can give some really decent advice when it comes down to what the score is made from.

Hoag: The Sustainability Index is drawn from publicly accessible information. We didn’t want to have to have an institutional researcher fill it out, nor did we want to have a research team complete this before we can actually meet with the board. I already have a group of boards that I’m going to be meeting with this fall, and we’re going to take this index with us as a resource these boards can use.

The other piece that makes the Sustainability Index unique is all of the factors it considers. As one example, it includes a housing index. If your faculty or your staff can’t afford to buy a house close to your campus, that makes things really challenging. That probably means that rental property for graduate students or others is going to be challenging too. That’s another example of an important variable that those other indexes you mentioned don’t even look at.

Mahurin: I’d like to shift our conversation now to talk specifically about the Sustainability Index itself. What makes these metrics the right indicators for Christian colleges and universities?

Clawson: We ended up with two main sections: First, Financial Resilience and Sustainability, which has 10 measures in it. Second, we have Educational Quality and Student Success.

Those are the two main areas that we can really measure using data from IPEDS [the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), IRS Form 990s, etc.

What’s missing that is important to the mission is the spiritual side. That’s one thing I love about Dr. Samels’ entire dashboard with all the indicators, which served as a starting point for our Sustainability Index. His entire dashboard includes so much spiritual measurement. That’s absolutely important. However, that would be difficult for us to properly assess without having some reliable way for every institution to use the same kind of measurements. I’ll just state that this, though—I’d love to make that part of the CCCU’s annual Collaborative Assessment Project (CAP) because I know it’s David’s heart and it certainly is mine as well, to really help our institutions, not just to be stronger, but also to support them in their spiritual endeavors because our institutions’ mission is spiritual.

In other words, if students grow in their Christian faith over time with us, then we fulfilled our mission. Unfortunately, while that is the crux of the mission of our institutions, that doesn’t always keep our schools in business. So, I think what we ended up with were these key factors that really need to be measured most so that we can remain financially healthy to fulfill the Christian mission.

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If you’re really going to steward things right, knowing the viability and the health of your institution is essential.

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Mahurin: Talk to me about how you constructed the overall Sustainability Index. Is there a weighting to the metrics involved? Is either category more important than the other one, and if so, why?

Clawson: On the educational quality side, there are some (factors or metrics) that are weightier than others because they just are more important, such as retention rate. That’s huge because if you matriculate a student but you don’t keep them, you lose all that money for the other years they’d be in school. So, in our Sustainability Index, the losses on things like that, like graduation rate, they’re weighted a little bit higher than some of the other factors, such as student loan default rate, which tells you something about your students, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you as much about your institution.

Hoag: To answer from my perspective, Ron, some are more important than others. And I’ll give you a great example. If you run out of cash, you’re probably done. But even if your graduation rate or your retention is poor, that’s not going to close you. Over time, it will, but in the more immediate sense, if you run out of money, you run out of money.

Samels: Financial is more near term, while aspects like the spiritual component, they think longer term. But ultimately, spiritual components relate to our conversion yield. So, they’re not mutually exclusive. Your ability to be competitive is key because it’s going to affect the size of your pool and the conversion yield. It’s not how many applications you get, sometimes it’s not even the deposits, but it’s who’s going to be sitting in the seat in September.

As we travel around with our clients, they want to focus on near term—that is, quick financial turnaround secrets, tips that will change their destiny, when indeed they should be thinking long-term about student success. The best enrollment tool you have is retention, persistence, and program completion. It’s really a lot about money and financial performance and becoming less reliant on traditional tuition.

I’ll give you an example. We have a client who has been competing with community colleges for years, but then the community college sought out a senior college to do a baccalaureate completion. That turned the relationship entirely around where instead of being antagonistic, they became mission complementary. Another client took our advice and started looking downstream to high schools, Christian prep schools, Christian schools for early college.

We’re living in times where the metrics are changing really fast, and these institutions have to be nimble, have to be on their toes to do those kind of entrepreneurial initiatives, counterintuitive partnerships with community colleges for bachelor completion and early college for Christian high schools.

Mahurin: I’d like to drill down a little bit on what all three of you have been talking about in relationship to mission identity and financial viability. How do we remain a Christ-centered institution faithful to mission while also being prepared to pivot for market opportunities?

Hoag: What we’re seeing is that the schools that are doubling down on their Christian mission and their identity are doing very well. If you’re doubling down on that Christian mission and identity, that provides clarity to the different markets and directions of the institution. At the institutions that aren’t clear on their mission, they’re trying to be all, end all for everybody. That dilution takes away from their effectiveness, and they lose track. They look for the bigger, better deal, jumping onto the next new project, the next new semester abroad program or what have you, without a guiding sense of that core Christian mission and identity.

Mahurin: How do you envision the Sustainability Index being used both internally for strategy and planning and externally either for benchmarking or other uses?

Hoag: I have an opportunity on a regular basis to go speak to different Christian college boards, to talk about the CCCU, to work with them on our priorities. When I go to have a conversation with them, I want to use the Index so I know how they’re doing, and so I can share it with them as a resource. There might be areas in which they can improve, and they may have to engage with a consultant or another party to help them work on the areas on their index that aren’t as strong. I go back to my analogy of the blood test—you know, the doctor might say, “I’m sorry, your cholesterol is a little high; we’re going to need you to work on this.” It would be my hope that we could give them advice as to ways in which they can strengthen their institution based on the index.

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With the strength of the CCCU network, we can hopefully enable those institutions that are thriving to use their voice to help smaller institutions and bring them up.

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Mahurin: Dr. Samels, you’ve been working on this kind of indices and benchmarking tools for over 30 years. How have you seen these indices help your clients and other institutions? How do you avoid the risk of an index such as this one becoming some sort of ranking mechanism rather than a tool for improvement?

Samels: It’s like the difference between looking in your rearview mirror versus looking over the horizon. The ranking is what happened. The index is what’s going to happen. It is a predictive tool. Ranking, looking behind. An index, a predictive tool to look ahead.

Sometimes, the index merely helps the board to recognize their own informed intuition and gives them confidence to apply it. Through these kinds of tools, what organizations like the CCCU and Ed Alliance offer is independent validation. Independent data that substantiates your intuition.

Mahurin: What cautions do you think Christian colleges and universities might consider when interpreting Sustainability Index results, especially around mission alignment versus market competitiveness?

Samels: Patience. Patience is important. If you’re going to change your enrollment, yield, conversion rate, it takes several years to do that. You don’t do it overnight. Many people are looking for a quick fix, but real progress comes through discipline over time.

Hoag: And patience can be tough for a board, because most of these boards only meet two or three times a year. I’m a little nervous about being too patient in a context where they’re not meeting on a regular basis. And quite frankly, depending on how the institution is doing on some aspects of the Index, time may not be on their side.

In considering these issues, I like to use the phrase “where do faith and reality meet?” The reality piece would be where that institution really is right now, in this moment in time. How does a board really assess that moment? You know, often they’re trying to pray their way through. I am a huge prayer warrior, and prayer is a central part of my faith. But sometimes the answer to that prayer might be that the board needs to really take a good look at the viability of this institution. My hope would be that they’re having patience to make strategic, data-informed decisions, and they use the Sustainability Index as a tool in that process.

Mahurin: How can the CCCU support institutions? What might the future look like as you begin to build a profile of individual member institutions?

Clawson: I know we’re going to be talking to some institutions that score lower on the Sustainability Index, but we have institutions that score highly on it too. With the strength of the CCCU network, we can hopefully enable those institutions that are thriving to use their voice to help smaller institutions and bring them up.

We already have a lot of that kind of support in place with our networking groups, key leader groups. We have some really top-level leaders in those spaces working in areas of enrollment, advancement, and more. This project will help us know how to build that out in new and productive ways.

Hoag: I was blown away by some of these conversations at the CCCU Presidents Conference this past year. We had a session led by the former president of Lincoln Christian University and the president of Ozark Christian College. When Lincoln Christian announced its closure, the institution essentially gifted their seminary to Ozark. Then Lincoln repurposed itself to Lincoln Christian Institute with a focus on church leadership development. The session was packed. Following that session, there was a group of folks that wanted to meet. I put the invitation out, and we had twenty-five people in the room—some coming more from the position of a potential acquirer, and others who might have been wondering, “What do I do with this institution I lead if it doesn’t make it?”

In general, though, not many presidents necessarily want to put their hand up to say, “I’m interested in having this conversation about mergers and closures.” So how do we develop a safe place for those conversations? That is one of our goals in this space.

Mahurin: How can a board’s use of a tool like the Sustainability Index enhance its governance role and yet help it avoid falling into a management trap? Does the Index provide a framework for asking the right strategic questions rather than the wrong tactical ones?

Hoag: I envision it becomes a part of each board meeting. In their board report, the board adopts the Index, and then at each meeting, they’re going to be able to look in their packet and see exactly how the institution is doing—just like how they get their audit once a year to review. These are busy people that don’t have a ton of time. And to me, a one- or two-page index sharpens them on their responsibility but puts it all in one accessible place.

Clawson: Boards are often getting bombarded with information, so I think the key is to give something simple, yet something that still offers depth. They can look at a number, and they can dig a little deeper, but it’s quick and easy to digest.

Mahurin: If you could say one or two things to a college or university president or board chair who might be anxious about the future of their institution, what would it be?

Clawson: Use the data, make data-informed decisions, and take the time to do it. Patience is the key. And the beautiful thing about numbers is they don’t lie. Numbers are a positive way to get information and to make your decisions based on fact, not just on instinct or panic or other emotions.

Hoag: The board and the president are stewarding the institution. As a good steward, you need to know how you’re doing. By knowing how you’re doing, you can chart out what your future could look like, should look like. If you’re really going to steward things right, knowing the viability and the health of your institution is essential.

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I’m really encouraged about this next generation of students and our institutions that are doubling down on their Christian mission.

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Samels: For me, it’s spirituality. Don’t lose your focus; don’t lose your mission. When I think about the places that have lost their way, losing their Christian faith is the biggest danger in the short-term financial liquidity ball game.

Mahurin: As men of faith, we also like to think about hope. What gives you hope about the future of Christian higher education right now?

Clawson: History gives me hope. I think about the last 25 years that I’ve been around Christian higher ed and all the different seasons and challenges we’ve already been through. Christian higher education is going to be around in the U.S. for a long time to come. There’s a need for it. There are probably going to be more schools that close. I understand that. But in the long run, there’s a great need and a great desire for Christian higher education right now in our culture. Seeing our institutions endure and survive so much, it makes me hope and know that we’re going to continue to move forward.

Hoag: In the last 12 months, I’ve visited more than 30 campuses, and more than half of them are doing very well. I’ve been able to have a front row seat to see God at work on so many of these campuses and in the lives of these students. I’m really encouraged about this next generation of students and our institutions that are doubling down on their Christian mission.

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Jeff Clawson, Ph.D. serves as the assistant vice president for membership, grants, and research at the CCCU. David A. Hoag, Ph.D. serves as the eighth president of the CCCU. Ron Mahurin, Ph.D., serves as principal of The Mahurin Group. James Samels, Ed.D. is the founder and CEO of the Education Alliance and the Samels Group.