Most readers will be familiar with the story of the police officer who encounters a drunk at night under a street light peering about on his hands and knees. On inquiry, the drunk tells the officer that he is looking for his keys. The officer says “So you think you dropped them around here?” and the drunk responds, “Oh no. I dropped them further down the block. But I have to look here because this is where the light is.

Editor’s Note: Allen Guelzo’s essay “Whither the Evangelical Colleges,” to which Dr. Carson has written this response may be accessed here. This article is quite detailed and will be of most interest to those involved in Christian higher education. However, the Editorial Staff suggests that church leaders that consider funding of Christian higher education institutions as well as parents and students who will be investing considerable assets in obtaining an education may find large parts of this paper extremely helpful.

The gauntlet has been thrown. Again. Allen Guelzo’s essay in Touchstone (May/June, 2011) entitled “Whither the Evangelical Colleges?” critiques the status of the Christian higher education project in America, with specific focus on the member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). This is a follow-on piece to his essay in Books and Culture in 2005 on the same topic. Guelzo complains that reaction to his first essay was “mostly … a frozen silence, the kind you hear when the divorced father shows up at his kiddies’ birthday party.” Here is one response to help unfreeze the conversation.

Guelzo, an eminent professor and scholar currently working at Gettysburg College, thinks that there is a crisis in Christian higher education. He thinks that CCCU institutions have lost their way. Specifically, he is concerned that the essential nature of Christian higher education is in jeopardy of being compromised due to the economics pressures generated by pressure to enroll a full class each Fall, by relatively small endowments, and by weak alumni giving. These pressures, in Guelzo’s view, should be met by seriously reducing the number of CCCU institutions, altering the criteria by which presidents are chosen, and ensuring that faculty are less guild-minded and more committed to the Christian higher education project.

Certainly, if Guelzo’s analysis were correct, then there would be great cause for concern. What CCCU institutions are, or should be, about is extraordinarily counter-cultural, and seemingly more and more so as the years advance. It is easy to imagine that the pressures of operating relatively small colleges, most of which are very tuition dependent, would have the effect of pushing CCCU schools to be less
committed to their Christian education ideals.

We do well to reflect on our policies and practices to assure that we are not drifting from our core purpose. To the extent that Guelzo’s essays prod us to that self-examination, he is to be commended and thanked. There are many dangers that face CCCU schools, and the gaps between the promise of postsecondary education steeped in the Christian faith, preparing students for lives of service to God and the world, and the reality on the ground are both large and troublesome. Those of us who serve in these institutions are well aware of the concerns, although we certainly have lively disputes about both defining our problems and discerning the correct path forward.

It seems that Guelzo’s fundamental view is that higher education should be reserved for a much smaller segment of the American populace than is currently the case. While his argument is ostensibly focused on CCCU institutions, most of his critique could well be targeted at any group of colleges and universities, both public and private, which do not exist in the ethereal realms of institutions that serve elite – both academically and financially – students. Guelzo’s core argument is that CCCU schools have, in essence, prostituted themselves on the altar of academic mediocrity in order to maintain the steady flow of tuition dollars that are the financial lifeblood of our institutions. If this critique is correct, then the vast majority of colleges and universities that are currently in operation today, whether in the CCCU or not, are in essence located in the red-light district of the higher education community.

This is not an irrational view. While it is not a politically or socially popular view, we all know of persons both inside and outside of higher education who think that there are too many unprepared or underprepared students who are in college. However, it is not a dominant view, and, in fact, this argument really has little to do with CCCU schools per se; rather it is a critique of the mainstream of American higher education. Much of the rest of Guelzo’s analysis is similarly not specific to the CCCU.

These are taken up point by point.

Admissions Policies
Guelzo contends that various sets of data indicate that CCCU institutions are in a very precarious financial state. The first, and foremost, of these data sets have to do with admissions policies and numbers. Guelzo presents data on a select group of 15 CCCU institutions (including Geneva College, my current employer). About this admissions data, Guelzo says

“Four colleges in this sample will take students with SATs (or the equivalent in ACT scoring) as
low as the 900s; and those who do rarely recruit a student with an SAT higher than the lowest
score Wheaton will find acceptable.

“Linked to the quality of students it accepts (or at least the quality of their test scores) is the
quantity a college admits; in other words, the higher the percentage of students we see admitted
from an applicant pool, the more likely that school will accept almost anyone who will fill its
spaces and pay tuition. Here is where the statistics begin their ascent toward genuine alarm,
because the lowest (i.e., most selective) admission rate for any of these colleges is a whopping 60
percent.

“Overall, of the twelve schools in my sample that reported recent statistics, the average
admissions rate was 77 percent. In other words, Christian colleges and universities pretty
routinely admit three out of every four students who apply.”

All of this is, of course, meant to sound an alarm of a dire situation. However, colleges hear two very different messages from higher education critics. Guelzo represents one of those messages – to wit, there are too many college students. That is, as colleges admit students who are less gifted in an academic sense, then the college degree is demeaned and degraded.

However, Guelzo fails to acknowledge that this criticism has nothing to do with CCCU institutions per se. Rather, the admissions policies of the particular schools that he cites are very much in the mainstream of American higher education. Barron’s College Admissions Index is probably the most widely used system for categorizing colleges and universities in terms of their selectivity. In the Barron’s system, there are six categories – Most Competitive, Highly Competitive, Very Competitive, Competitive, Less Competitive, and Noncompetitive. In addition, three of those categories are further differentiated by a “+” designation. Table 1 details the admission criteria that are typical for schools in each category, both in terms of SAT score ranges and typical acceptance rates. Further, Table 1 gives the count of the overall number of schools that are included in each category, and the number of CCCU schools that are in each category. CCCU schools are under-represented in both the two highest competitive categories (which Guelzo points out) and in both of the lowest competitive categories (which Guelzo ignores). The point of this analysis is that the statistics that Guelzo cites above are true for the majority of institutions of higher education, not just of CCCU schools. There is no need to rely on a sample of 15 schools. If Guelzo’s critique is to be taken seriously, either by the CCCU or by the broader spectrum of higher education institutions, then roughly 2/3 of the higher education institutions in North America are guilty of having admissions policies that are not restrictive enough.

In contrast to the message that Guelzo represents, the dominant social and political message in the air today is that many more students should be attending and completing college than are currently in the system. For example, President Obama has called for an increase in the percentage of American adults who have earned a college degree, such that the U.S. leads the world by 2020. The President has also
focused attention on community colleges, suggesting that an associate’s degree is a worthy goal in and of itself. Of course, a similar message has been propounded by politicians and commentators across the political spectrum.

Thus, all colleges, but most particularly small colleges like much of the CCCU, are caught between two views. In one view, we are not nearly selective enough, and thus are selling our collective soul in return for tuition from students who should not be in college. If true, then we should downsize dramatically, or, as Guelzo recommends in his 2005 essay, the 105 CCCU schools should merge into roughly 15 or so larger institutions which would have the financial stability and institutional heft to make a significant impact on higher education. According to the other view, we should be admitting even more students than has been our historical practice.

CCCU schools are well within the mainstream of admission practices of higher education institutions generally. We balance open access and academic rigor much like many, many other schools. If we have gotten this balance point wrong, then we have lots of company. I think that we likely get it about right, although it would certainly be good if the CCCU had greater representation in the elite categories, and it might well be good if the CCCU had greater representation in the lowest categories in what might be called the ‘front-lines’ of higher education.

SAT Acceptance All Schools Rated CCCU’s Rated
CATEGORY Range* Rate Plus Rate by Barrons % by Barrons %

Most Competitive 655‐800 < 33% na 87 6.2% 0 0.0%
Highly Competitive 620‐654 33% ‐ 50% > 645; < 25% 108 7.7% 2 1.9%
Very Competitive 573‐619 50% ‐ 75% > 610; < 33% 253 17.9% 26 24.8%
Competitive 500‐572 75% ‐ 85% > 563; < 50% 687 48.7% 71 67.6%
Less Competitive < 500 > 85% na 195 13.8% 4 3.8%
Noncompetitive ** > 98% na 80 5.7% 2 1.9%
Totals 1410 105
* The Barron’s system uses the average of the individual SAT scores that schools use; some schools look
at only two scores, while others look at all three.

It is interesting to note that private schools in general, including CCCU institutions, do a much better job of retaining and graduating students compared to our public counterparts. This is true both in terms of raw numbers, and in terms of analyses which control for the quality of the incoming class (which is the primary determinant of retention and graduation).

Thus, I do not find Guelzo’s critique here particularly persuasive. There is no evidence that CCCU schools engage in admissions practices that signal a desperate situation as Guelzo’s rhetoric suggests.

Can’t or Won’t Give
Guelzo next turns his attention to advancement, and specifically, to rates of alumni giving. He notes that rates of alumni giving for many of the CCCU institutions are poor relative to some comparable institutions. He argues, correctly, that alumni must be both motivated and able to give in order for a college to do well on this metric. He then advances this cause-effect connection:

“A mediocre college will supply neither—students will feel indifferent loyalty to a college that
hands them an indifferent education, and graduates with indifferent educations will generally not
be in a financial position to be handsome givers. (Which is why, from the viewpoint of
development officers, every admissions decision is like a minor-league draft pick: with the right
skills and the right seasoning, the right prospect has the long-term potential to become an
endowment star).”

In addition to the questionable advice to view prospective students as giving units, Guelzo here states a hypotheses that is, on its face, dismissive of much of higher education. The use of the pejorative term ‘indifferent’ suggests that hoi polloi of colleges (I take it that he has in mind the 2/3 of schools that are in Barron’s ‘competitive’ category or below) are both completely undifferentiated and that the education is mediocre. This is a false assertion. I am not here arguing (as some might) that there is no difference in the education that a student receives at a school that is more competitive as opposed to one that is less competitive. The mere fact that students are, on average, brighter (and perhaps more motivated) allows faculty at more competitive schools to teach at a higher level and with somewhat greater speed. (Of course, the fact that undergraduates at many highly competitive institutions rarely see anyone other than graduate students as their instructors may be a counterweight to this advantage, but I will put that aside for the time being.) However, I reject the contention that this means that education at less competitive schools is “indifferent.” Bright students go to “indifferent” colleges all the time, do amazing work, and go on to top graduate programs or careers. More prestigious colleges have more bright students to begin with, so more of their students do amazing work and go on to top graduate programs or careers.

In fact, there is research that demonstrates that institutional prestige (such as in conferred by highly competitive schools) is not, in and of itself, a determinant of career earnings (see Dale and Krueger, 2002). When student ability is controlled for, the influence of the institution that a student attends becomes far less significant in a prediction equation of career earning success. The evidence is clear that
college does little to significantly alter fundamental human intellectual capability. This is true from higher education institutions from Harvard to your local community college. Rather, colleges work with the student talent that they have and that they are able to attract.

From a statistical perspective, Guelzo’s argument is correct in that students attending schools that are not as competitive are less likely to have careers that are very financially rewarding. This is not because the education provided is ‘indifferent.’ Rather, it is because employers value the same things in their employees that educational intuitions value in their students – motivation and ability. Unless you are going to argue that the number of students who are admitted to (see the comments above), and who graduate from, college should be cut dramatically, this outcome is inevitable.

A second line of argument that Guelzo makes in this regard concerns endowments. He notes that even high profile CCCU schools (Wheaton, Messiah, and Seattle Pacific are specifically mentioned) do not have very impressive endowments when compared to their secular counterparts. Presumably, this is meant to be an indictment of CCCU colleges advancement efforts or their ability to attract funds.

However, it is possible that a substantially different argument can be made. In Guelzo’s 2005 essay, he makes the powerful argument that financial instability will tempt CCCU schools to compromise faith convictions and standards. However, it might also be that CCCU colleges have difficulty attracting funds precisely because they do stand for a particular point of view in an increasingly pluralistic culture, a culture which is increasingly intolerant of exclusivist religious claims. That is, rather than presaging a move towards compromise, perhaps this situation is a marker of faithfulness.

This is not to say that any of us in the Christian education movement should be happy with the current state of affairs. We need to press both alumni and Christians in general to support this important work. I can imagine several hypotheses that would explain why this might be harder for Evangelical institutions, although I acknowledge that this is largely speculative. For example, there is data to show that evangelical Christians are much more charitable than the populace at large. But, there are also many demands on their donated dollar including local church operations and local, national, and international relief efforts. Further, many of these families have demonstrated a commitment to Christian education which may well translate to paying for private K-12 education for their own children. Both of these factors would lead to less money being available for giving to one’s alma mater. But to repeat, none of this should be a cause for rest or for not pursuing much better performance in this area.

Staggering Costs
Guelzo next turns his attention to the high cost of private (and increasingly, public) higher education. As with admissions practices, there is nothing in this analysis that is specifically and only applicable to CCCU institutions. This is a well known problem that faces the entire sector. None-the-less, Guelzo contends that

“… Evangelical higher education painted itself into this corner—a corner where its financial grip
is weak, its student population is lagging, and its profile in American higher education is shrinking.”

Let’s take these three descriptors one at a time. Finances are certainly an issue of concern, but there is no reason to think that CCCU schools are closer to the edge than many others. Guelzo has certainly not provided evidence of this, and I am not aware of any research that does. Second, the CCCU reports that there were 190,000 students in CCCU campuses in 2000 and 315,000 as of 2010. The number of member institutions has risen from 95 to 111 in the same time period. This does not appear to be a situation where the student population, or the institutional population, is lagging. Finally, it is not self-evident to me that the CCCU profile in higher education is shrinking. I accept that it has never been a very high profile, but I do not see it shrinking.

So it is not at all clear to me that Guelzo has identified a problem that is unique to CCCU institutions.

However, if one does accept his problem statement, we should then turn to his remedy. He recommends institutional mergers, different criteria for choosing college presidents, and encouraging faculty to think less in guild terms than in institutional and missional ways.

Of the three, the most dramatic is his institutional merger argument. He recommends that CCCU schools should merge so as to create helpful economies of scale. While this argument may have merit in some ideal world, the geographical, denominational, and tradition differences of institutions make this solution extremely unlikely. So, I do not think that it merits much consideration. Of course, the CCCU does have cooperative ventures such as the very valuable Best Semester program that creates off-campus study experiences for students from across the CCCU.

Guelzo’s second remedy for the “painted into the corner” problem is that colleges should stop choosing the wrong persons as presidents of CCCU institutions. He labels the wrong persons “ “Rolodex presidents”—presidents who may or may not have much understanding of the life of liberal arts education and who may or may not have much personal investment in the Evangelical identity of the college, but who have been picked out of a corporate Rolodex of “successful leaders,” either by boards of trustees or executive search firms.”

He continues

“A recent report for the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) blamed “the lower likelihood of
presidents coming from the academic ranks” on “trustee search committees” who don’t see actual
members of the academy itself as having “the fundraising and managerial skills they assume are
needed.” Given “the importance of teaching and learning” in CIC schools, it came as a surprise to
CIC researchers to find that the Rolodex generation of college presidents now consider fundraising,
risk management and legal issues, capital improvement projects, budget and financial
management, and “entrepreneurial ventures” to be their top five priorities.

“The result is that the Rolodex presidents tend not to be particularly successful at their real job,
which is being the president of a learning institution. They are often very good at pleasing
constituencies and boards; but having done so, they stay only as long as their charm or their tricks
work, and then move on to the next presidency. And this keeps on happening because boards do
not know whom else to hire, partly because “executive search” firms are primarily interested in
selling from their own stable of candidates, and partly because the people who really know the
inside-out of the institution—the faculty—only want to be left alone.”

Note that Guelzo’s analysis switches here from CCCU to the CIC (Council of Independent Colleges). So the application to CCCU schools is in question. That aside, Guelzo’s contention does not even square with CIC data. The report that Guelzo cites says that only 13% of CIC presidents in 2006 had an immediate past position outside of academia. The highest category of immediate past posts was as a chief academic officer (35%). (It is true that “non-academic role in higher education” is the next highest category at 33%. What these positions ere is not identified.) Further, the CIC report also says that between 2001 and 2006, CAOs became more likely to be presidents, not the reverse.

The “rolodex president” may be a feature in some schools, but my sense is that it is not the rule in CCCU schools. Gordon just hired a 39-year-old sociologist, and both Covenant’s and Wheaton’s presidents (Neil Neilson and Phil Rykken) were taken from the ranks of the pastorate. At Geneva, Ken Smith came to the presidency straight from a faculty position at Syracuse University.

Perhaps the most damning of Guelzo’s charges in this section is the contention that CIC presidents do not list teaching and learning in their list of priorities. This is a serious mischaracterization of the data. The five issues that Guelzo identifies (fundraising, risk management and legal issues, capital improvement projects, budget and financial management, and entrepreneurial ventures) came in response to this question posed to first-time presidents: “Identify presidential responsibilities for which you feel insufficiently prepared.”

This leads to a conclusion exactly the opposite to Guelzo’s. This is not a list either of presidential or institutional priorities, rather it is a list of presidential responsibilities for which first-time presidents feel ill-prepared. One could conclude that presidents feel better prepared to address teaching and learning issues, and this is why they were chosen as presidents in the first place. Further, the CIC report separates responses by type of immediate past position. For those who come from outside of higher education, the three largest areas of insufficient preparation in rank order are faculty issues, enrollment management, and academic issues. So, for presidents who come from outside of academia, two of their three self-identified areas of insufficient preparation are clearly academic in nature. While it would be interesting to know what issues presidents see as their top issues, or the top issues that face their institutions, this data does not speak to that question.

It is true that the CIC report finds that CIC institutions (independent liberal arts colleges) are less likely to have presidents who come from academia than other types of institutions. As noted above, pastors appear to be a source of presidents for CCCU schools, although I am not aware of systematic data on this point.

Whether pastors are culpable of being “rolodex presidents” is a matter the reader can decide. Guelzo’s third remedy for the problem situation that he thinks CCCU institutions are in is that CCCU faculty should be less “guild minded.” He argues that

“Faculty think of themselves as historians, chemists, physicists and sociologists first, rather than
as members of a certain college faculty, because that’s where the mobility is.

“This means that, even for Christian colleges, there is only modest incentive for a faculty member
to buy into a Christian college’s worldview paradigm. Given the atmosphere of financial fragility,
the resources to reward the development of such a worldview are simply not there, and the
professional cultures in which faculty are trained are actively hostile to it.”

The observation that faculty are more tied to their profession than to their institution is not new.

However, Guelzo provides no evidence for his assertion that CCCU faculty think much like faculty in general about these things. In fact, I doubt that he is correct. As one data point, CCCU faculty are systematically paid less than their peers in secular institutions, and yet they remain. While this is certainly due to a variety of factors, in my very limited experience as an administrator at one CCCU institution, I have found that the faculty are very committed to the mission of the institution and they are attracted to, and then retained by, the institutions where they serve primarily because they believe that God has called them to these places.

Guelzo summarizes his argument as follows:

“The yardsticks by which I have been measuring the decline and fall of many Christian colleges
have been, I admit, secular ones: endowment, admittance rates, and so forth. All of these I could
cheerfully agree to dismiss if they were the price being paid by a college for its commitment to a
forthrightly Christian identity. But they are not. In pursuit of Rolodex presidents and guildminded
faculty, too many Christian colleges are actually begging to be judged by secular standards.
They are, in effect, trying to serve two masters. I am simply taking them at their word.”

I don’t understand Guelzo’s switch at this point. I don’t see any evidence that CCCU schools are begging to be judged by secular standards. We are required to submit the very data that Guelzo uses to indict the sector. We have no choice but to submit it. I do not think that Guelzo has established that CCCU schools are in pursuit of rolodex-presidents and guild-minded faculty, and I think there is plenty of evidence that they do not. None the less, it is true that CCCU schools, along with all non-profits, both religious and secular, both education-related and non-education related, require significant resources in order to operate. I don’t think that this necessarily means that we are trying to serve two masters, although that is a constant danger for every Christian and for every Christian institution.

Conclusion

Guelzo concludes his essay by arguing that CCCU schools have forgotten their core business, which he identifies as follows:

“But Christian higher education, if it has any raison d’etre at all, is in the business of handing
on a tradition, not of piling up research or conferring credentials—in other words, its real
“core business” is education. If Christianity is a revealed religion, then the content of that
revelation is both fixed and authoritative; it does not bend, wilt, or evolve gradually into
something else. It will not be improved by research into religious phenomena. Thus, the
Christian college may recover, re-emphasize, and reform, but it will not re-design.”

Guelzo’s concern has merit. But I do not know a single person involved in Christian higher education who disagrees that our raison d’etre is passing on the revealed truths of Christianity. At the same time, the rationale for all colleges and universities is education defined as the systematic exploration of God’s creation and works. We in the CCCU are surrounded by schools which were founded with this goal in
mind, but which have long since given up on an acknowledgement that an understanding of God is at all relevant in the educational endeavor.

This then is what is somewhat mystifying to me about Guelzo’s essay. He sets up a variety of things about which to critique CCCU schools, when what he is really critiquing is the vast majority of four-year (or more) institutions, both public and private, who are
classified by Barron’s as Very Competitive, Competitive, or even lower. He has not presented data that is uniquely true of CCCU institutions. He has not presented data that suggests or demonstrates that CCCU boards, administrators, or faculty think that their core mission is something other than “education.” And he has certainly not presented any evidence that CCCU boards, administrators, or faculty do not think that that Christianity is something other than “revealed religion,” the content of which is absolutely essential to be fully educated.

If Guelzo is correct that these things are in jeopardy, then the CCCU’s project certainly will come tumbling down. But this has to do with choices that are made in context of the warp and woof of academic life: faculty hiring, tenure recommendations and decisions, curricular proposals, and budgetary decisions in support of the central mission of the college. Data on these things are difficult to come by, and research of these topics would be very difficult. But, this is the research that would be necessary to answer Guelzo’s concern, not the kind of data that he has presented so far.

Most readers will be familiar with the story of the police officer who encounters a drunk at night under a street light peering about on his hands and knees. On inquiry, the drunk tells the officer that he is looking for his keys. The officer says “So you think you dropped them around here?” and the drunk responds, “Oh no. I dropped them further down the block. But I have to look here because this is where the light is.

To look for problems in the CCCU, we need to look in the right places, even if it is difficult to see.

Sources Consulted
• Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges, 2011. (New York: Barron’s Educational Services), 249.
• Stacy B. Dale and Alan B. Krueger, “Estimating the payoff to attending a more selective college: An
application of selection on observables and unobservables.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics,
November, 2002.
• Allen D. Guelzo, “Cracks in the Ivory Tower.” Books and Culture, July/August, 2005.
• Allen C. Guelzo, “Whither the Evangelical Colleges?” Touchstone, May/June, 2011.
• Harold V. Hartley and Eric E. Godin, A Study of Career Patterns of the Presidents of Independent
Colleges and Universities (Washington: Council of Independent Colleges and Universities, 2009), 2.

Kenneth P. Carson is Provost and Professor of Psychology at Geneva College. This article is reprinted with his permission. You may contact him at [email protected]