Becker lays off 9, exploring other changes

Photo | Grant Welker Becker College in Worcester

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By Grant Welker

Becker College is working with a consultant to find ways it could take steps to stay ahead of changes in the higher education industry, with an open mind toward major shifts if necessary.

Less than a month into the fall semester, the school has already taken one step: it laid off nine faculty and staff this week.

The college, which has campuses in Leicester and Worcester, took the difficult financial step to address a short-term budget deficit, President Nancy Crimmin said.

In the longer term, Becker is having roughly 80 workers involved in a months-long process of reviewing the college’s operations and analyze what changes might be possible. Recommendations are expected early next year.

“We’re not going to just sit by and let higher education change around us,” Crimmin said in a WBJ interview.

The college is open to potentially major changes if they’re recommended, she said, and small enough to be able to institute changes more quickly than a larger school might. The president said she’s open-minded about making necessary changes, including how courses are taught or what academic programs are offered.

Becker is also purposefully giving employees other than top administrators a prominent role in the process. The review, which began this summer, is being led by Whole-Scale Change, a firm with offices in Michigan and The Netherlands.

“Whatever we decide to do, there will be an implementation process,” said Crimmin, Becker’s president since 2017. “We want to see what they come up with.”

Becker has been flexible before, launching last year what it says is the first esports management program in the country and starting a two-semester program letting undeclared students try out 10 majors.

Becker, with about 1,700 students, is not alone as a college being squeezed by financial pressures. Small colleges like Mount Ida College in Newton have closed, with remaining small schools and others challenged by high personnel costs and an expected drop in high school graduates in the years ahead, particularly in the Northeast.

[Related: Becker adds varsity esports team]

Becker doesn’t have a lot of financial cushion, with an endowment of just over $5 million and a budget in which 52% of costs are in personnel. The college had 48 full-time faculty and 127 part-time as of the fall 2018 semester, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Becker does work to defray student costs, with its sticker price for students — $57,160 in total costs for students last school year — brought down to an average of $33,266 after aid from the college or other sources, according to federal data.

Even with student aid, Becker is working to be fiscally responsible. The college maintains a tuition discount rate between 46% and 48%, which Crimmin said is both enough to keep the school competitive with discount rates at other schools but not too much to force the school to give up needed revenue.

But other signs are trending in the right direction, including a student retention rate of 77% and a graduation rate of 46%. The school’s so-called melt rate — those who commit in the spring but don’t ultimately enroll in the fall — dropped this summer by 3 percentage points.

Becker has increased capacity in what may be becoming the college’s most well-known program, its video game design major. About 30% of its graduates last year were in game or graphic design, with the video game design program rated third best in the world by The Princeton Review.