June 9, 2014
Shop Talk
Q&A with Francesco Cesareo, President of Assumption College
By Rick Saia
Assumption College finds itself in a challenging position. As a small, Catholic, liberal arts school, it's fighting a battle against the pressures of higher education costs, as well as the increasing desire for students — and by extension, their parents — to get a quick payback after graduation in the form of good jobs. Earlier this year, it introduced what it calls Assumption Assurance, which freezes tuition for the classes of 2016 through 2018. Not long after that, the college laid off 15 people. Francesco Cesareo, president of the school since 2007, addressed these issues with us recently.
Assumption opened a new campus recently in Rome. Other U.S. colleges have also opened satellite campuses in other parts of the world. What does that do for Assumption?
It allows us to be distinctive. We've been emphasizing the importance of (studying) abroad, the importance of giving students that sense of global citizenship, and we felt it was much better to have our own campus, whereby we develop the curriculum, we could set parameters (and) goals (for) the program, and give students that (global) experience. What we found in our surveys of accepted students is that many of them use that as one of the factors in their process of deciding where they want to go to college.
When the college announced the extension of your contract, it alluded to your efforts in raising $15 million. How did you make that work, even in the middle of a very tough recession?
We were building ... a campus ministry center. So we had a very specific project by which we could approach donors. That became sort of a cornerstone … of fundraising in other areas. The recession helped us go out to donors for scholarship support and creating endowed scholarships because many of our families were impacted directly by the recession.
Is this a challenging time to be running a relatively small, private college, given the heavier focus on the costs of education?
Absolutely. As you know, there's a great deal of scrutiny as to the costs of higher education and is there a value that's associated with that cost? Unfortunately we're in a period right now where value is being seen simply in terms of what career or what job is the student going to get immediately upon graduating and how much is he or she going to be making immediately upon graduating. It should be (about) formation, developing skills that are transferrable from one career to another.
Along those same lines, what's the tougher challenge? Is it the financial side? Or the demographics in the Northeast?
I think you can't separate the two. (The declining number of potential students) have more choices because schools are competing with one another … and then you have the cost factor. One of the reasons that we embarked on our Assumption Assurance program was that … we needed to begin to address that.
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