Spring 1999

Where We Stand

A number of years ago a mentor of mine at Columbia University – a fellow sociologist of science and leading expert on social stratification in science – described what he called “the Matthew effect” in science. In the Gospel according to St. Matthew one finds this: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance, but from him that hath not shall be taken, even that which he hath.”
One example of the so-called Matthew effect is the way in which established scientists are sometimes given the benefit of the doubt when applying for grants to support their research, whereas new young scientists’ proposals are treated with extra skepticism because they have not yet proved themselves. Economists, of course, know this as the “principle of cumulative advantage,” in which existing advantages can be leveraged into even greater advantages absent some systemic controls or mechanisms for redistribution.
The Matthew effect has been much on my mind as I think about the strategic issues St. Lawrence faces today. In the last five or so years our endowment has doubled and is now solidly over $200 million. But competitors whose endowments began at $200 million five years ago now have $400 million or more. Five years ago we were $100 million behind them; today we are $200 million behind. We are much better off in absolute terms and worse off in relative terms.
Our less-wealthy competitors view us in the same way – they were much closer to us in this regard five years ago than they are today. Their ability to compete with us, at least in a general sense, has declined.
Similarly, you know that we have been working hard to improve facilities at St. Lawrence. Our hope is to invest $15-$18 million per year for seven to eight years, both to catch up to key competitors in some areas and, hopefully, to leap-frog ahead in others. But our competitors aren’t standing still. They too are investing for the future.
Data from the last 15 years or so indicate the independent colleges, including St. Lawrence, have been able to increase educational program spending at about 3% per year in real terms, whereas legislative appropriations in support of public colleges and universities have not grown at all in real terms or have declined over that period. This means that our ability to provide a truly enriching and effective educational program for students has grown while our public sector colleagues have had to struggle just to stay in the same place.
We have not yet found a good way to capitalize on this advantage. It’s not something most prospective students and their families see easily, and we have been reluctant to point it out forcefully in our admissions marketing. When we can get a student who is exploring public institutions to apply to St. Lawrence, we have an excellent chance of enrolling that student because applicants look closely at comparisons. Our major losses to public-sector competitors due to the sticker price difference come at the time of the application decision, and hence we don’t get them close enough to see the differences.
All of this is about cumulative advantage, or lack thereof. Over half the high school students who apply to St. Lawrence are accepted at independent colleges and universities with more net revenue per student than St. Lawrence has. For half of the remainder, our competition is with public institutions with very low tuition, offsetting for many students and parents, as I said above, the inability of those colleges and universities to improve their educational programs over time. For the remaining 25% of our total pool we are in competition with independent colleges and universities with less net revenue per student than St. Lawrence. A strong majority of students from the latter two groups of applicants chooses to attend St. Lawrence, while a strong majority of the first group chooses to attend the competition.
This may seem like an insoluble dilemma, but here is where a second Biblical passage comes in for me. In Ecclesiastes we find the well-known admonition that “The race is not to the swift, or the battle to the strong…; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” Of course, the race actually is almost always to the swifter and the battle almost always to the stronger. It is just not necessarily always so.
The competition for top students is growing trough every year, and those institutions with whom St. Lawrence is in the most intense head-to-head competition have resources that are growing faster than ours – even as we achieve record fund-raising success. But time and chance happeneth to them all. Some of our competitors will fail to take advantage of their greater financial resources. They will become complacent front-runners. This happens with some frequency with some regard to academic and residential program development.
If we at St. Lawrence can harness the immense creativity of our faculty and staff and feel free to move in new directions that we believe will provide superior teaching and learning, we can out-compete complacent front-runners. There is not space to describe it all here, but I believe we are doing just that with our reformulated approach to area studies, in science education, in our new thinking with regard to the arts, and by our increased support of student/faculty research in the social sciences. Recent grants from the France-Merrick Foundation and the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation are strong, positive indications that many of our colleagues in higher education acknowledge our competitive edge. Look for detail on these initiatives in future issues of this magazine and elsewhere. I want us to behave like a talented, ambitious, hustling dark horse, and I believe that we are well on our way to adopting this posture.
Thorstein Veblen, author near the turn of the century of a seminal book entitled The theory of the Leisure Class, wrote insightfully of the competition between firms. One phrase of his- “the privilege of historical backwardness” – has stuck with me and very much affects the way I think about how we must look for opportunities to move ahead of the competition.
Veblen argued that sometimes it is an advantage not to be a front-runner, if the front-runners are deeply invested in an approach to doing things that is nearly beyond its time. Front-runners achieve their position by finding ways to do something more efficiently and effectively than the competition. This is rewarding, and so front-runners are generally reluctant to give up the advantages they have in the present in order to pursue less well-known potential advantages in the future. The “historically backward” did not find the best solution in the current competition, and so they are much less committed to the status quo. This can be advantage if an organization in this situation is willing and ale to recognize the situation, devise superior solutions to new and changing circumstances, and pursue a new solution with deep commitment and great energy. If it can do this, it has a chance, in Veblen’s terms, to “leap-frog” the competition.
We have this chance at St. Lawrence in several of our facilities projects, in the arts, in our approach to interdisciplinary teaching and learning in science, in our reformulation of area studies, and in many other ways. In this time of enormous change and uncertainty in higher education, I much prefer being a dark horse than a front-runner, and I believe our current and future students will be the major beneficiaries – if we hustle, if we stay the course, and if we remain clearly focused on student learning, in a broad and balanced sense, as our most important institutional goal.