(C) Iowa Capital Dispatch
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Iowa’s private colleges bring the world to the communities that support them [1]

['Brooklyn Draisey', 'More From Author', '- February']

Date: 2024-02-22

When Iowa Wesleyan University announced its closure in March 2023, students working at The Grange Public House & Brewery could be seen checking their phones and crying on shift. Owner Sue Sorensen said they would wipe their tears and go back to serving customers, all while feeling like the world was ending.

Almost a year later, the restaurant, as well as the Mount Pleasant community, are moving forward without the institution that brought people, growth and culture to town.

In Pella, another college town, resident Robert Judkins said he gets sad sometimes when driving past Central College in the summer — the campus sits empty of students and the extra liveliness they bring to the community.

“I just love the activity,” Judkins said. “I love the fact that I have to stop my car and let a whole bunch of kids cross the street. I like the fact that when I drive through town on a Saturday you can hear the noise from the crowd at the football game, the buzz, the activity there.”

Iowa’s private colleges and universities have an outsized impact on the communities that house them, from economic growth to cultural experiences, bringing benefits to both sides of the coin, advocates say. As rising costs, fewer incoming students and other uncertainties make it more difficult to thrive, these historic institutions are thinking of new ways to secure their future in their homes.

Colleges help community economies thrive

According to the Iowa College Foundation, Iowa’s private colleges and universities contribute more than $1.8 billion in annual economic impact across the state, and employ more than 10,000 people.

For colleges based in smaller towns and rural areas, they are among the largest employers with good pay and benefits, said Gary Steinke, president of the Iowa Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. Add in the hundreds to thousands of students coming to study, live and maybe work in the area, and foot traffic is greatly increased in small towns with colleges.

Students also rely on local businesses for shopping, eating, errands like getting their haircut and more, Steinke said, bumping the local economy up. Graceland University President Patricia Draves said Lamoni would probably not have a Hy-Vee if the college wasn’t in town.

“The community actually becomes intertwined with the institution, and the economic impact of that is just unbelievable,” Steinke said.

Beyond the direct impacts the people who make up private institutions have on local businesses, Steinke said the act of maintaining and expanding a college campus contributes to Iowa’s economy.

Renovation and construction projects at private universities, while often funded by alum and others who don’t live in the area, are undertaken and finished by Iowa workers, Steinke said, putting more dollars in Iowans’ pockets and into the economy.

“Iowa companies poured the concrete, Iowa welders welded the steel beams, Iowa companies did the roofing, Iowa people did the landscaping,” Steinke said. “It goes down the line, and that’s just one building.”

Colleges can even help modernize the towns themselves. At Graceland University, Draves said the work computer science faculty did in the 1990s to earn grants for better wiring made it so the area has good broadband internet today. This has contributed to businesses being able to thrive in the internet era.

Students are also heavily involved in volunteering in the community, Draves said, helping with organizations like social service programs and the food pantry in order to gain experience and give back.

“We definitely think if the college was not here, I worry about whether the town would be sustainable,” Draves said.

Bringing the world to small-town Iowa

A fine art gallery in Lamoni. A hockey arena in Sioux Center. Nationally recognized choirs in Waverly and Decorah. Beyond dollars and business growth, private colleges expand the opportunities communities have to experience art, entertainment and culture.

Cultural impacts of private colleges cannot be quantified, Steinke said.

Graceland University hosts some sort of arts-related activity every week, Draves said, whether it’s a student recital, one-act play or performances from visitors to the college. The university also puts on more major arts events around once or twice a month, like a concert or major play.

Sports also garner a lot of local support, Draves said. Community members will often use these as social get-togethers, pairing attending an event with grabbing lunch or other activities.

As a leader in higher education, Draves said she feels a responsibility to offer educational opportunities to the community as well as entertainment. Lecture series, student presentations and guest talks all serve the community as well as campus, introducing people to new information and ways of thinking.

“That’s a whole world that we get to open up to those people, and then people choose to retire here because of that,” Draves said. “I mean, I can give you a huge list of people that chose just to retire (here) because of the opportunities they get at Graceland.”

For many students, coming to Lamoni through Graceland University opens doors to a whole new world as well. A little less than half of Graceland’s student population come from the Midwest, Draves said, and the majority of the rest come from more than 500 miles away.

Many Graceland students from Texas, Florida, California and across the globe are experiencing small town Iowa living for the first time, Draves said, and once the culture shock wears off they begin to fall in love with it.

“There is something comforting about being in a small community,” Draves said. “For our kids from Miami, they’re like, ‘It feels like heaven to me here.’”

Mount Pleasant moves ahead after Iowa Wesleyan closure

Once the news was announced that Iowa Wesleyan was going to close, Sorensen said her restaurant had to switch up schedules to accommodate students going on college visits and moving out of their temporary homes at Iowa Wesleyan or in Mount Pleasant, and the restaurant ended up losing eight employees.

Those losses were paired with uncertainties of how business levels will be impacted, and they created the situation of employees having to work doubles so the restaurant could keep its hours.

“It’s not like we look around and go okay, these are Iowa Wesleyan people, I mean, they were just Mount Pleasant people. We couldn’t distinguish one from another,” Sorensen said. “So it was hard, we didn’t know what the future was going to look like.”

Rachel Lindeen, executive vice president of the Mount Pleasant Area Chamber Alliance, said the community won’t know the total impact of the closure until its one-year anniversary in the spring, but overall the community’s economy is still thriving.

The most immediate impact of Iowa Wesleyan’s closing was on the local workforce, Lindeen said. Students who worked at restaurants, retail stores, and more suddenly had to leave those slots empty, and the employee pool wasn’t large enough to fill it.

The Grange is still operating with a slightly smaller staff, Sorensen said, and it’s been difficult to find good workers who will stick around.

“We’ll never get the caliber that we had before,” Sorensen said. “And when I say that, I don’t mean they were just really, really good, but some of the employees that we had from the university really kind of had the work ethic, the ideals of what the future was going to look like, and they knew how to work.”

While the restaurant did see a dip in business, Sorensen said it was less drastic than their worst expectations.

Some of the cultural offerings Iowa Wesleyan brought to the town, however, are being missed. Lindeen said sports activities were popular entertainment for Mount Pleasant, as well as lecture series and other events hosted by the college.

Even so, some of the cultural institutions housed by the university are continuing. The Southeast Iowa Symphony Orchestra, which was based at Iowa Wesleyan, continues to hold performances for the community and the Harlan-Lincoln House, a historic house built by Sen. James Harlan and frequented by his and Abraham Lincoln’s descendants, has established its own nonprofit organization to continue keeping the house open for tours and events after the college closed.

“People are stepping up and starting to fill those voids,” Lindeen said.

Community members are also working to fill roles that students left behind at arts fairs and other activities. Sorensen said people were worried ahead of Midwest Old Threshers events that there wouldn’t be enough volunteers to staff them, as students would usually help out. The baseball team would even stay up overnight to watch over craft booths so no one would mess with them.

People from Southeastern Community College and Burlington joined in the festivities to fill the gaps, Sorensen said, letting events go on as planned.

“Everybody kind of took it upon themselves to be available,” Sorensen said.

As for Iowa Wesleyan’s campus, Lindeen said all but one of the buildings have been sold or repurposed for the future. The Mount Pleasant Community School District has purchased much of the central campus and housing and other properties have been bought up, with the only building remaining to be torn down being the old gym.

Having grown up close to campus and taken jobs there when she was younger, Lindeen said there’s a nostalgic sadness in seeing the college divided up and sold. Even so, looking at the still well-maintained property and being able to see a bright future ahead, for both the campus and the community, makes it easier to handle.

“It is sad … but knowing what I know now, that the campus does, as a whole, have a path forward, is just encouraging and reassuring,” Lindeen said.

Private colleges strategize to thrive

With problems facing higher education institutions today, from rising costs to shrinking enrollment numbers, private colleges are looking for ways to keep thriving in their small towns.

In 2018, Draves said she told the Graceland University board of trustees that the business model they had at the time would not be sustainable long-term. At the time, the university was making cuts in order to tighten its belt, she said, but at some point there would have been nothing else to cut.

From there, the university began turning its efforts to investing in programs that would yield more students and funds in the long run, including an accelerated, hybrid Doctor of Physical Therapy program which launched this semester. This will allow students to conduct their studies online part-time, traveling to the college’s Missouri campus when needed.

The college is working with a planned budget deficit in order to invest in this program, with allocations of more than $3 million planned over the next three to five years. As the program is now enrolling students and bringing in tuition dollars, Draves said they will be able to make up that gap.

Graceland University is also working to get its foot in the door with families who may balk at costs by reducing its base tuition by half and simplifying the financial aid formula. Draves said the goal behind the changes is to show students what they’ll be paying up front, rather than showing them a larger number that would later be brought down by scholarships and other financial aid.

“We just think it’s way more transparent to say this is closer to what you pay, and then we can have that conversation,” Draves said.

The university has also tried to smooth admissions paths in order to attract more international and transfer students.

Central College is pitching new projects and strengthening its partnerships with Pella with the “Imagine More: It’s Central to Pella” initiative. This five-year plan involves constructing new housing near campus with units available for both students and townspeople, collaborating with local restaurants and businesses to bring students into the community and the community onto campus, and increasing philanthropic efforts.

Central College President Mark Putnam said this initiative was born from looking to the past for inspiration when planning for the future. He and others at Central are striving to make the college stand out from other schools, and they’re hoping that crafting a college experience that can take students off campus will do just that.

“The future of Central College is heavily, heavily tied to Pella’s future, which looks, in every way I can see, very bright,” Putnam said.

There’s no one solution that would work for every university facing challenges today, Putnam said. It may seem like private colleges are all similar enough, each “storied institution,” as he called them, have their own contexts to work with in terms of their history, programs, and location.

While Central College has definitely felt the sting of inflation, making the college have to think harder about where budget dollars are going and how they’re being used, it’s nothing compared to the peers he’s spoken to in areas like New York.

It is harder for private universities to thrive today than it was in the past, Steinke said, but with the support from their boards, leaders and the communities they call home, Iowa’s institutions are still able to welcome students from across the globe.

“It is more difficult than it used to be, no doubt about that, but you’ve got to remember over the history of private colleges, most of these private colleges have been around for over 100 years,” Steinke said. “There have been depressions, there have been world wars, there’s been all kinds of problems in those 100 years, and they’re still there, and they will continue to be there.”

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