Belhaven president: Associating MS private colleges with struggling Alabama school unfair

Your recent front-page evaluation of private colleges in Mississippi offered a simplistic overview of the dynamics of private higher education. Further, by attempting to link Mississippi's future to that of Birmingham-Southern University, an institution that has visibly struggled for more than a decade, your report unfairly taints all of Mississippi’s private institutions with their viability questions.

I appreciate the Clarion Ledger featuring private higher education. The future of higher education is especially vital to the Jackson metro area as a "college town" with four private institutions, strong community colleges, a significant HBCU state university, and a thriving medical school.

Unfortunately, your story guided readers to judge private higher education based on some of the lesser important benchmarks of institutional strength – application yield rates, undergraduate enrollment counts, and endowment changes. Such a limited view is a distorted and simplistic approach to evaluating a vital sector of Mississippi's higher education system, serving over 15,000 students.

As the longest serving university president in Mississippi, let me offer readers a more realistic and robust picture of private higher education.

Each private college in Mississippi is grounded in a unique faith-based mission, and each school's educational dynamics and financial model are equally distinct. A representation of their strengths cannot be measured by one-dimensional means, but requires a deep dive into the dynamics of each college's multi-layered makeup.

For instance, the endowment focus of your story is an antiquated approach to college financing, as today's institutions are driven by a variety of factors, including net tuition revenue analysis, capital debt structuring, auxiliary income elasticity, program "S curve" patterns, delivery system diversity, net contribution margins patterns, cash management calendars, and a host of additional factors that determine an institution's vigor and viability.  Higher education financing has become extremely complex.

Undoubtedly, the future of higher education will demand a new level of innovation, flexibility, student-centered delivery, and lower-cost financial modeling. These changes will be required across all higher education sectors, from community colleges to research universities.  At Belhaven, we have been on the front edge of this revolution, and I have witnessed agility among my peers in Mississippi's private sector.

I cannot speak for all, because each of the seven private institutions is distinctive. Still, as a representation, I succinctly highlight the strengths of my university that are missing from your overview story.

Belhaven University serves 3,621 students with undergraduate, masters, and doctoral level education. Our online programs are competitively priced with national brands, we offer our traditional campus undergraduates an affordable degree with a double major option at no additional cost, along with a free master's degree for each campus graduate.

At Belhaven, we are marketplace responsive, adding eight new academic programs in the past five years. We are one of only 35 institutions nationally accredited in all four primary arts. Our STEM programs have dramatically expanded in quality and marketplace responsiveness, including engineering partnerships with Ole Miss and Mississippi State.

My university is in a category with only a handful of peer private colleges delivering a sophisticated integration of vibrant Christian worldview teaching across the entire curriculum. Demonstrating respect and love for the students we serve, we are committed to being as biblically grounded in Grace as we are in Truth.

While we watch the rapid crumbling of some private universities nationwide, God has allowed our financial foundation and Christ-centered mission to remain firm. Belhaven University's charming Jackson campus would cost $300 million to replace, but we carry less than $15 million of low-interest capital debt on a $60 million annual operating budget.

By any measure of meaning, Belhaven University is growing and expanding.

While the post-COVID path has been challenging for every level of education, I am bullish on the future of private higher education in Mississippi. Yes, there are some tough challenges, and financial margins will be thinner as we work to keep our institutions affordable to students across our state.

But rather than promoting a simplistic scorecard on the ups and downs of private higher education, this is the time to invest in the future of Mississippi by supporting, with prayer and gifts, Mississippi's irreplaceable private colleges and universities.

Dr. Roger Parrott is the president of Belhaven University in Jackson and the longest serving president of any Mississippi university. His op-ed is in response to a Dec. 3 piece on the state of the liberal arts colleges and universities in Mississippi.

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Belhaven president responds to Clarion Ledger article on liberal arts