Chapter 19
Serving More Students
In his inaugural address Kim Clark set the expectation that BYU-Idaho would accommodate more students on its Rexburg campus. He spoke of finding “creative ways to organize, schedule, and calendar the educational experiences of our students so that more of them may come.”1 But he also stated a goal of taking higher education to students “all over the world.” He expressed his conviction that “this university is in this valley where our pioneer heritage is deeply ingrained, where the people are humble and faithful, so that we can be a proving ground of great fidelity [relative to global education needs].”
Clark's ambition was shared by others, including several of his predecessors. David Bednar recalled a day in 1997 when education commissioner and former Ricks College president Hal Eyring came to survey the construction of a campus chapel. Eyring had just returned from a two-week tour of South America, where he had met with church members, many of them poor even by local standards. Standing beneath the chapel's lofty ceiling and grand pipe organ, he privately noted to Bednar that tithes offered by those people had helped pay for the new building, the like of which they would never see. Of the church's higher education system, he soberly observed, “We do so much for so few and so little for so many.”
High-Fidelity Higher Education
From the founding of the university, Bednar and his colleagues had built the curriculum to serve a broad constituency, not just traditional bachelor's degree-seeking students. That commitment was evident in his declaration to the faculty that associate's degrees would not be “cannibalized,” in his words, to speed the creation of bachelor's programs.2 Rather than climbing the Carnegie ladder and eliminating the rungs beneath, BYU-Idaho would be a “two-tiered institution,” offering both associate's and bachelor's degrees.
Clark built on the principle of serving a broad population with his reference to pioneer heritage and “a proving ground of great fidelity.” The word fidelity, as he used it, has formal meaning in the realm of product design. When an innovative new product, such as a pharmaceutical drug, is tested in the laboratory and in clinical trials prior to mass distribution, the tests are evaluated for their fidelity. A test of good fidelity is one that yields results on a small scale that accurately predict a medication's performance in the broader market.
Clark's goal was to apply BYU-Idaho's heritage of frugality and student focus to developing forms of higher education that would provide good results not only in Rexburg but also in the rest of the world, especially in less-privileged places such as Latin America and Africa. The university's new online courses seemed to satisfy some of the tests of global fidelity. Their measurable quality matched that of on-campus courses and was independent of location. Their cost met Clark's target of one-tenth the on-campus amount, accounting for the expense of physical facilities.
But there was still the question of whether foreign students could succeed in these online classes, which presumed English fluency and graduation from an American-quality high school. Clark directed his colleagues to continue testing the new curriculum on campus. They sought to enhance it while serving more students in Rexburg and eyeing possibilities in the rest of the world. The team constituted to expand campus enrollment beyond 11,600 students per semester called itself “Enrollment Expansion I,” a name presaging a second initiative to grow enrollment away from the campus.
Enrollment Expansion I and the Fishbone
Serving more students via a fixed resource base is a classic operations management problem, a matter of optimizing a production system's efficiency. Steve Wheelwright, Clark's colleague of twenty-five years at Harvard, had been studying such operations problems since taking his Ph.D. at Stanford's business school under the direction of Hal Eyring. As a member of the Enrollment Expansion I team, Wheelwright introduced a time-tested analytical technique to his BYU-Idaho colleagues. He showed them how an Ishikawa, or “fishbone,” diagram can clarify the relationship of a desired outcome to the host of causes that produce it. Kaoru Ishikawa was a Japanese engineering professor and former naval officer who translated the pioneering work of J. Edwards Deming and fathered the quality movement in Japan. Building on Deming's work, Ishikawa created the fishbone and demonstrated its power in first in the Kawasaki shipyards and then in Japan's state-owned telephone company and other large enterprises.
Like all operations management scholars, Steve Wheelwright was well versed in the Ishikawa technique, which was reimported with the rest of Deming's quality movement to the U.S. in the 1970s. Having sat quietly in the team's first disjointed discussion of factors such as classroom capacity, faculty–student ratios, and student dropout rates, Wheelwright came to the second meeting with an initial pass at a fishbone diagram; it showed the connections among these factors and the university's key output, college graduates. The team spent the next several months refining the diagram, applying a technique initially proven by Japanese shipyard engineers to BYU-Idaho's Rexburg campus.
Kaoru Ishikawa and the Japanese Quality Movement
Ishikawa's fishbone, or cause-and-effect diagram, was part of a broader set of tools, some borrowed from U.S. colleagues including J. Edwards Deming, that he used to pioneer the quality movement in Japan. Ishikawa was ahead of his time—on both sides of the Pacific—in seeing ways to engage not only administrative leaders but rank-and-file employees in assuring product quality and customer satisfaction. He observed that the root causes of quality problems are often known only to those with hands-on exposure to the manufacturing process. He also recognized that these lowest-level employees may fear bringing bad news forward. Thus, even in enterprises that invest in quality control, such as by hiring specialists to track outcomes, the root causes of quality problems persist.
Ishikawa's answer to this organizational problem was a “quality circle” comprised of self-directing front-line employees. These employees would be volunteers, assuring that none felt compelled to run the risk of punishment for reporting the root causes of problems. The company would give them time during the normal workday to do their analysis, as well as the necessary authority and resources to address the problems identified. A significant ancillary benefit would be an increase in their collective autonomy and individual job satisfaction.
A respected university researcher, Ishikawa proved equally influential among Japan's industrial leaders, whom he persuaded to test his techniques.3 Armed with his fishbone and other analytical tools, along with his philosophy of making customer satisfaction the end goal of all activities, Ishikawa's quality circles helped propel Japanese manufacturers to the fore of global competitiveness. They shattered the long-accepted belief in a cost/quality tradeoff by producing cars and consumer electronics that were both affordable and reliable. Among those inspired by their example was Kim Clark, who as a young Harvard Business School professor studied the Japanese auto companies.
One of the first things highlighted by the fishbone diagram (presented in part in Figure 19.1) was the significance of BYU-Idaho's hours-at-graduation, or throughput, problem. The registrar's office had that number at its fingertips, and the team immediately discovered how producing graduates with more than 120 hours decreased the university's ability to serve additional students. Another factor was average class size, which correlated directly with the number of graduates produced. Quantifying the effects of class size gave the team greater appreciation for discussion-based learning, peer instruction, and other aspects of the Learning Model that allow students to learn more effectively even in groups as large as eighty or ninety. It focused the team on classes with small enrollments, including a surprising number with five or fewer students.
Figure 19.1 Fishbone Analysis of Graduate Production4.
It was far more difficult, though, to determine how many more students the university could serve without adding new classrooms. The anecdotal evidence, provided by the department secretaries who matched instructors with classrooms, indicated no excess capacity. The task of testing that conclusion, which some team members doubted, required a visual inspection of every classroom on campus to determine its practical seating capacity.5 That data then had to be manually matched with the secretaries' classroom assignments and the registrar's record of the number of students in each class.
When all of the data collection and number crunching was done, the results surprised even those who had doubted the reports of scarce space. It turned out that between 7:45 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. each weekday the typical classroom was occupied 70 percent of the time, a reasonably high figure but not one discouraging of future growth. The telling statistic, though, was the percentage of seats occupied in those classes—again just 70 percent. That meant that, at what appeared to be a university operating at peak efficiency, any given classroom seat was in use less than half of the normal school day.
The team discovered that each department secretary's knowledge of available rooms was often limited to those in the building occupied by the department; that created a disconnect between perception and the underlying reality. In addition, some faculty members pressed the secretaries for favorite rooms at the generally preferred times, between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. Working with an artificially constrained set of classrooms and times, the secretaries naturally concluded that the university was bursting at the seams.
One answer to the problem came in the form of a campuswide room-scheduling process that drew upon the new data on classroom capacity. The process helped department secretaries meet faculty preferences while achieving greater classroom utilization. Further relief came from renovations and consolidations of chronically underutilized rooms such as laboratories and computer rooms. The latter were an anachronism in the age of laptops, which were mandatory for BYU-Idaho students.
Through the report card, as well as regular face-to-face updates from the Enrollment I team and other task forces, Clark and his colleagues could see the university's gradual progress in raising quality and lowering costs. They also saw the success of the year-round calendar and three-track system. By mid-2008 the spring semester was full to more than three-fourths of the 11,600 target level for fall and winter. More than sixty online courses were being delivered by a cadre of eighty adjunct instructors, with more of both in the pipeline. Due to the low marginal cost of adding students, tuition dollars covered the new growth; the church's total financial cost of supporting the university went down as the student body grew. Thanks to the fishbone, Clark knew that low-cost growth via online learning and improved classroom utilization was sustainable up to at least 15,000 students per semester or 22,500 on an annual, three-semester basis. Armed with this data, he sought and received from the board authorization to increase the on-campus student body by 900, to a total of 12,500 students per semester, with the prospect of going to 15,000 by 2015. It was a confirmation of the success of the new university's unique model, a blend of the traditional university and a set of disruptive innovations (see Table 19.1).
Innovations of the Kim Clark Era, 2005–Present
| New Traits | Implications |
| Full year-round operation | Reduced cost-per-student |
| More students served | |
| Reduced flexibility for students (track assignment) | |
| Increased faculty workload | |
| The Learning Model | Enhanced learning experiences |
| Increased student responsibility | |
| Increased faculty preparation effort | |
| Foundations | Broad, common learning experiences |
| Opportunities for faculty teaching groups | |
| Challenges of integrating across disciplines | |
| Constraints on student course selection | |
| Student Living program | Enhanced apartment environment |
| Reduced cost of supervision | |
| Increased cost of instruction | |
| Online courses and degrees | Low-cost, convenient learning |
| New costs of course creation and support | |
| Challenges of faculty involvement and quality assurance | |
| Modular majors | Increased customizability |
| Decreased cost of changing majors | |
| Increased complexity of academic planning | |
| One-time costs of reconfiguring majors |
Enrollment Expansion II: From Rexburg to Manhattan
For several years, Clark and his BYU-Idaho colleagues had talked about the possibility of moving beyond the Rexburg campus to deliver college-level education to “nontraditional” students, in the spirit of A. Lawrence Lowell's extension program at Harvard. This was already happening in the form of an online Bachelor of University Studies (BUS) program launched in 2007. Through it, students who had begun a degree in Rexburg but had not finished could do so entirely online. The BUS degree was a boon to many former students, especially mothers who had dropped out of school to raise children. However, the program lacked the intimacy of the on-campus experience: though these students enjoyed interacting online with their BYU-Idaho colleagues, they had no face-to-face learning opportunities. The program presumed a degree of self-sufficiency and motivation greater than that of the typical college-aged student. It was also limited to four emphases: business, English, communications, and marriage and family studies.
Clark wanted to overcome the limitations of the BUS program, with its exclusively online curriculum and narrow range of specializations. He hoped to create a learning outreach model that would work not only for adults with some college experience but also for young people with no prior exposure to higher education, especially those whom traditional institutions might consider unfit for college. He of course wanted them to have a broad range of study options. In early 2007, he challenged Clark Gilbert and his online team to experiment with gathering online students to a common location for weekly face-to-face interaction. They did so in two places, BYU-Idaho (in Rexburg) and its sister institution BYU-Hawaii, where Steve Wheelwright had taken the helm. They chose two introductory-level courses, one in English and the other in math.
The weekly face-to-face gathering in each location was presided over by a peer mentor, a student who had taken the course recently and been specially trained in facilitating classroom discussion according to the BYU-Idaho Learning Model. Students in both classes and on both campuses performed well, but the face-to-face gathering worked better for the English students. Their online instructor had created special learning exercises just for that gathering, rather than simply viewing it as an opportunity for unstructured tutoring and socializing. The Hawaii experiment taught the online team that these distant-site courses needed to be hybrids, a combination of online and traditional classroom instruction.
Clark's next challenge to the team was more ambitious and required board approval. In three U.S. cities—Boise, Phoenix, and Manhattan, New York—they recruited a total of fifty young people not currently enrolled in college, including some with no college experience. After a fashion similar to that of the Hawaii experiment, each cohort would take semester-long online courses and meet in person weekly. In this case, though, the meeting would occur not on a university campus but at a local church institute building, similar to those over which Ricks College president John Clarke had presided before coming to Ricks College.
Each institute had a full-time director, but the church board of education made it clear that institute directors were not to be diverted from their existing responsibilities, primarily organizing and teaching church religion classes to college-aged students. To keep the hybrid model of online and face-to-face instruction affordable, the team sought out volunteer retired couples to meet with the students each Thursday night, playing the role of supportive coaches and mentors rather than teachers. Students led discussions and helped each other, using the Learning Model, while completing the bulk of their course work online. This model allowed students to have the benefits of a face-to-face gathering without BYU-Idaho's incurring the costs of hiring remote teachers at each site.6
Customized Higher Education Pathways
Because nearly all of the students in the new program had jobs, the curriculum for the first semester was light. Each student took three courses. Two were taken online, and the third, a religion class, was taught face-to-face at the institute by its director. This first semester's curriculum, along with the two to follow, assumed the need to reproduce the college preparation that Charles Eliot and the Redbook's authors expected to occur in high school. The students differed dramatically from their counterparts in Rexburg, even most of the Heber J. Grant scholars. Of the twenty-two in Manhattan, for example, only ten were native English speakers. Thirteen had some previous college experience, the others none. Their average age was twenty-six.
Though the program required a high school degree or its equivalent, most of the students had been out of school long enough that college readiness couldn't be taken for granted; at least in a limited way, it would be necessary to vertically integrate, a la Henry Ford and his steel plant. Fortunately, an Academic Start suite was readily assembled from existing components. One of the online courses, called “Life Skills,” was adapted from the Grant scholars program; it addressed subjects such as time and money management. The other online course, called “College Success,” was developed by specialists from the tutoring center in Rexburg.
To the team's satisfaction, eighteen of the twenty-two Manhattan students completed the first semester's requirements. The specially tailored curriculum and peer interaction allowed nearly all who made a serious effort to succeed. Fifteen reenrolled for the second semester, in which they took college math and a second religion course. Similarly encouraging results came in Phoenix and Boise.
The second semester, though, revealed new challenges. Many students struggled in the first real academic course, college math. The team recognized that, notwithstanding the peer-to-peer interaction built into the online course and the support of the volunteer couple at the institute, more academic advising support was needed. They recalled the observation made by several online university administrators that effective online learning requires one-and-a-half to two times as much “out-of-class” student support as face-to-face courses do.
Drawing upon the students-helping-students principle embedded in BYU-Idaho's activities program and Learning Model, the team both beefed up its professional support, hiring more academic advisors, and also injected several forms of student leadership into the distant-site pilot programs. Those included enlisting volunteer students in Rexburg to provide online assistance; they acted as one-on-one mentors. In addition, BYU-Idaho students on their semester away from the Rexburg campus were recruited to work as volunteers under the direction of the couples at the institutes. Through this increased support, as well as ongoing course redesign and refinement, success rates of the students in Manhattan, Phoenix, and Boise were brought up to levels comparable to those in Rexburg.
Before launching these initial experiments, the team had considered what might come next for the students. One option was enrollment in the BUS online degree program, to which the university planned to add subject matter–specific bachelor's degrees. Yet this path, though appropriate for adult learners who had spent a year or more on the Rexburg campus, seemed less than ideal for most of these fledgling students. Some hoped to transfer to Rexburg, others to local community colleges. Still others wanted professional training instead of traditional bachelor's degrees. All needed a meaningful credential in the near term, given their age and need to make a living as they studied.
The team, which dubbed its new program “Pathway,” determined to accommodate as many of these individual paths as possible. (See Figure 19.2.) The need for near-term employability in particular required significant modification to the traditional bachelor's degree. A conventional general education program seemed like the wrong next step for Pathway students. Applying the modularity principle, the team designed a special curricular pathway by which most of the university's Foundations courses would be preceded by a technical certificate. They recognized that this putting of specialization before general study was effectively turning on its head the traditional model of curriculum, established by Lawrence Lowell. Lowell's approach of distribution before concentration makes sense only if a student is very likely to graduate, as is the case at Harvard. If the risk of dropping out before completion of a bachelor's degree is significant, as it is at most universities, then delaying the start of focused study disserves the student, leaving a college dropout with training little more valuable than a high school degree. It also underserves the first- and second-year students who need to work part-time but cannot convert their learning from a general education program into more gainful employment.
Figure 19.2 Pathway Program Curricular Options.
For students at risk of failing to finish a bachelor's degree, the better design puts the technical certificate first, embedded in subsequent associate's and bachelor's degrees like a Russian nesting doll. From his days of working with Clayton Christensen, Clark Gilbert saw this new curriculum as a disruptive innovation. The elite universities and colleges rightly focus their efforts on increasing the percentage of their students who graduate. They know that associate's degrees and technical certificates are generally less valuable than bachelor's degrees; they also know that students come to college with the goal of graduating, not of being employable after dropping out. Yet those two goals are not incompatible. The value of achieving them both becomes apparent by seeing the world through the eyes of at-risk students and nonconsumers of higher education whose needs have been overlooked.
Having conceived this nested structure, the team was disappointed to learn that the university had lost most of its non-bachelor's degree credentials. Notwithstanding David Bednar's commitment to making BYU-Idaho a “two-tiered institution,” by 2009 only a dozen of its 125 associate's degrees remained; it offered no technical certificates at all. The cannibalization of which Bednar had warned occurred naturally in the process of creating a full-blown university curriculum.
Fortunately, a two-year sister institution, LDS Business College in Salt Lake City, continued to specialize in basic professional training. Courses such as Office Procedures and Customer Relations from LDS-Business College filled gaps in five certificate programs created primarily from first- and second-year BYU-Idaho offerings. The certificates ranged from traditional office functions such as administrative assisting and basic accounting to newer fields such as web media development. Each was designed as a front piece to a related associate's degree, which would be created by the faculty in Rexburg in time for continuing students to transfer in as sophomores. Those associate's degrees would, in turn, fit by design within specifically designed bachelor's programs.
In fact, the Pathway team found one accommodating bachelor's degree already on the books. Students who had completed an associate's degree in a field such as architectural or automotive technology could earn a bachelor's of applied management degree with only 24 credits' worth of business-related courses. This bachelor's degree had been created in 2003 to help former Ricks College students who were working toward associate's degrees in applied fields complete bachelor's degrees quickly. With the introduction of traditional bachelor's degrees at BYU-Idaho, student interest in the applied associate's degrees waned; as a result, the applied management bachelor's degree was all but forgotten. For Pathway students, though, it proved to be a boon.
Though the members of the team appreciated the importance of giving Pathway students a cost-effective means for coming to Rexburg, they knew that continuing students were at least as likely to transfer to a local community college or to continue studying online. The great financial advantage of the program was not just its low tuition ($65 per credit hour, half of the price in Rexburg and less than or roughly equal to community college tuition in the three pilot areas). The real savings for students came from staying in their current living and work settings. Of the roughly $12,000 total annual cost of attendance in Rexburg, only a little more than $3,000 was tuition; most of the remainder comprised rent, food, and transportation. Particularly for students living with their parents and working jobs paying more than they could make in Rexburg, taking courses online in Manhattan, Phoenix, and Boise could mean a total education savings not of 50 percent, but something closer to 90 percent.
The economic advantages of this new program, with its modular openness to multiple endpoints, hearkened back to Clark Kerr's system of community colleges that feed state universities. Rather than taking up expensive residence in a distant city and immediately facing the rigors of a bachelor's degree program, Pathway students could start at home in a low-cost, low-stress academic environment. They could sample college at a price of a few hundred dollars, plus transportation costs for the weekly trip to the local institute building, rather than BYU-Idaho's all-in first-semester cost of $6,000. If things went well, they had the option of transferring to BYU-Idaho or an unaffiliated community college or other four-year university with which credit articulation agreements would be created. They could also stay with the program long enough to earn a certificate and then to go straight to work with a technical certificate and the advantage of having little or no financial debt.
Pathway's use of online technology made it more cost effective than not only traditional community colleges but also purely online universities. Part of the reason was the preexisting investment in BYU-Idaho's residential campus. Whereas an online university must invest in curriculum development, computer infrastructure, and student advising and administrative systems, all of these were already in place in Rexburg. Though the Pathway program created incremental costs for human services such as academic advising, much of the fixed cost of a Pathway education was covered by the tuition of Rexburg-based students, who were still getting a bargain relative to the average cost of a traditional university education. In effect, BYU-Idaho's on-campus instructional activities, which were supported by a full-time faculty who had developed online courses that were already running on established computer systems, allowed the university to price its Pathway courses to cover only the relatively low marginal costs.
At $65 per credit, the cost of a year's worth of study could be reduced from the $8,700 of the Rexburg program, for which students paid less than half that amount, to roughly $1,950. Pathway students could also save the cost of room and board, which might total another $8,000-plus per year. A Pathway student could, under the right conditions, earn a four-year degree for a total of less than $8,000, with no subsidy by the church.
The Pathway program produced unexpected benefits back on the campus. The need to create certificates and associate's degrees for Pathway students had the effect of accelerating the modularization of the four-year curriculum for on-campus students. Modularization was further inspired in the upper division, as faculty members anticipated the transfer of Pathway students to Rexburg; their goal was to provide modules that would allow a technical certificate or associate's degree holder to complete a bachelor's degree, with no credit left behind. The achievement of that goal would benefit not only transfer students from other universities but also BYU-Idaho students who changed majors to graduate in the hoped-for four years.
Another benefit to BYU-Idaho's traditional students accrued when a committee was created to enhance the experience of freshmen students. One of the committee's objectives was to give new students assistance in making the academic transition to college—picking a major and learning time and money management were leading concerns. This committee looked to the Pathway program's Academic Start suite of courses in designing a new course for freshman in Rexburg.
The benefits of reaching beyond the campus flowed back in ways that hadn't been foreseen when the Pathway program was created. Disruptive innovation often has that effect. Innovations designed initially to serve nonconsumers ultimately change and enhance the ways high-end consumers are served. BYU-Idaho's efforts to serve students at a distance had the effect of increasing the quality and decreasing the cost of education for its on-campus students.
This success was predicated partly on attention to two rules of managing disruptive technological change.7 One is to give responsibility for disruptive technologies to organizations whose customers need them. Kim Clark did that by putting Clark Gilbert in charge of both online learning and the Pathway program. Rather than applying online technology only to traditional students and classroom environments, Gilbert and his team had the incentive to adapt it to the needs of higher education nonconsumers. Serving these nonconsumers required rethinking the traditional higher education model and thus produced disruptive learning innovations.
The other rule Kim Clark observed is matching the size of the organization to the size of the market. Gilbert's small team was well matched to the similarly small group of Pathway students. He and his colleagues became the de facto academic advisors and parental figures to the fifty young people in the initial cohort. They took the students' phone calls and texts round the clock during that first semester. As a result, they were able to respond quickly to unforeseen needs. Their strategies for serving the Pathway students evolved more quickly than would have been possible had they not been organized as a semi-autonomous team.8
Seeing the low cost and relative success of the Pathway pilot, Kim Clark sought the board's approval for a new test. In addition to its 230 institute buildings in North America, the church operated 324 overseas. Each of these had a full-time director, and nearly all had high-speed Internet access. Finding volunteer couples to serve as onsite mentors would be difficult in some countries, but otherwise the essential Pathway infrastructure was in place.
The church also had a financial aid program called the Perpetual Education Fund (PEF), established by Gordon Hinckley in 2001, less than a year after the creation of BYU-Idaho. The PEF, a kind of educational microlending program, took its name from Brigham Young's Perpetual Emigration Fund. The Perpetual Emigration Fund aided nineteenth-century Mormon pioneers in their trek from the east coast of the United States and various European countries to the Utah Territory. The church and individual benefactors created a financial corpus from which qualifying émigrés could draw, on the condition that they repay the amount borrowed, with minor interest, upon settling on the western frontier. All told, some 30,000 pioneers made use of the Perpetual Emigration Fund.
Hinckley established the Perpetual Education Fund on similar principles, with international institute directors identifying qualified students. Those students used the borrowed funds to pursue certificates and degrees from local trade schools and colleges. In its first eight years of operation, the Perpetual Education served more than 40,000 students who realized, on average, a three- to fourfold increase on their pre-education incomes.9 The amounts borrowed were similar to the cost of obtaining a technical certificate or associate's degree through the Pathway program. Thus, Clark could see not only the educational infrastructure to take Pathway international but the financial infrastructure as well.
Even with the essential pieces in place, it was a bold moment to propose international expansion. At the time, early 2009, the church had a hiring and budget freeze in effect, due to the 2008 economic downturn. But the Pathway model conformed to Commissioner Hal Eyring's prediction about the university's frugality being a source of advantage in turbulent times. As Eyring foretold, relying “more upon inspiration and perspiration to make improvements than upon buildings and equipment” had allowed for “continuous innovation … even in the most difficult times.”10
With board approval, Clark charged the Pathway team to explore the potential for pilots in two new countries, Mexico and Ghana, which were chosen as relatively easy entry points into Latin America and Africa. The team would need to develop online English as a Second Language courses for both Mexico and Ghana, but BYU-Idaho's more international sister institutions in Provo and Hawaii had language instruction experts who offered assistance. In both countries the church institute system, including online communication infrastructure, was strong.
Realizing the Benefits of the New DNA
By 2010, a decade after the announcement that Ricks College would become BYU-Idaho, the university had realized many of the benefits inherent in its new DNA. (For a graphic representation of the evolution of the DNA of Ricks College and BYU-Idaho, see Figure 19.3.) More students were being served: 18,355 versus 10,160.11 The institutional operating cost of serving each student had increased slightly, from $5,771 to $6,155. However, in light of the inherently higher cost of providing a four-year degree, with its specialized course offerings, that could be considered an efficiency victory.12
Figure 19.3 Ricks College / BYU-Idaho's Institutional DNA.
The sources of the university's efficiency could be seen in other statistics. Whereas the student body had grown by 80 percent, the full-time faculty had grown by only 50 percent. In spite of the addition of the 400,000-square-foot auditorium, the university had only 126 square feet of building space per student, compared with 153 in Ricks College days. Efficiency could also be seen in the academic catalog. The number of courses in the catalog had grown, from 879 to 1293, but that 30 percent growth was, like the increase in faculty, small relative to the student body growth. The number of degree programs and academic departments had shrunk. Whereas Ricks College had offered 125 associate's degrees, BYU-Idaho offered only 17 associate's and 77 bachelor's degrees. Continuing the trend of consolidation set by Hal Eyring in the 1970s, in 2010 BYU-Idaho had just 33 academic departments, compared with 38 in 2000. (See Table 19.2.)
Table 19.2 A Comparison of Ricks College and BYU-Idaho, 2000–2010
| 2000 | 2010 | |
| Students | 10,160 | 18,355 |
| Faculty members | 411 | 628 |
| Building square feet per student | 153 | 126 |
| Face-to-face courses | 879 | 1,293 |
| Online courses | 20 | 104 |
| Degree programs | 125 | 94 |
| Academic departments | 38 | 33 |
| Operating cost per student | $5,771 | $6,155 |
In addition to meeting efficiency expectations on its campus, BYU-Idaho had shown the ability to serve students well at a distance. To this point, the Pathway program had proven to be of high fidelity relative to the needs of students in the United States who would not otherwise have had access to college education. The next step was to test BYU-Idaho's ability to serve, in Hal Eyring's words, the many students in the less developed world for whom so little had yet been done.