New Collaborative Research Leads to Solutions for Liberal Arts Colleges During Covid-19

A research on the sustainability in the scope of higher education led by Dr. Daryl D. Green, Dr. George Taylor III, and Mrs Violet Ford has opened many windows of opportunities. The study is known as ‘Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Mindset In Today’s Small Liberal Colleges & Universities’ outlines the importance of restructuration in colleges and universities with an entrepreneurial mindset for long-term sustainability.
The coronavirus situation has led to disruptive changes in the academic workflow of students in universities and colleges. With an ongoing volatile market, higher education has been impacted immensely with a direct connotation about underachieving and unprepared pass outs from these educational institutes. This has also propagated stark declining numbers in college enrolments and projections and surveys across the United States point at as much as 450,000 drops in students in years beyond 2025. Previous research, undertaken by Harvard professor, DR. Clayton Christensen also states that in the scope of organizational sustainability in educational institutes, disruptive changes and innovation will lead to 50% of 4,000 colleges and universities in the country to go bankrupt in the next 10 to 15 years.

The outcome of these regressive changes has hit independent liberal art colleges the most. Traditional institutes are also at risk of getting negatively impacted by disruptive change. This brings about uncertainty and unpredictability in various verticals of the market, innovation, industry, and more. “Cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset will infuse innovative thinking to difficult problems and provide new revenue streams to universities that utilize student tuition as the principle income for these academic institutions,” Dr. Green notes. Fellow research scholar, Mrs. Ford adds, “At the heart of entrepreneurship is pursuing opportunities with a vision. Traditional organizations will keep creativity within the confines of the classroom; whereas, entrepreneurial driven educational organizations will cultivate and develop creativity throughout an educational system. Thus, the presence of institutional entrepreneurial practice is needed to both create business models and actively participate in implementing changes that can drive transformational change.”

The study leads to a fundamental understanding of the importance of entrepreneurial objectives among students.  Dr. Taylor further suggests, “Early considerations of the entrepreneurial mindset within liberal art colleges show that liberal arts students were encouraged to develop characteristics fundamental to entrepreneurial thinking….Although the entrepreneurial mindset is receiving increased attention that encourages students to think in new, innovative ways while improving their life skills, there is little evidence to support its widespread consideration and implementation at a significant level within traditional liberal arts colleges.”  Ford, Green, and Taylor hope that the current paradigm among academic institutions will change.  The collective effort by the scholars will further inculcate ideas of founding a more sustainable education system that is flexible and progressive.
To view this research, please visit   https://tinyurl.com/y3wydycz
For more information about the researchers, you may contact Dr. Green at  daryl.green@okbu.edu or 405-585-4414