Pulling the Goalie Worked

A few months ago, I wrote admiringly of the president of Bloomfield College, Marcheta Evans, for doing something I had never seen a college president do. Facing severe financial and enrollment issues at her small private college, she went public with a distress signal. Instead of the usual playbook of public denial and private panic, she was up-front about the college’s need for help.

I compared it to the move that losing hockey teams sometimes pull near the end of games—they’ll pull the goalie and replace them with another player on offense in hopes of mounting a comeback. The idea is that losing by two or three is really no worse than losing by one, but an increased chance of scoring makes losing less likely. It’s no way to play an entire game, obviously, but in certain circumstances it can make sense.

Apparently, Bloomfield’s version of pulling the goalie worked. On Wednesday it publicly announced an emerging partnership with nearby Montclair State University. Montclair will make up financial losses enough to allow Bloomfield to remain open for academic year 2022–23, and over time, they expect to merge. Bloomfield gets to stay alive, albeit in a different form, and Montclair gets a new campus.

To be clear, although this is in my state, I have no inside information on it. Folks who do may have a different impression. My interest is more in the effect of making a distress signal public.

My surmise—and again, that’s all it is—is that going public with a distress signal made it much easier for merger talks to happen. Having done away with the need for cover stories or deniability, they could spend the limited time they had on the urgent business at hand.

It’s hard to convey just how unusual the public distress signal is.

Most of the time, colleges in deep financial trouble fear that fact getting out, because it could easily lead to a death spiral. If prospective students hear that a college may not exist in a year, they’re less likely to show up; suddenly, the enrollment (and tuition) crisis is worse. Donors may shy away for fear of throwing good money after bad. Key employees may leave, and attracting good new ones to replace them would be an uphill battle. Even vendor relationships could get tricky if vendors think they might not get paid. A series of individually rational decisions could cascade in ways that make a bad ending unavoidable.

I’m guessing that President Evans saw the writing on the wall and realized that the usual playbook of secrecy until the bitter end wouldn’t help. So she stopped playing defense—pulled the goalie—and went for the score. It looks like she got it.

I’m impressed.

Kudos to Bloomfield—and Montclair State, too—for showing the rest of us that there’s an alternative to the usual playbook. Bloomfield’s students will have a reliable way to complete their degrees, and Montclair will get new land, buildings and students. I don’t know about employees, though if the alternative was complete collapse of the college, this will certainly be better than that.

I hope college leaders around the country take note. Well done, President Evans!