Nothing Fails like Success: Managing Growth in a Highly Developed Honors Program

INTRODUCTION "Nothing fails like success," economist Kenneth Boulding observed decades ago. He went on to explain that we only learn from failure; if a particular pattern of behavior or policy seems to be working we continue it until, of course, it fails. Then we might learn something. The law of diminishing marginal utility echoes Boulding's aphorism. What starts out as a source of pleasure yields diminishing utility until it reaches zero or even sinks to a negative return. I recall that my introductory economics instructor used the example of how the pleasure yielded by the first in a series of cold beers on a hot day ultimately becomes a nausea-inducing, coma-provoking calamity. I expect the beer example is still widely used in introductory economics classes. This line of somewhat counter-intuitive thinking corrects the conventional wisdom that you cannot have too much of a good thing (or you can't be too rich or too thin). Unfortunately, for successful honors programs and colleges, the conventional wisdom often seems to guide the policy making of university leadership when it comes to determining the appropriate size of a college or program. After all, administrators seem to think, if a program is perking along with 500 students, it will be twice as good with a 1000. Seldom will mandated growth be that starkly justified, though as the decision moves up the institutional hierarchy from dean to provost to president to trustees, it often seems to approach such simple idiocy. Honors directors and deans, laboring closer to the front lines, better recognize the complexity and challenges of managing enrollment growth. Indeed, each added student increases marginal costs in both quantitative and qualitative senses. Anticipating the full costs of growth is difficult; persuading the central administration to address them often approaches impossibility. Moreover, my personal experience leading the South Carolina Honors College for eleven years and overseeing an increase in size from fewer than 800 to 1200 students taught me that, no matter how carefully the growth process is managed and supported, honors remains more vulnerable to events beyond its control than most of the major colleges in a university. To paraphrase another aphorism from economics, when a college of arts and sciences catches a cold, honors goes on life support. Managing growth also presumes university leaders possess some notion of an appropriate size and are not simply "biggering" for the sake of "biggering." Determining appropriate size, though, reminds me of the small boy who asked his father why he was so tall. His father replied, "So my feet can reach the ground." An honors program/college should be no larger than what can be securely grounded in the university's resources and culture. THE PRESSURES TO GROW The pressure to increase the size of a successful program or college comes from a number of often reinforcing directions, and we cannot dismiss any of these motives as frivolous. All deserve careful consideration, not peremptory dismissal. The interrelated growth imperatives include: 1. Increasing demand. Those of us in honors leadership have a dirty little secret--we like to turn away qualified students. Having more, even many more, qualified applicants than we can accommodate validates the prestige and visibility of our program. High-achieving honors programs and colleges, like the wider institutions of which they are a part, report with pride indexes of selectivity and yield. After all, we commonly compare ourselves to fine liberal arts colleges, and they accept only a portion of their qualified applicants. Moreover, once we reach the point where we turn down applicants with credentials that were competitive in the recent past, we benefit from what I term "the reverse Groucho Marx effect:" People want to be in a club that won't have them. When the South Carolina Honors College started declining applicants who had been admitted to Furman, Emory, or Davidson, we moved from being a "fall-back" school to being among the top choices of our applicants. …