ADRIAN, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – Faculty and staff at Adrian College are not in full alignment with the school’s prospective plan to use a for-profit company – co-owned by college president Jeffrey Docking – to help boost enrollment and save more tuition dollars for school savings. 

The plan would involve Adrian College and some other colleges to partner with Rize Education who would act as the middleman to provide online classes.  Numerous faculty both current and retired suspect that Rize is the real priority above the college which has led to difficulties in implementing the plan. 

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“Small private liberal arts colleges, generally speaking, are in a world of trouble; the business model is broken,” Docking said. “It does not work anymore. What I say is innovate or die.”

Docking views Rize as a step in his plan to ensure Adrian does not struggle like many other small liberal arts colleges.  This is a continuation of his earlier efforts to bring investments to many of the school’s sports teams, and grow the athletic program.  

Prior to his presidency, the school enrollment was at 840 students in 2005.  Since then, enrollment has grown to 1,900 students  according to college officials.  While in 2011, athletes accounted for 44% of the school population, that percentage has grown to 63% in the 2021 – 2022 school year.  

“We were on the brink of extinction,” said Fritz Detwiler, who retired at the end of last school year after 39 years as a religion and philosophy professor at Adrian. “He turned all that around. In that sense, he saved the college.”

The Rize plan appeals to the classroom side of the college while keeping costs low to the students. 

Schools like Adrian would partner with Rize and offer classes taught by professors on one campus to other member colleges.  The schools pay a flat fee which is less than the total tuition coming in from the students, to Rize, which passes the majority of the fee on to the college teaching the class according to the Detroit Free Press.  Rize would keep a portion of the fee to cover its costs. 

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This plan would allow colleges to add many courses, and even majors to their campus, all which circumvent hiring a whole staff of teachers and years to develop a new curriculum.  

“You can imagine what it would cost this college to start this many majors (17 new majors over the past 18 to 25 months),” Docking said. “You can’t say I’m going to start supply chain management, oh, kids arrive next week, go. You got to write the curriculum, you’ve got to get the classes going and then you’ve got to get the word out there.” 

While Adrian would have to pay some of the tuition money to Rize, it would maintain much of its other profits from room and board revenue from its local students. 

“So it’s expensive, it’s time-intensive. And then the worst thing these days is you don’t know if it’s going to work. It may not draw flies. So now you’ve got all this money into it with tenured professors,” he said. 

Students would have the tremendous opportunity to pursue more classes that might not be traditionally offered at their campus, and the college would save time and money in developing new courses, and yet many faculty members are concerned.  

“I think the priority is to build up Rize as big as possible,” said Michelle Beechler, a former professor at Adrian who resigned in 2021 because she disagreed with the college’s direction. “They are just trying to get by with as few people as possible. Rize makes more money the fewer faculty that are teaching at Adrian.”  She found it hypocritical that she was not allowed to teach online courses at the same time administrators were pushing for Rize’s online classes to be added to the school curriculum.  

Other faculty have been frustrated by staffing cuts while at the same time Rize has been increasingly touted by Docking and the administration. 

Docking has transformed Adrian from a liberal arts college into a career college and an athletic college according to Detwiler. “It is clear that it is a marketing movement to increase, on paper, what the college has to offer. The college is marketing toward job training rather than an education,” he said.