NAIS - New Competitors in a Fast-Changing Educational Landscape — And How Independent Schools Can Confront

I am a proud and satisfied independent school graduate and parent. I’ve also dedicated my 25-plus year career to independent schools, and I now serve independent schools each day by offering advice on enrollment management strategy and assessment needs. Our schools offer best-in-class education, and I’m grateful to continue advocating for our industry’s success.

Yet we cannot rest on our laurels. The realities of the fast-changing educational landscape are upon us. Rising tuitions, a slowing economy, changing consumer expectations, and a nationwide interest in education reform have led to the emergence of alternative types of schools. In several major markets, these innovative schools are beginning to give independent schools a run for their money, literally, as they compete for an already diminishing pool of full-pay students.

It’s time for all independent schools to understand the new landscape, forget the past, and forge forward as the leaders in education. That means your school’s enrollment leader needs to join your administrative team as the source for critical data to help you compete.

At a Glance: Four New Educational Models

Our 2015 SSATB report Sizing Up the Competition offers insight into four notable new educational models. The schools profiled are exploiting technology in intriguing and powerful ways, leveraging private capital in a manner not seen before, and standing on the shoulders of the maturing charter school movement.

What’s intriguing and potentially threatening about these models is that they do not compete by being different — except in price! They compete by going head to head with independent schools in our traditional areas of strength.

Academically Rigorous Schools

Value Proposition: These schools maintain a laser-like focus on academic rigor. They may offer high-stakes exams, teacher bonuses for student performance, and free or subsidized tuitions.
Market Position: Academically rigorous public schools are not new. Many are stable components of the landscape — long-standing, but not expanding. However, others in this category, like the BASIS Independent Schools, are growing fast. BASIS operates 24 schools in the U.S. and recently opened a school in Shenzhen, China, as part of its ambitious plans for international growth.

Deeper Learning Schools

Value Proposition: These schools are designed to deliver on the promise of developing 21st century skills. The most innovative among them completely reinvent the traditional teaching and learning model, including the physical space.
Market Position: More than 500 charter and alternative public schools are loosely associated with the Deeper Learning Network (DLN). The network is a group of schools that prioritizes student inquiry and creation, and emphasizes developing skills over acquiring content knowledge.
These schools vary widely, and in many markets, they do not currently pose significant competition to independent schools. Yet in some areas, they are becoming a genuine alternative for families. An example is High Tech High in California, the family of schools that has become an unofficial flagship of the DLN.

Personalized Learning Schools

Value Proposition: These schools tailor the academic experience to the level of the individual learner.
Market Position: Effective, less-expensive alternatives to independent schools, such as AltSchool, Fusion Schools, and Summit Public Schools, are popping up in places one would expect to find a “disruptive” educational model, including in Silicon Valley and Brooklyn. Parents who want to build an education around their child — not the other way around — are beginning to see great value in this innovative model.

Online Schools

Value Proposition: These schools provide students with a flexible education that can be experienced from anywhere in the world.
Market Position: Online schools have typically represented a partnership between a traditional educational provider (such as a state, district, school, or university) and a for-profit online provider. Yet some online schools are growing in full-time student numbers, with full-tuition-paying students who might have otherwise attended independent schools. An example is Stanford Online High School in California, where enrollment has grown more than 25 percent per year for the past several years.

Strategies for Confronting the Competition

In Sizing Up the Competition, we offer several specific strategies for managing the rising competition from new educational models.

Understand your competition; understand yourself. Take the time to study your market carefully. You can find some of the richest data by looking at the schools with whom you overlap. Analyze those overlaps (in admission score reports and applications) to find patterns and trends. Consider what programs at your institution are growing — and why. Conduct exit or decliner interviews with families transferring or choosing to enroll elsewhere, examining their motivation and the value afforded by the alternatives.

Know, strengthen, and articulate your value proposition. What exactly do you offer your families, and how is that better than what anyone else is able to offer? More than knowing this benefit, and always deepening it, you must also be able to prove it and communicate it effectively.

Understand your customer and remove all barriers. The need to clearly define and articulate your school’s educational model and expected outcomes is critical. In your admissions process, are you taking ample time to market your school’s academics? Do you provide opportunities to connect students with faculty? Participation in a common application is an important and strategic choice to increase application volume — and signals to families that your school values applicants over application forms.

Choose whether to outflank or co-opt. After examining and identifying particular attributes of a competing school, you have two obvious alternatives. In some cases, the best course is to attend to, deepen, and communicate your differences. In others, it’s smart to join competitors in their programs.

Emphasize character. While many of the emerging models are going head to head with your independent school in your traditional areas of strength — providing academic rigor and delivering innovative approaches to teaching and learning — one area these new schools do not stress is developing character. Yet as we know, independent schools have long highlighted nurturing a child’s moral and ethical character as a key driver in the campus communities they create. Use this as a differentiator and move it to the front of marketing messages.

Consider flexible scheduling. If the trend continues, families will be putting their child’s talents and passions at the center of their day, and then looking only to fill in their other needs around that pursuit. Traditional schools may need to explore how to adapt to fit these trends so the focus is on student passions, and not school schedules.

Assess your ability to individualize learning and deeply differentiate. Technology is creating accessible and affordable opportunities to implement highly targeted instruction for students, each in their particular zone of proximal development. But this can only happen school-wide with strong leadership and the precise allocation of resources for hardware, software, and — most of all — professional development.

Bring design thinking from the classroom to the administrative table. The new school models recognize that design thinking belongs in the board room — and in the offices of the head, admission, and business — just as much as it does in the innovation lab space.

These schools focus on the user experience of students, parents, and teachers by:

rapidly deploying the most viable product rather than delaying it until it’s perfect;
surveying users not annually, but monthly or quarterly;
viewing negative feedback as empowering, not demoralizing;
timing themselves on how long it takes to implement improvements based on user feedback; and
always trying to speed up their iterative process.

Realize economies of scale. Independent schools pride themselves on their autonomy. But seeking ways to cooperate and collaborate, while still delivering individual value, will be critical. How can a purchasing consortia or a shared administrative team help a regional group of schools save money and create efficiency?

Focus on financial sustainability by anticipating a more competitive future. Prepare by ensuring your school’s house is in order financially as much as possible so you can be more nimble in the future.

Experiment and innovate constantly. As competitors emerge and rise, ultimately you can only match and exceed their excellence by continually improving.

To realize success, your school leadership must undertake these strategies in conjunction with your enrollment team. Your enrollment leaders’ monthly market analysis and tracking will guide the board as it engages in generative discussion. In the evolving landscape, your enrollment leader and enrollment team should be front and center to help develop strategies to combat, circumvent, or even collaborate with these new forces.

A Time for Strategic Action

Our independent school community is extraordinarily diverse and contains many pockets of strength. While some schools will be unaffected by these new alternative schools, for others, the potential for disruption is real — and deserves careful attention and strategic thinking about enrollment.

Every challenge brings opportunity. Let’s commit to understanding and embracing the new competition, strengthening our value proposition, making positive adjustments to how we run our schools, and continuing to innovate and improve on the education we offer our students.

The full report, Sizing Up the Competition, is available at www.admission.org/competition.