Jeff Docking, president of Adrian College, said a partnership with Rize Education has reaped benefits. But critics worry about his role as co-founder of Rize and the potential for conflict. (Adrian College/Facebook)
Adrian College president Jeff Docking has some innovative ideas for higher education leaders battling enrollment pressures and market forces. Among them: Rize Education, a for-profit course-sharing company that Docking co-founded and incubated on Adrian’s campus outside Detroit, which develops and teaches online courses through its platform.
Rize was founded in 2019, and Adrian began using the platform the following year. That allowed the college to build out new majors, which in turn brought in students and revenue. Docking told Inside Higher Ed such efforts are a necessary innovation for higher education, offering strapped institutions an affordable way to add courses of study and flexible online programs in an effort to recruit students.
His dual capacity as president of Adrian and co-owner of Rize Education, however, has raised questions about a potential conflict of interest as use of the platform grows. Some faculty members fear Rize’s creep into the college’s general education courses and worry that it poses a threat to their jobs; Docking denies any possibility of a conflict of interest. Most Popular
The Docking Experiments
To understand Adrian College today, it helps to look back to 2005, when Docking became president of an institution that he described as struggling and rudderless at that time. Federal data show Adrian enrolled nearly 1,200 students in 2001, but that number had dwindled to fewer than 1,000 by the time Docking arrived.
“In 2005, we got down to about 840 students; we were hemorrhaging money at the time—about $1 to $3 million a year with no real plan to grow enrollment and a lot of deferred maintenance,” Docking said .
The new president, who had previously served as an administrator at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, quickly developed a plan that involved investing heavily in athletics to attract students. Docking told Adrian’s Board of Trustees his proposal would require an investment of $30 million; he asked the college to borrow $15 million and promised to raise the rest.
“I put together a model to grow enrollment quickly, and we did. We basically doubled in enrollment over five to six years, essentially through leveraging co-curricular activities,” he said.
A scan of Adrian’s athletics website reveals a multitude of sports offerings, including traditional programs like football and basketball as well as less common—but cheaper—sports such as cornhole and synchronized figure skating, plus emerging programs in fields like esports.
Some faculty members said the experiment generated excitement and boosted revenue, though both have fallen off in recent years.
“That was a good model. It worked. He just ran out of inexpensive sports. Then he kept trying and brought in a few expensive sports. And I think that maybe didn’t work so well. He did everything he could with that and I think maybe went a little too far, but it worked, at least initially,” said one faculty member who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation by Docking.
(Docking disputes the notion that he has or would retaliate against his critics on campus. The anonymous professor said the president has done exactly that through a past layoff attempt that was only reversed after alumni pressured the university to keep threatened positions in the humanities.)
New sports programs weren’t the only Docking innovation to bolster Adrian. Data available on the website show that unlike most liberal arts colleges, Adrian’s enrollment has boomed, increasing from under 1,000 students in 2005 to roughly 1,900 today. Docking credits that growth in large part to the role Rize Education has played in allowing the college to add majors and recruit students.
Over the last two years, Adrian has added a total of 17 programs through Rize—a mix of majors, minors and certificates.
“The way Rize works at Adrian College is we offer certain majors that we don’t offer exclusively in-house, for example, supply chain management,” explained Tony Coumoundouros, an Adrian faculty member who was serving as faculty president when the college first partnered with Rize Education. “Students who want to major in supply chain management take the bulk of their business courses in-house, face-to-face at Adrian College, and then they take online courses that are supply chain management–specific from an institution that is in the Rize group.”
Those additional programs have boosted student recruiting and ultimately the bottom line.
“We have about 110 students here at the college now that we wouldn’t have gotten without these new majors. That translates to […]
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