Yeah, That's A Stupid Question

"Why do we need a school or college of professional & continuing studies?" It's a question that visionless senior academic leaders are asking (yes, people in senior positions are actually asking this) as they flounder through the existential enrollment and budget crises battering private universities.

Traditional-age enrollment has been shrinking for years and the "enrollment cliff" has arrived. Mid-tier tuition-dependent privates that rely entirely on 18-year-old freshmen are competing for a shrinking pool of students against better-resourced flagships and lower-cost regional options. Expanding the pool of students and learners is what these privates should be doing, and this is exactly what schools and colleges of professional & continuing studies are built to do. These are the units creating low-cost, high-demand entry points into the university for working adults, career-changers, veterans, and students pursuing stackable credentials.

The truth is that asking the question in 2026 signals a leader who is looking at their institution's enrollment projections and budget deficits, and finding themselves immobilized by a rigor mortis-like inability to lead during crisis. Falling back on elitist tropes and uninspiring disciplinary territorialism demonstrates a striking lack of vision and woeful ignorance of the modern learner. But more troubling to me (and the universities at which the question is being asked) is that underneath the query is a boorish assumption that a school or college of professional & continuing studies isn't a "real" college. In the visionless leader's outdated mental hierarchy, colleges earn legitimacy through research output, doctoral programs, and faculty lines dedicated to scholarship. A unit built around working adults, alternative career-relevant credentials, and professional market-sensitive degrees doesn't fit that mold, so it gets foolishly filed under "not academic" rather than "differently academic."

This myopic and unfortunate framing has and continues to do real damage to the universities that allow it to persist. It ignores that schools and colleges of professional & continuing studies aren't designed or missioned to replicate a research school; they solve the more challenging problems of access, flexibility, and relevance for the learners traditional schools can't serve. Judging schools and colleges of professional & continuing studies by a research-intensive yardstick is utterly inane and disastrously disappointing.

And then, of course, there's the tiresome but significantly detrimental territorial instinct at play behind the question. This is the dim and senseless idea that professional degree programs rightfully belong to traditional schools and colleges, and that schools and colleges of professional & continuing studies offering these credentials are encroaching on someone else's turf. The ignorance embedded in this claim is shocking. Again, the traditional schools with fixed calendars, residential expectations, and research-driven faculty incentives are structurally unable to serve learners who need accessible, flexible and accelerated alternative credentials and market-applicable degrees. When a school or college of professional & continuing studies builds a professional master's or non-credit alternative credential for non-traditional students, it's serving a market segment that the School of Aspirational Networking was never designed to reach.

Mid-tier tuition-dependent private universities can't afford leadership that suddenly treat their schools and colleges of professional & continuing studies as unnecessary or irrelevant because they're now scrambling to fund a hack back-office administrative unit, led by consultants and unimaginative transactional robots, to market the university's online programs with trite and stale (and comically expensive) digital ads. These are the universities that no longer have the luxury of asking stupid questions and accepting uninformed answers. Be bold. Be smart. Suspend your elitist and biased opinions of professional & continuing education and do the better thing.