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President Bill Beardsley, PhD, remembers a student coming to his office at Bangor’s Husson College, looking for help. The young man was the first in his family to attend college, thanks to a gift from a grandparent who wanted to keep him from joining the Army. Now, though, money was tight, and the student was worried he wouldn’t be able to keep coming to school.
He was a good student—high SAT scores, decent grades—who wanted to return home with a career, marry his high school sweetheart, and build a house on a hill outside town. Beardsley, now in his 21st year as Husson’s CEO, offered to help in several ways, including a small loan. In the end, the young man figured out a way to make it all work, and he’s back on track, headed toward a degree, and maybe that house and family. "Those are the kind of kids that a lot of us are here for,” Beardsley says. “Now, every college has those stories, but those are the kids we prize. His SAT scores were as good as any kid that’s going to Bowdoin, Bates, and Colby. He’s right up there. But he belongs at Husson. He wants a career. He wants a career, right here. We’re teaching him how to do just that.
“That type of student,” Beardsley adds, “is what makes us tick.”
Husson is ticking away, growing at a time when many schools are struggling in a tough economy, against shrinking demographics. Beardsley came to Husson in 1987, back when getting 250 incoming freshmen to a school known for nursing and accounting was a major accomplishment. This year, the school will matriculate 900 students, more, Beardsley says, than any private college in northern New England, save Dartmouth.
The Meeting House, a $15 million, 55,000-square-foot facility, is rising in the heart of the campus, with a state-of-the-art 500-seat theater, academic facilities, and an alumni center. That comes just three years after the opening of O’Donnell Commons, a 40,000-square-foot laboratory and academic building centered around a 100-seat lecture hall.
The school will be renamed Husson University in October, a major stride for a once-small college that now offers graduate programs in business, education, criminal justice, and a growing roster of health care-related professions. Husson has branched out to include campuses in Presque Isle and South Portland, the Boat School in Eastport, and Unobskey College in Calais. It supports the state’s 30,000 family-owned businesses with its Richard E. Dyke Center for Family Business. New England School of Communications (NESCOM) and Bangor Theological Seminary, a separate entity, also call the Husson campus home. Next up is a pharmacy school, and, beyond that, a law school.
Not all Husson students have stories like that one young man, but many do.
“We have kids from all over, from every walk of life, but we truly prize Maine kids,” Beardsley says. “We don’t quota them. We don’t put up with them. We don’t do it by default because we’re in Maine. We seek them out. We reach out to them, in particular—the diamonds in the rough, the kids that have tremendous talent but are the first generation to go to college, with limited resources. So we have arguably the lowest private-college tuition in New England, about $12,000. We’re capturing market share as a result of that.
“We could cut back,” he adds. “We could raise our tuition and get fewer students, and get more money. But we wouldn’t get the guy I just described.”
Bangor Metro spoke to Beardsley about the school’s growth, its role in the region’s economic development, the bond between Husson and this part of Maine, and the businesslike way he and Husson’s leadership team run the school.
Tell me about the school’s recent growth.
We were in the right place at the right time. It’s pretty amazing. We chugged along at 900 to 1,000 traditional undergraduates throughout the 1990s; then things really took off after 2000. This year, Husson and NESCOM (the New England School of Communications) will have about 2,300 traditional undergraduates and a record 3,000 students overall. Our traditional business and health programs have crept upwards but we have really taken off in such areas as criminal justice, psychology, teacher education, communications, and now chemistry.
How does physical expansion factor into Husson’s “growth”?
We’ve added the O’Donnell Commons to accommodate health professions and education. We are building a wing of the new Meeting House to accommodate our expanding liberal arts programs and alumni center. Our Gracie Theater will be completed in 2009. We added the Furman Student Center, fields for soccer, softball, and baseball, plus the Swan Fitness Center. Major renovations, new laboratories, and technology are less conspicuous. Most recently we received a gift of a small outreach center in Calais that we call Unobskey College, and the Boat School. There is talk about a field house. The campus is looking pretty collegial, and we’re reaching out across the region, too.
What does the upcoming name change to Husson University signify?
Husson will be basically the same. We are recognizing that “university” status has been creeping up on us since about 1990. Dartmouth recently looked at the concept of college vs. university. They suggested that a university tends to offer multiple degrees, have multiple schools and campuses, have graduate programs, and so on. Husson has many but not all of the Dartmouth criteria. On the other hand, we pride ourselves in being a teaching institution, a personal place, rather than having a focus on research and public service and hordes of students.
What does Husson and its growth mean to the area’s economy?
We have 2,500 students and 200 faculty and staff, studying and working in greater Bangor. With an economic multiplier of 2.5:1, our $30 million annual budget magnifies into a $75 million impact each year. And we don’t drag on the system, because we don’t get direct state appropriations. We do get federal funds. So the multiplier effect for us is higher than for a public institution.
You’ve said before that Husson wants to be an economic driver for the region. How so?
I think we do that in a lot of ways. An educated labor force is critical to attracting private capital, but it goes beyond that. We are providing primary care providers in rural areas in the form of nurse practi-tioners. We’re investing Downeast, in Eastport and Calais. Above all else, we are outspoken champions for the private sector, regulatory and tax reform, and private investment. Essentially, part of it is the training that we do and the graduates we produce, part of it is our philosophy, and part of it is reaching out where we think we can help.
How does the school support the business community?
We are turning out people. If you go to the transportation industry in Bangor, think of the names: Quirk, Darling, Varney, Dysart’s, Cyr; Tom Thornton at Freightliner of Maine. They’re all Husson grads. You go to Cross Insurance: Woodrow and Brent Cross are graduates. You get sick and you go to the hospital: the president of Eastern Maine Medical Center, Debbie Johnson, Husson graduate. We’re in the woodwork. You go Downeast and go to [Machias Savings] bank [president and CEO] Ed Hennessey: Husson graduate. Washington County Community College, the president, Bill Cassidy: Husson graduate. We’re turning out people. Governor’s restaurants, Randy Wadleigh, Husson graduate. Any sector, and it’s not just Bangor. You go down to Linnehans [auto sales and other businesses], and Heather Linnehan is a Husson graduate. Prentiss and Carlisle, one of the largest timber producers in the state, Don White is the president, a Husson graduate. He gets his lumber processed up at Pleasant River Lumber in Dover-Foxcroft. Luke Brochu is the president, also a Husson graduate. We are the entrepreneurs, the leaders. And we’re training people so that they stay here and work here. Students do go away, but we’re in the woodwork.
The school has an entrepreneurial reputation, both in terms of how it’s run and the graduates it turns out. Is that a part of the economic development mission, too?
It is. Our whole approach to jobs is to really calibrate programs to where the market is. You don’t see us going into things where there’s really no demand in Maine. For example, our whole law school idea was to keep it very small because we didn’t want to exceed the market. We probably will end up building it a little bit bigger than we originally planned to do some of the things the [Maine Supreme] Court wants us to do. Our preference was to keep it just the right size so we’d meet the market demand that’s local and not go out and compete with other law schools around the country. That’s kind of our approach to a lot of things that we do.
Is Husson’s growth unique these days?
We’ve used growth to strengthen our finances rather than high tuition. We’re very similar to York College in Pennsylvania. They have a lower tuition than Penn State, yet they play sports with Swarthmore and Johns Hopkins. They’ve taken a similar strategy. The difference is they have 20 million people within a three-hour drive and we have one million. Another school that is urban is Quinnipiac. They’re near New York City, so they can do a lot of things, but they’ve done something similar to us. There are other schools, but they’re bigger, they’re more urbane. They’ve built bigger endowments. We have no big endowment. We work to build in surpluses that we can funnel back in, so we have almost no long-term debt. So, how can Husson compete? It’s a lot less tuition, yet has comparable programs.
How do you do it?
You can see it around campus. We’re very plain. Every bed is full. Every classroom. We have no spare capacity. When we build the Meeting House, it will be full this fall. When you run anything at full capacity, you can charge less. We decided not to build an extra dorm this year. You call up Acadia University in Nova Scotia, they’ve got 500 extra beds. There are public colleges around here I won’t name that have extra beds. I’m not popular here because it’s hard to run at full capacity, but we’re able to keep tuition down—and every penny we earn goes right back into the school. We don’t have fancy stuff. The new building is kind of glitzy, but if you look. . . we don’t have many annual flowers; we have perennials because we don’t have enough people out there to weed the gardens. Everybody else is raising tuition and discounting for low-income kids. We keep our tuition down for everybody.
How do you make decisions as to whether to add on?
Our trustees have not said, “We want you to be a certain size.” What they basically say is, if it leads to a professional career in Maine, if it doesn’t exceed your bandwidth of risk, go for it. So we do lots of relatively small programs, where one of them may bomb out, but the others will get you through. With new programs, we try to keep operating costs below 10% of our operating budget.
Have there been growing pains?
Last year, we grew about 15% and the stress lines began to appear, so we slowed down. But that was a learning experience for us and we were going at warp speed. This year we’re growing but we’re not quite as fast.
How does the school connect so well with this place, and these people?
I don’t want to be trite. It means a lot to me. I’ll give you an example: We’re all worried about the Canada lynx. We figured out that the Canada lynx is losing its food stock, which is the snowshoe hare. Then, we looked at what happened to the snowshoe hare. It’s disappeared because there’s no undergrowth in the forest anymore, no briar patches. Why? With selective harvesting, we’d created a solid canopy overhead. The solution is to do some clear-cutting. That’s connecting the dots. Husson connects the dots. Others will specialize. They do niches. We have people that are both very interested in the environment and in the economy. So we’d be the multiple-use forest resource managers. That’s how we would look at it. We look at the vitality of small towns and things like that, and we go back and work in the small towns. We go out and look at people’s health needs in rural areas, and they’re underserved. And we say, well, a doctor can’t earn enough here, but a nurse practitioner can, so we turn out nurse practitioners. It’s that kind of connecting the dots that Husson’s been very good at.
What’s next for Husson?
We are working hard to get our final approvals for a school of pharmacy. We are looking at niches in the vocational technical training area. We are adding lacrosse and other sports that will attract students from away. But basically we are faced with a weak economy and weakening demographics for college-aged kids and we simply need to help create a rising economic tide for the region if we want to prosper. We are constantly reviewing labor statistics, studying what other colleges offer, trying to find areas of unmet need, and then, entrepreneurial as we are, we move quickly and strategically. We’ll keep doing that.
He was a good student—high SAT scores, decent grades—who wanted to return home with a career, marry his high school sweetheart, and build a house on a hill outside town. Beardsley, now in his 21st year as Husson’s CEO, offered to help in several ways, including a small loan. In the end, the young man figured out a way to make it all work, and he’s back on track, headed toward a degree, and maybe that house and family. "Those are the kind of kids that a lot of us are here for,” Beardsley says. “Now, every college has those stories, but those are the kids we prize. His SAT scores were as good as any kid that’s going to Bowdoin, Bates, and Colby. He’s right up there. But he belongs at Husson. He wants a career. He wants a career, right here. We’re teaching him how to do just that.
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“That type of student,” Beardsley adds, “is what makes us tick.”
Husson is ticking away, growing at a time when many schools are struggling in a tough economy, against shrinking demographics. Beardsley came to Husson in 1987, back when getting 250 incoming freshmen to a school known for nursing and accounting was a major accomplishment. This year, the school will matriculate 900 students, more, Beardsley says, than any private college in northern New England, save Dartmouth.
The Meeting House, a $15 million, 55,000-square-foot facility, is rising in the heart of the campus, with a state-of-the-art 500-seat theater, academic facilities, and an alumni center. That comes just three years after the opening of O’Donnell Commons, a 40,000-square-foot laboratory and academic building centered around a 100-seat lecture hall.
The school will be renamed Husson University in October, a major stride for a once-small college that now offers graduate programs in business, education, criminal justice, and a growing roster of health care-related professions. Husson has branched out to include campuses in Presque Isle and South Portland, the Boat School in Eastport, and Unobskey College in Calais. It supports the state’s 30,000 family-owned businesses with its Richard E. Dyke Center for Family Business. New England School of Communications (NESCOM) and Bangor Theological Seminary, a separate entity, also call the Husson campus home. Next up is a pharmacy school, and, beyond that, a law school.
Not all Husson students have stories like that one young man, but many do.
“We have kids from all over, from every walk of life, but we truly prize Maine kids,” Beardsley says. “We don’t quota them. We don’t put up with them. We don’t do it by default because we’re in Maine. We seek them out. We reach out to them, in particular—the diamonds in the rough, the kids that have tremendous talent but are the first generation to go to college, with limited resources. So we have arguably the lowest private-college tuition in New England, about $12,000. We’re capturing market share as a result of that.
“We could cut back,” he adds. “We could raise our tuition and get fewer students, and get more money. But we wouldn’t get the guy I just described.”
Bangor Metro spoke to Beardsley about the school’s growth, its role in the region’s economic development, the bond between Husson and this part of Maine, and the businesslike way he and Husson’s leadership team run the school.
Tell me about the school’s recent growth.
We were in the right place at the right time. It’s pretty amazing. We chugged along at 900 to 1,000 traditional undergraduates throughout the 1990s; then things really took off after 2000. This year, Husson and NESCOM (the New England School of Communications) will have about 2,300 traditional undergraduates and a record 3,000 students overall. Our traditional business and health programs have crept upwards but we have really taken off in such areas as criminal justice, psychology, teacher education, communications, and now chemistry.
How does physical expansion factor into Husson’s “growth”?
We’ve added the O’Donnell Commons to accommodate health professions and education. We are building a wing of the new Meeting House to accommodate our expanding liberal arts programs and alumni center. Our Gracie Theater will be completed in 2009. We added the Furman Student Center, fields for soccer, softball, and baseball, plus the Swan Fitness Center. Major renovations, new laboratories, and technology are less conspicuous. Most recently we received a gift of a small outreach center in Calais that we call Unobskey College, and the Boat School. There is talk about a field house. The campus is looking pretty collegial, and we’re reaching out across the region, too.
What does the upcoming name change to Husson University signify?
Husson will be basically the same. We are recognizing that “university” status has been creeping up on us since about 1990. Dartmouth recently looked at the concept of college vs. university. They suggested that a university tends to offer multiple degrees, have multiple schools and campuses, have graduate programs, and so on. Husson has many but not all of the Dartmouth criteria. On the other hand, we pride ourselves in being a teaching institution, a personal place, rather than having a focus on research and public service and hordes of students.
What does Husson and its growth mean to the area’s economy?
We have 2,500 students and 200 faculty and staff, studying and working in greater Bangor. With an economic multiplier of 2.5:1, our $30 million annual budget magnifies into a $75 million impact each year. And we don’t drag on the system, because we don’t get direct state appropriations. We do get federal funds. So the multiplier effect for us is higher than for a public institution.
You’ve said before that Husson wants to be an economic driver for the region. How so?
I think we do that in a lot of ways. An educated labor force is critical to attracting private capital, but it goes beyond that. We are providing primary care providers in rural areas in the form of nurse practi-tioners. We’re investing Downeast, in Eastport and Calais. Above all else, we are outspoken champions for the private sector, regulatory and tax reform, and private investment. Essentially, part of it is the training that we do and the graduates we produce, part of it is our philosophy, and part of it is reaching out where we think we can help.
How does the school support the business community?
We are turning out people. If you go to the transportation industry in Bangor, think of the names: Quirk, Darling, Varney, Dysart’s, Cyr; Tom Thornton at Freightliner of Maine. They’re all Husson grads. You go to Cross Insurance: Woodrow and Brent Cross are graduates. You get sick and you go to the hospital: the president of Eastern Maine Medical Center, Debbie Johnson, Husson graduate. We’re in the woodwork. You go Downeast and go to [Machias Savings] bank [president and CEO] Ed Hennessey: Husson graduate. Washington County Community College, the president, Bill Cassidy: Husson graduate. We’re turning out people. Governor’s restaurants, Randy Wadleigh, Husson graduate. Any sector, and it’s not just Bangor. You go down to Linnehans [auto sales and other businesses], and Heather Linnehan is a Husson graduate. Prentiss and Carlisle, one of the largest timber producers in the state, Don White is the president, a Husson graduate. He gets his lumber processed up at Pleasant River Lumber in Dover-Foxcroft. Luke Brochu is the president, also a Husson graduate. We are the entrepreneurs, the leaders. And we’re training people so that they stay here and work here. Students do go away, but we’re in the woodwork.
The school has an entrepreneurial reputation, both in terms of how it’s run and the graduates it turns out. Is that a part of the economic development mission, too?
It is. Our whole approach to jobs is to really calibrate programs to where the market is. You don’t see us going into things where there’s really no demand in Maine. For example, our whole law school idea was to keep it very small because we didn’t want to exceed the market. We probably will end up building it a little bit bigger than we originally planned to do some of the things the [Maine Supreme] Court wants us to do. Our preference was to keep it just the right size so we’d meet the market demand that’s local and not go out and compete with other law schools around the country. That’s kind of our approach to a lot of things that we do.
Is Husson’s growth unique these days?
We’ve used growth to strengthen our finances rather than high tuition. We’re very similar to York College in Pennsylvania. They have a lower tuition than Penn State, yet they play sports with Swarthmore and Johns Hopkins. They’ve taken a similar strategy. The difference is they have 20 million people within a three-hour drive and we have one million. Another school that is urban is Quinnipiac. They’re near New York City, so they can do a lot of things, but they’ve done something similar to us. There are other schools, but they’re bigger, they’re more urbane. They’ve built bigger endowments. We have no big endowment. We work to build in surpluses that we can funnel back in, so we have almost no long-term debt. So, how can Husson compete? It’s a lot less tuition, yet has comparable programs.
How do you do it?
You can see it around campus. We’re very plain. Every bed is full. Every classroom. We have no spare capacity. When we build the Meeting House, it will be full this fall. When you run anything at full capacity, you can charge less. We decided not to build an extra dorm this year. You call up Acadia University in Nova Scotia, they’ve got 500 extra beds. There are public colleges around here I won’t name that have extra beds. I’m not popular here because it’s hard to run at full capacity, but we’re able to keep tuition down—and every penny we earn goes right back into the school. We don’t have fancy stuff. The new building is kind of glitzy, but if you look. . . we don’t have many annual flowers; we have perennials because we don’t have enough people out there to weed the gardens. Everybody else is raising tuition and discounting for low-income kids. We keep our tuition down for everybody.
How do you make decisions as to whether to add on?
Our trustees have not said, “We want you to be a certain size.” What they basically say is, if it leads to a professional career in Maine, if it doesn’t exceed your bandwidth of risk, go for it. So we do lots of relatively small programs, where one of them may bomb out, but the others will get you through. With new programs, we try to keep operating costs below 10% of our operating budget.
Have there been growing pains?
Last year, we grew about 15% and the stress lines began to appear, so we slowed down. But that was a learning experience for us and we were going at warp speed. This year we’re growing but we’re not quite as fast.
How does the school connect so well with this place, and these people?
I don’t want to be trite. It means a lot to me. I’ll give you an example: We’re all worried about the Canada lynx. We figured out that the Canada lynx is losing its food stock, which is the snowshoe hare. Then, we looked at what happened to the snowshoe hare. It’s disappeared because there’s no undergrowth in the forest anymore, no briar patches. Why? With selective harvesting, we’d created a solid canopy overhead. The solution is to do some clear-cutting. That’s connecting the dots. Husson connects the dots. Others will specialize. They do niches. We have people that are both very interested in the environment and in the economy. So we’d be the multiple-use forest resource managers. That’s how we would look at it. We look at the vitality of small towns and things like that, and we go back and work in the small towns. We go out and look at people’s health needs in rural areas, and they’re underserved. And we say, well, a doctor can’t earn enough here, but a nurse practitioner can, so we turn out nurse practitioners. It’s that kind of connecting the dots that Husson’s been very good at.
What’s next for Husson?
We are working hard to get our final approvals for a school of pharmacy. We are looking at niches in the vocational technical training area. We are adding lacrosse and other sports that will attract students from away. But basically we are faced with a weak economy and weakening demographics for college-aged kids and we simply need to help create a rising economic tide for the region if we want to prosper. We are constantly reviewing labor statistics, studying what other colleges offer, trying to find areas of unmet need, and then, entrepreneurial as we are, we move quickly and strategically. We’ll keep doing that.
