Hope Forward: A Plan to Reimagine Higher Ed

Hope College President Matt Scogin (blue jacket) with students at a campus event.

Our country’s colleges and universities find themselves beleaguered on multiple fronts, in many instances rightly so. They are especially vulnerable to this question: do they serve as engines of meritocracy, social mobility, and public spiritedness, or as increasingly costly replicators of privilege? 

My alma mater, Hope College in Holland, Michigan, is making a determined and innovative bid to be the former, not the latter. This is fitting given the institution’s mission “to educate students for lives of leadership and service in a global society” via “recognized excellence in the liberal arts in the context of the historic Christian faith.” 

At the heart of the new initiative, which it calls Hope Forward, is a different business model for higher education, which rests in turn on a transformed relationship between the institution, its students, and alumni. I recently talked with Hope’s president, Matt Scogin, about the plan. Here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript of our conversation:

In a nutshell, what is the innovation at the core of Hope Forward? 

What we're trying to do with Hope Forward is reimagine how students fund their college education in a way that enhances the learning environment. We call it Hope Forward because it’s a “pay it forward” model. Students don't pay tuition up front. Rather, their tuition will be fully funded from the gifts of others. But the students then make a commitment to give a financial gift to Hope every year after they graduate. We don't specify an amount or a percentage of income, because we want it to be a gift. They are paying it forward, investing in the generations of students who come after them.

Put another way, this is a form of crowdfunding. Once we're fully living into it, our alumni will be crowdfunding our current students. We can then become the kind of a community in which we are taking care of each other. By the way, it’s very much the way the Bible talks about how a Christian community ought to be functioning.

How are you implementing the plan? What is the timeline for launching it?

Ah, that’s always the hard part! This is a great idea. But to move from a tuition-based model to this gift-based model is a complex transition that will take some time. We're doing it in two parallel paths. We decided that, even as we aspire eventually to roll this out to all students, we needed to go ahead and start piloting it. We now have two cohorts of students on the Hope Forward model, one that started last year of about twenty first-year students, and we have a second cohort this year roughly double that size. So we can assess and learn and course correct along the way if we need to.

The second thing we're doing is raising money so that we can kick-start Hope Forward for our entire college community. Assuming we like what we're learning from these early cohorts, and it continues to go well, we will eventually need to raise enough money so that we can flip the switch and put our entire college on the model.

 Hope is not just a liberal arts college -- it is also a Christian community that aspires to be “faithful, welcoming, and transformational.” How might Hope Forward enable the college to realize these aspirations more consistently?

Hope Forward has us living into our Christian mission in such a cool way. With it, we are actually saying that we don't just want to have this mission permeate our classrooms, where it does, or our residence halls, where it does. We actually want it to permeate our financial structure and our business model. And it turns out that is a much more Christian-oriented business model than what we have traditionally used, and what other colleges and universities are still using. 

Jesus creates this very interesting upside-down economy. He says it's the poor and the lowly and the meek who are actually closest to God. And we think, therefore, that a Christian institution ought to be pushing hardest on access to higher education for those unable to afford it.

Jesus also talks about money a lot. He basically says the purpose of money is to give it away. What if we built our entire business model around giving? That’s what we're doing. As part of this pay-it-forward approach, we're putting out graduates who committed to be givers, and not just to Hope College. We want students to go out into the world asking, what can I give to make this world a better place, rather than what can I take to make my life better?

If you really boil it down, the message of the Christian gospel is simply this: Jesus says you are covered–your mistakes are covered, your sins are covered, you are covered. Now go and live differently. That is precisely what we want to say to our students. You're covered. Your tuition is covered. You're not graduating here burdened by debt. Now go and live a different kind of life. Live a life motivated by impact. Be a generous citizen of the world!

What led you to develop this new model – and what gives you confidence that Hope College can realize the vision that you have laid out?

We started with two premises. First, the world is losing hope in higher education. There are a lot of ways you can see that. The percentage of high school graduates who are going to college has been steadily declining for the last decade.  The percentage of alumni who give to their alma mater has also been steadily declining for the last couple of decades. The business model is broken.

Second, innovation is necessary and it’s not going to come from the top of the pyramid, from the leading incumbent institutions with the premier brands. Why? Because they have to defend their incumbency. So who better than a place called Hope to lead the way and re-instill a sense of hope in higher education. We're small enough. We're nimble enough. We have an innovative mindset, and from a position of strength - not desperation - we can be a leader. 

Hope Forward was basically the result of a two-year conversation with the board of trustees beginning from these premises. It led us to land on the idea that we're now pursuing, which is connected to our Christian mission. It honestly just felt natural. It didn't feel like we were taking a leap. This is big. It's bold. No question about it. But we feel we're the right institution to do this. If it works, a lot of other institutions could follow. But somebody has to raise their hand first.

Will the college be doing anything differently to engage students while they are on campus to help them fulfill their role in Hope Forward after they graduate?

This model broadens the group of people dedicated to Hope College, and how we all think about our obligations to the institution. Both we, the institution, and our students have signed up for this lifetime commitment to each other. We have what we call a covenant document that we sign with the students. I sign it on behalf of the institution, and then each of the students sign it. It’s an agreement to be partners with each other for a lifetime. That starts during their four years of college, of course, but it continues well beyond. 

We're doing a number of things with the Hope Forward cohorts. They have committed to being givers. We're talking to our students about what it means to be generous citizens of the world. What does philanthropy mean? How might you think about having a life of impact? How do you define impact–what does that even mean?

One of the things we've learned from talking with the cohort students–and they are very diverse in all the ways you can measure, including socioeconomically – is that inherently, by definition, we believe they have something to give. A lot of these students have never had someone believe they have something to offer the world. That in and of itself is a life-changing thing for many of them. And then, of course, after they graduate, we're going to continue that partnership, and that conversation.

As I said earlier, the commitment they make is to give something every year, and we don't specify an amount, starting with the year they graduate. We want our students to start developing the muscle memory of giving, even when they might feel like they have nothing to give. Give something, because over time it will add up.

Is there anything else about the Hope Forward model that you’d like to share before we wrap up?

We believe that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. And we're trying to be an institution that is leaning hard into the second half of that statement, so that we can at least play our part in making sure that opportunity is more equally distributed. I say this all the time internally: our name is Hope, not settle! We ought to be a place, therefore, that looks at the biggest problems of the world and runs toward them. And what we're doing in part is modeling for our students what impact can look like in the world. We can help solve at least one of our country's big puzzles right now, which is, how do we truly become a land of opportunity rather than a land of privilege for a few?

Thank you, Matt—and Godspeed in carrying out Hope Forward!