Debt-Free Degrees? Early Results from the UCA Commitment

0:00:00.2 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. In the fall of 2023, the University of Central Arkansas launched the UCA Commitment to make earning a degree from UCA more affordable and in many cases, debt-free for students. So what’s happened since? On today’s episode, UCA President Houston Davis returns to share early results, lessons learned, and suggestions for other university leaders who want to make college more affordable. So give this episode a listen and enjoy.

0:00:49.5 Paul Gunther: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Paul Gunther, and I’m Managing Director of Strategic Advisory Services. I’ve recorded a few of these podcasts over the years, and every so often, we feature a campus leader who is proud to announce the launch of some new ambitious project designed to accomplish amazing things and serve the greater good. And it’s great to recognize and celebrate these projects, but sometimes you wonder if they ever ended up accomplishing their mission, or did the enthusiasm and momentum dry up soon after the project was announced? Well, today, we’re happy to have as our guest someone who came on the podcast two years ago to talk about how he and his university were launching an initiative to establish a debt-free pathway to a college degree for all incoming freshmen who qualify based on financial need. He’s back in the hot seat today to give us an update on how things are going. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome back to Office Hours, Dr. Houston Davis, President of the University of Central Arkansas. President Davis, welcome.

0:01:53.9 Dr. Houston Davis: Always good to be with you, Paul. Good to talk with you. Thank you for allowing me to join you again.

0:01:59.2 Paul Gunther: Absolutely. We’re thrilled to have you back. Your institution launched the UCA Commitment in the fall of last year, and it promised to cover the tuition and academic fees for incoming Arkansas first-time undergraduate students who are Pell eligible or have an annual household income of $100,000 or less. Now, before we dig into the specifics, remind me and tell us a little bit about your institution and the students you typically serve so we get some sense of the scale of this commitment.

0:02:29.4 Dr. Houston Davis: I’ll tell you, I think that’s a great place to start to really appreciate that what you just described is a big part of our student body. UCA is a regional public university, serves 10,000 students. 8,000 undergraduates, 2,000 graduate students. But among that population, still very traditional in terms of the traffic patterns. We have almost 4,000 students that live in our university housing, another 1,500 that live right around the ring of campus. It’s a very residential, still very traditional in terms of our touchpoints and the like. And being able to help students imagine how they, if they’re academically the right fit at our institution, how to overcome any other barriers, financial and others that might exist, is a big part of what we have to do. It’s mission critical, as well as something we’re proud to have in our mission. Still, we have a lot of students that are first-generation college students and certainly have a lot that are, by the measures of Pell, certainly in financial hardship. So, proud to do what we do, and we know that we move the needle in terms of social and upward mobility.

0:03:39.2 Paul Gunther: Yeah, it’s really incredible. There was a lot of fanfare when you all announced UCA Commitment. It’s a great program. Take us back to the beginning there just for a moment. What was that impetus for UCA Commitment and what goals did you set out to achieve within that first year?

0:03:54.2 Dr. Houston Davis: I think that a lot of what we were wanting to do was to change the narrative. And we’ll talk about how we have done that. I’m very proud, in a good kind of proud way, to say that we did. But we knew that we had to change the narrative around cost barriers, what those really were. There’s a little bit of myth-busting that was involved with that because you still can have a very affordable path in America to college education, and certainly a university like UCA’s way to do that. But we also had to overcome some of the narrative about, “Was a degree worth it anymore?” You kept hearing chirping, and we still hear that. And we realized that one of the things that we had to overcome was how can we make certain to be able to reduce the threat barrier that’s there in thinking about taking on debt. Students and their parents, they hear horror stories nationally about people being $100,000, $150,000, and $200,000 in debt. And while that certainly is not true at UCA, any amount of debt can feel like millions of dollars of debt if you’re poor or marginalized in the economy.

0:04:59.6 Dr. Houston Davis: So, changing the narrative was the number one reason for the UCA Commitment program, and making certain that again, if a student was academically prepared and positioned to be able to benefit from our university, we wanted to make certain that debt aversion or fears about taking on debt were not the reason that they were going to choose not to come to university. We wanted them to embrace the opportunity to come our way and then know that we could do that with a debt-free or reduced debt load pathway.

0:05:25.7 Paul Gunther: What did you think it was going to result in in that first year? What did you kind of anticipate?

0:05:30.7 Dr. Houston Davis: Well, we modeled. First of all, we looked back at the last five cohorts of freshmen who had come into UCA, looking at what was the unmet need of those populations. What were we thinking that participation rates might be in a program like this? And we modeled that we would have 758 students in that incoming cohort. And we may talk about the results. We were remarkably close to that number. But what we didn’t necessarily know was exactly what the makeup of those students would be, but we knew that we were talking about a $4,000 average unmet need across prior cohorts. We knew that was what we had to solve. We knew that a lot of those students likely were leaving dollars on the table. We can talk about what we’ve learned from the works that we’ve done to be able to reduce just by helping them make a commitment. That’s why we chose that word, “commitment,” to help them to play the game. And what we’ve seen, just to give away a little bit of the upshot to things—in the first two years, over 1,300 households have had their lives transformed by the UCA Commitment program. And just really proud of where we stand.

0:06:43.8 Paul Gunther: That’s incredible. So you mentioned you were pretty close to that initial projection. Tell me about that. Where did you land? Where are you today relative to those initial goals?

0:06:53.3 Dr. Houston Davis: Well, that first year, I said we modeled 758 students. We had 767 in the fall of ’23. So I don’t know that we could ever get that close in our estimate again. But we did laugh about that. But what we also did, I mentioned the $4,000 of unmet need as we were building the program. As I was announcing this to you and to others a couple years ago, it wasn’t just to do this for a year or two. It was to be a sustained program that would be a key sort of value pillar for our university for decades to come. We built it assuming that even if we didn’t solve that unmet need puzzle with other things that we were going to do for those families, we were going to address that average of $4,000. But we actually, just through helping these students to be able to know how to work through the FAFSA, to know how to work through the Arkansas Challenge Program, to be able to take advantage of other resources that are available. After two years, encompassing 1,300 students, we’ve reduced the average unmet need from $4,000 down to $1,207 without applying a single UCA Commitment scholarship dollar.

0:08:05.7 Dr. Houston Davis: So really, Paul, what that did was, we knew that students were leaving assets on the table that were there for them. We didn’t understand just how powerful the intricacy of trying to know how to access that aid was. Just, and I guess when you think about it, if you get two or three screens into filling out the FAFSA, you might give up, too, if it was completely foreign to you. And I think the same thing was happening with Challenge. But we really have reduced that down to $1,207 in the first two cohorts. And our overall expenses to UCA Commitment, we were anticipating it would be $3.1 million. In year one, it was only $850,000. We’re still finalizing up the tally for this second cohort that started this fall, but it’s similar. We don’t even think in the first two years of the program that we will have approached what we thought were going to be the first year cost. All of that accrues to net tuition revenues, which have continued to make considerable gains. We’re utilizing dollars wisely, and in our program, we’re actually offering less scholarship dollars now than we were three years ago, just taking advantage of the opportunity to work with these students and their families.

0:09:19.3 Dr. Houston Davis: We’re going to help you. We’re going to make the commitment to help you work through the process. And then, oh, by the way, whatever’s left in the unmet need at the end, we’ll make certain to bridge that, too.

0:09:28.5 Paul Gunther: It really is just incredible. One of the things that strikes me and the impact that you’re making on all of those households is to be that credible source. You talked about changing the narrative around the barriers to higher education. And so regardless of whether these students come to UCA, you’re also that credible source of information for just navigating the college process. And almost as a byproduct, because of that, more of those students are attracted because they know of that commitment that you are making to their success. I’m curious about that second piece: what has happened with this initial cohort when they’ve gone there? Have you seen retention gains as well because of the structures you’ve put around it?

0:10:06.6 Dr. Houston Davis: We have. The freshman to sophomore retention rate for the incoming cohort was 78%. And that actually was a percentage point and a half more than the average all freshmen. And again, that proved what we knew already. These students were academically prepared to be at UCA. It was just a financial barrier that was standing in the way. They were not coming to university or they were place-bound. Again, this is offered to any Arkansas family, any graduating high school senior. They make less than $100,000, provided they meet our admissions standards, and we’ve not lowered those. But provided that they do that, we’re going to work with them to make certain that they can make that transition. And again, academically in good position to thrive at UCA. And they’re proving that. And there’s nothing about the early markers of this second cohort that started in August of ’25 that would tell us that that’s going to be any different. Our all-freshmen GPA and all-freshmen ACT scores just continue to go up. We’re very proud of the fact that we’ve continued to keep the admission standards of the university in place. We’re second only to the flagship institution among public universities on that. And I’m not bragging on this, but it’s a fact that I think is important to our faculty.

0:11:04.5 Dr. Houston Davis: When you launch something like UCA Commitment, you wonder, “Is that going to do anything to academic standards?” We’ve had record numbers of students to be declined admission because of this. Now that’s not to say that we don’t want to help them find the right fit and the right institution for them, but we’re going to hold to our academic standards. We’ve seen great growth, two straight freshman classes that are above 2,000 after the prior five-year average was 1,780 for that five-year period. But we’ve done that with insisting upon the same academic standards. And again, we want to see these students, really, it’s a launchpad to what’s next for them. We’re removing barriers. We need to make certain that they’re able to matriculate through to degree.

0:12:07.9 Paul Gunther: Yeah, I think you used the phrase a good kind of proud earlier, and I think that’s a good kind of proud there. It reflects that the commitment is really targeted towards both the mission and the margin of the university. And you’ve been able to advance both of those, which I think is pretty incredible. One of the things that always impresses me about UCA is the way that you all iterate on big ideas. It’s never just the first pass and we’re there, but you take the time to reflect on it, to learn, and then to further develop. And so I’m curious, when you think about some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned over the past year or two, what have those been? How have you modified the approach or the structure based on what you’ve encountered and any changes you’re thinking about going forward?

0:12:49.5 Dr. Houston Davis: Yeah, well, UCA Commitment was built upon all those promises in making the transitions into school. And then, it was not just the aid that would be available to them, but we also were going to be able to bridge with work-study opportunities. Well, we found that the work-study component was more of a distraction than was necessary. We saw it as more of a “skin in the game.” We had plenty of opportunities for those individuals to be able to do regular work-study and student worker roles, and those are things that can help them with their housing and their meal plan and the like. We made the decision after the first year to lay that work-study option to the side because we felt like that was too much of a distraction administratively. It was becoming a burden, and we felt like it was an unnecessary distraction to the students. We just simplified that. And again, I think some of that is driven by that.

0:13:45.9 Dr. Houston Davis: I mentioned that first year, we budgeted $3.1 million and we only had to spend $850,000. Considering we had almost 800 students to benefit, that we didn’t need that unnecessary burden. So making that change… And we knew in starting a new initiative like this that we would make adjustments. That’s probably the single largest adjustment. One thing that we’ve not done: they’re volunteer hours. We like to be able to put service learning and service to community at the heart of just about everything that we do at UCA. And when we built the UCA Commitment Program, we wanted that to be about… Well, anybody that’s going to be benefiting from this is also committed to be a part of our community service efforts, not only here in Conway, but they can do that in their local communities. They’re all students from 75 Arkansas counties. They can do that service in their home counties. Well, if that’s what they want to do over the break, or if that’s what they want to do during the summer, we’ve made that as easy as possible for them, too. So those are minor adjustments as we’ve gotten in, but we’ve been proud to know that the program is financially very sound. I don’t want to start rumors that the rest of our team is going to yell at me about, but I think about, as we look to the future, being able to perhaps expand this to be able to include some community college transfers, maybe from partner institutions.

0:15:02.6 Dr. Houston Davis: We have a Bear Partners program with three major feeder institutions. Two-year, maybe get to that. I look forward to that being something that we could model in year three, year four. I think about being able to extend some book coverage to be able to cover textbooks. That might be a next iteration, but I think we’ll want to get through two full cycles and then assess where we are financially, and then what a great problem to have, to think about what more can we can reach for. But I’m excited that what we originally cast is very sound and is working even better than I expected, and I’m usually a pretty optimistic person.

0:15:38.5 Paul Gunther: Wow. It’s impressive what you all have been able to achieve, the results in the first couple of years, the way you’re thinking about growing the program in the future. And it didn’t happen by accident. There was so much intention and so many people who were part of making this possible. And I want to unpack that a little bit, right? With any of these types of big initiatives, we can have big dreams, but it takes so many discrete moments of leadership to make it come to fruition. And often that’s the hard part to replicate, or we do it implicitly, but we don’t talk about it as intentionally externally. And so I want to spend a moment there. When you think about your contribution to this effort, what was your most important contribution as president, and what did it take to build that consensus and that momentum on campus?

0:16:29.7 Dr. Houston Davis: Truthfully, it’s probably to surround yourself with people who are a lot smarter than you and then let them do their jobs. That’s not hard for me to surround myself with smarter people. I think that I have a lot of friends and colleagues. A lot of friends who are presidents and chancellors who have talked to me about what we’ve done with UCA Commitment and some other initiatives. I’m in my ninth year. I should have mentioned that at the beginning here. So, I’ve seen a few things in nine years’ time. But going back to the first couple of years, the work that we were doing to really be stewards of the existing university budget, and then accept that we needed to take some steps. And that would have been 2018, 2019—take some steps far before we had to, before we got into things like the enrollment cliff period of ’26, ’27, ’28. I had a Board of Trustees that bought in as I started in January of ’17.

0:17:27.6 Paul Gunther: And then it was in that first full academic year, FY18, that they really bought into, if we want to do big things in the future, there probably is no likelihood of just raising tuition haphazardly, thinking about students like they’re ATM machines. That wasn’t going to happen. We knew that while we’re very appreciative of the support that we get from the state of Arkansas, it’s still relatively healthy compared to perhaps peers in other states. We knew it wasn’t going to grow. So then, therefore, it’s either you’re going to fundraise, and that’s probably going to be for very specific things that donors want to give to—or your most likely source of funds is going to be reallocation of existing resources. And that is hard to accept. As you’re thinking about perhaps every new dollar that you are thinking about for three, five, and 10 years out, that probably 75 cents of that dollar is going to come from hard decisions. But I sold our board on the fact that that was likely our future, that we had a lot of good opportunities in front of us, but we needed to show courage and really putting a name and a function to every dollar and then identifying freed-up dollars.

0:18:38.4 Dr. Houston Davis: I can’t stress this enough. Every single dollar that we’ve put into UCA Commitment came from reallocation of existing programs of grant aid and scholarships, every one of them. But it took several very hard decisions across four or five years, not taking anything away from the students who were in those programs then, to be able to free up the dollars to say, Okay, how many students were benefiting from those dollars under the old model? How many more students can we serve if we’re making certain to right-size and maximize those dollars coming in those programs? All of that—and I won’t bore your audience about the ROI program, but UCA.edu/ROI, and it’s not “return on investment,” that’s the “Resource Optimization Initiative.” Horrible name, but I named my first puppy Puppy. So I’m more about results. I’m not going to worry about whether it’s shiny. But our ROI initiative—again, the work that we did, and our board believed in that—and leaders all throughout campus came to grips with the reality that that was something we needed to do. And again, it’s hard to do things five and six years before you’re going to have to.

0:19:44.4 Dr. Houston Davis: That creates a stair step instead of a cliff, if that’s what you really are looking at. But what we announced were things: It was not freeing up dollars just to save money. It was freeing up dollars to be able to invest in big ideas with the UCA Commitment, which we nicknamed “Moonshot” five years ago. Being able to do things like the Moonshot, and then that became a branded saying, to be able to reach now 1,300 Arkansas families within the first two years. That doesn’t happen without a board being all in support of that and seeing that you’ve got to take a medium- to long-term view of things, in addition to making the day-to-day decisions that presidents and their teams are certainly burdened with.

0:20:24.5 Paul Gunther: Yeah, I think that’s one of the things I hear more presidents talking about today is the amount of time, the thought, the intention they put into building that consensus with their board. When they know there’s a hard thing or a big opportunity to seize, really spending the time well in advance to paint the picture and the vision for that, to set guardrails around it, and really hold hands on what that’s going to look like in practice and what it’s going to mean for the community. And so here you’ve set the stage with the board and you built consensus over a long period of time. I would imagine this sets UCA up well to move into other big initiatives and to do so more quickly in the future. So, what’s next for UCA? What’s the next big swing to impact access and outcomes for students that serves your region and your state?

0:21:13.3 Dr. Houston Davis: Yeah, we, I’ve sold our campus on this idea: We had to do “weird things” so that we could do “special things.” And it’s also a little bit of “hide the vegetables so you can enjoy the desserts.” But I know, and I was in Georgia immediately prior. We were doing the consolidation of institutions, making some hard decisions, and that was about setting up that state and system for the future. I knew when it came to UCA, we needed to be in position where as a lot of institutions were leaning into a struggle period, and they’re in it now. Everybody knew “truth in lending.” Everybody’s known for a decade that this was coming. Maybe didn’t know about some of the federal headwinds that would be joining that, but either way, everybody’s been there, so no complaints. We needed to make certain to be ready to be able to capitalize on opportunities. Momentum was our key watchword for the first seven years I was here; “opportunities” is a word that I use all the time now. I really think that taking advantage of the fact that as we’re looking at ’26, ’27, ’28, and ’29, I love that we’ve been living for it, we’ve been preparing for it, we’ve been looking forward to it, because it’s an inflection point that allows us to do things like our College of Science and Engineering, which was established within the last two years and largely grown out of, again, making decisions to allow opportunities to be able to invest in that space.

0:22:02.7 Dr. Houston Davis: I think by the time perhaps this is being put out there for review, we will have announced our “UCA Innovation Campus,” which is going to allow our College of Science and Engineering, our College of Business, our College of Health and Behavioral Sciences to work together in concert. There’s a tech transfer side of things. There’s also just a broad, almost “living-learning lab.” It’s a lab experiment in how we can rethink the way that we’re engaging with students at that particular campus. We don’t want to confuse the “Innovation Campus” with being a more innovative campus.

0:23:11.6 Dr. Houston Davis: A lot of what we’re doing in our strategic plan is looking at whether that happens here on the main campus or it happens at a satellite campus like we’re looking to establish or anything where we interact in Arkansas or beyond. We need to be thinking about: are we positioning our programs, our services, our applied research? We should be known as an institution of innovation—that UCA is willing to try things, it’s willing to do things, it’s willing to work with business and industry. I think what we do with our Coding Academy, what we do with our Conductor in terms of entrepreneurship, what we do with some of our work around Data Sciences and the consortium that they’re a part of, with a couple of institutions here in the state. Those are things that are about meeting grand challenges, big challenges for the state of Arkansas. And while we cannot be all things to all people, we’re well positioned to both invest in both our time and our treasure in making certain that we’re pursuing some of those things that are great opportunities. The inflection point that we’re going to have as we look at the next five to 10 years is, if you go back, we were founded in 1907 as Arkansas State Teachers College.

0:24:21.6 Dr. Houston Davis: We’ve grown in our mission. I think that I look forward to, and hopefully I’ll see, some of those next 10 years. I don’t know, day to day, we’ll see. Hopefully the board will keep me around, but it’ll be fun to see in 10 years: How will they be talking about where UCA has positioned itself? Because I know that we’re talking about it very differently than we were 20 and 30 years ago, but I think the pace of change in the next 10 is going to be as great as the last 20 or 30, and being able to choose a wave and ride that wave. You can’t do that if you’ve not made some hard decisions and you’ve kept some of your “powder dry” to take advantage of opportunities. And because of our ROI initiative, yeah, I’m looking forward to the next few years. I can’t wait. I am kind of welcoming to the headwinds. Bring it on! That’s what we’ve been preparing for, and I’m excited about it. And I think we’ve got a faculty and staff that are excited about it, too.

0:25:16.7 Paul Gunther: Yeah. I love the way that you delineate between being an “innovative campus.” That’s part of our identity, that’s part of our DNA and our strategy, and then this physical manifestation of that, this “Innovation Campus” that you’re launching. I think that’s a really neat way to think about it and a great way to engage not just the region and employer partners and others in that, but the entire campus in that work by making it core to the identity to position you well for those opportunities that are ahead. And I can hear your optimism for it. I want to be respectful of your time, but before we go, would you mind sharing your best advice for other university leaders who may be thinking about launching a similar effort or taking that big swing or just who might want to do something difficult that’s going to make a difference?

0:26:06.1 Dr. Houston Davis: Yeah. Well, one, be courageous. I think there’s always that in leadership. But one thing that I enjoy, and this part of our culture was already in place, so I’ve just been able to really just cultivate it a little bit. I think we’re very good at knowing who we are and what we do well and then doing that thing and then looking to build upon that strength. I think, as I mentioned earlier on, you can’t be all things to all people. I think too many institutions are, and it may be out of desperation because they’re trying to do something that’s going to quickly manifest itself in success in the next two to three cycles. And I don’t know what is driving that. I think they’re throwing way too many things at the wall, and “let’s see what sticks.” And that you can get away from core purpose. I think it’s very difficult to be able to lead faculty and staff towards something when they don’t know that there are some sort of guideposts that everyone is identifying with. I think the culture of the institution is something you have to attend to.

0:27:08.8 Dr. Houston Davis: I mentioned board support. I encourage, every time that I talk with new presidents and chancellors, that you’ve got to have your board to support you. I can promise for a school like UCA, we have seven board members appointed by the governor. One rolls off every seven years—a seven-year appointment. Those individuals, especially after they’ve been on the board for a couple of years, they’re part of our work. It’s not necessarily our daily work, but they’re critical to our work. And that’s critical to knowing the big picture. It’s critical, for instance, as we were doing the ROI work and working on “Moonshot” and going to something like announcing UCA Commitment, that they had to conceptually understand what we were trying to achieve. And they had to understand that we were being fair and we were being objective, and we were looking to measure, evaluate, assess, and to make certain that when we made a hard decision that we could defend that decision. I think as long as I could look at my board and say, “All right, here’s how we made that decision, and we were fair and objective about it.” A little like the NCAA selection committee. I don’t care what the departments’ names are.

0:28:24.5 Dr. Houston Davis: I just want to know Team A, Team B, Team C. And we’re going to look at what their statistics are, and then we’re going to be fair about the decision. And only then will we reveal what the names of the departments are. I’ve told my board from the beginning that’s the way that we were going to measure up things, because I wanted to be able to come to them and let them know that there was a fundamental fairness about some hard decisions we would have to make. And I think they’ve hung in there with me because we’ve been very transparent with our campus and I’ve been very transparent with them. But the other thing: there are a lot of presidents who are getting jobs right now that, quite frankly, someone exited because they knew it was about to get really hard and that school wasn’t prepared. So you’ve got a lot of presidents are coming in right now who have inherited challenges. I think that you’ve got to probably kind of fall back into what do we believe in most, and probably prioritize. And it’s almost like a family. Which of our children are we going to make certain eat, and are we going to invest in their education? I think there are some hard choices in front of most presidents, but for those who are relatively new, there’s a clearing there. But you’ve got to have courage, and you certainly have to get your board on your side.

0:29:27.5 Dr. Houston Davis: And I think you’ve got to be transparent, fair, and objective in the way that you go about making those decisions, or else you’re going to look over your shoulder, and you entitled be a leader, but you will literally have no one following you. So, there’s my advice.

0:29:41.5 Paul Gunther: It’s incredibly helpful to hear and I think incredibly helpful for our partners to think about what that will look like for them on their campuses. What I hear you saying is that in order to take the big swing, in order to do the exciting thing, you’ve got to do some of the hard things first. And you can’t hide the ball on what that is, but when you foreground it with your people and your place and you do it fairly, that gives you that opportunity to enter into those big moments with confidence and with optimism. And I think that’s a great lesson that I’m taking away from our conversation today.

0:30:14.3 Dr. Houston Davis: Yeah, I might add, I should have said this too, in that I think to take a step back. If you’re a new leader of an institution, don’t bemoan what you don’t have. Look at what you do have. As I started as president of the University of Central Arkansas, a lot of it was, okay, well, wait a second, we had a $185 million budget. How are we utilizing $185 million? That’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of possibilities. That’s a lot to work with as we go forward. And I would tell anybody, look at what you have, look at what’s within your reach and work that, you control that and you probably have a lot more there than you think.

0:30:53.7 Paul Gunther: President Davis, thank you for your time. Thank you for joining me today on Office Hours.

0:30:58.9 Dr. Houston Davis: Thank you, Paul. Appreciate you.