Jon C. Strauss and Harvey Mudd College appear to be an ideal pairing.
Harvey Mudd, a Claremont-based private liberal arts college of engineering and the sciences, shares a playing field with high-tech magnets like the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Strauss, who last year was named Harvey Mudd's fourth president, is an engineering professor who got into the college administration business mostly because - in true scientific spirit - he wanted to see how his mathematic models and theories might improve academic management.
"A system is a system. Engineers are trained to make things work," he said.
Strauss pens articles from time to time describing formulae for balancing university budgets and predicting tenure dynamics. But he also writes more general-audience articles, like an opinion piece in the Seattle Times in June 1997 that lamented the rising cost of tuition nationwide.
"With yearly (tuition and fee) increases averaging twice the rate of inflation during the past 20 years, a college education is swiftly moving beyond the reach of the middle class," he wrote. "Justifiably, society is balking. The fact is that today's system of higher education is no longer serving students and society. It's too expensive and it's not adequately preparing graduates to think and act in the real world."
Even Harvey Mudd, where annual tuition is $20,754, could someday lose high-quality freshmen to rivals that are cheaper to begin with or willing and able to undersell the college, Strauss believes.
His primary concern: Over the past five years, better-known rivals like CalTech and MIT have ramped up their merit-based financial aid to high-quality students. Harvey Mudd, whose pockets aren't as deep as those larger rivals', can't match the offers dollar-for-dollar. So it must compete for highly desirable students, like National Merit Scholarship finalists, based on quality alone.
"Literally all of (our potential students) qualify for this financial aid," he said. "There's no way we can compete economically."
The student body hasn't been looted of talent yet: In the most recent freshman class, 86% of the students were in the top 1/10th of their high school classes, up 4 percentage points from the year before.
On the other hand, the percentage of starting students who were National Merit finalists dropped to 19% from 22% the previous year. While that might just be a fluctuation, it could also be a harbinger of coming trouble, Strauss warned in the college's 1998 annual report.
"Should our premier student quality diminish, it will be extremely difficult to win it back," he wrote.
Strauss' chief concern, then, is to make a Harvey Mudd education worth the money, while keeping tuition under control.
In heading off the perceived threat from rival schools, Strauss has eschewed dramatic, sweeping changes in favor of minor adjustments and the creation of a three-pronged strategic plan last year.
Among the changes proposed and already enacted:
* Strauss formalized what had been an intermittent guest speaker program into a biweekly series of dinner talks featuring scientific and engineering notables.
* The college plans to make better use of cooperative arrangements with its sister campuses in the Claremont community, including Pomona, Pitzer, Scripps and Claremont McKenna colleges. Many nontechnical courses not offered by Harvey Mudd, like languages, can be taken at the other schools.
* Strauss wants to continue building the college's clinic program, in which corporate sponsors like TRW Inc. and San Bernardino-based Optivus Technologies Inc. assign engineering, physics, math or computer science research projects to student teams. The corporations get a possible solution to a technical problem; the students get valuable experience, exposure and sometimes a job.
In a similar vein, Strauss has been actively talking to local high-tech groups, including the Inland Empire's CORE21 and Inland Empire Technology Executives, about ways to transfer the research of local colleges to the enterprises of local companies.
Strauss also wants to broaden the clinic concept into research projects directed at social and humanitarian needs. "We're preparing people for life as well as work," he said.
In 1997, the college's board settled on Strauss, a veteran of engineering schools with a strong management and finance resume, to replace outgoing President Henry Riggs, recalls Clifford A. Miller, who resigned Jan. 1 after nine years as chairman of the college's board.
"We liked Jon's background, the fact that he had been the president of a science and engineering school (the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts) once before, so he knew the territory," Miller said.
For Strauss, the move was a return to academia after a stint as chief financial officer and vice president of Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland.
An engineering graduate from the University of Wisconsin, Strauss originally planned on working in industry after getting his doctorate in electrical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology.
Originally published in The Business Press 02/22/99