Spotlight On: Jonathan Peri, President, Manor College

Spotlight On: Jonathan Peri, President, Manor College

2022-07-15T07:31:12-04:00May 2nd, 2022|Education, Philadelphia, Spotlight On|

Jonathan Peri Manor College4 min read May 2022Manor College is a private Catholic institution recognized for its academic excellence and personalized approach to ensuring each student leaves ready to excel in their chosen fields. In an interview with Invest, President Jonathan Peri, Ph.D., J.D. discussed Philadelphia’s education ecosystem, key milestones and achievements for the college, affordability efforts, shifts in demand, challenges in the education sector and the overall outlook for the college and higher ed community in the next two to three years.

How would you describe the overall strength of greater Philadelphia’s education ecosystem?

There is a tremendous amount of strength in terms of opportunities for students to find a pathway to their ideal career. In the current environment, there is constant discussion about workforce development, which is great because our goal is for our students to be part of the workforce and develop their careers. Workforce development can reference training for the first job or preparing someone to jump into a job. In the broader sense of how we deliver higher education, we are actually preparing students not just for their first jobs, but for the entirety of their career. We believe it is important to have a holistic view and to develop critical analysis and problem solving as the thinking tools that enable long term success. As such, we prepare our students for the short and long term.

What were some key milestones and achievements for Manor College during the last two years?

We were named the second safest college in the country by StateUniversity.com, which holds a comprehensive perspective on safety. We are also the best-priced non-profit independent residential college in Pennsylvania. We are wonderfully diverse; we probably have a more diverse student body on campus than most state institutions. With 60% of our student population diverse, I believe that we are among the most diverse non-HBCU institutions. We have excelled at ensuring everyone feels they belong here, and that relates to the dynamics of authentic care.

We champion our mission as a student-centered institution. We were founded by the Ukrainian Catholic Sisters of St. Basil the Great in 1947. They have a ministry of community, hospitality and inclusiveness, which has had a major legacy on our campus. To deliver our mission we have small classrooms that seat a maximum of 25. Apart from our auditorium, our biggest room suits up to 80 and is only used for campus forums and speakers series programs. This means that since we have a consistent 12-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio, our classes are small, and this creates fantastic opportunities for our students to have the guiding and mentoring conversations they need to be successful.

What are you doing to make education more affordable?

We are already the best priced, so we are leaning into being an institution that serves first-generation students, who make up about 60% to 65% of our current population, and 80% to 85% of whom are working while they are in college. 96% of our students are receiving some form of tuition aid, and we have positioned ourselves in a way so that books are either included in the cost of tuition or free. Our faculty, especially those in the Early Childhood Education program, have championed this initiative campus-wide. When many institutions started to think about the subject of these Open Educational Resources (OER) at low or no cost, we were ahead of the game. When I shared about OER at our most recent Accepted Students Day, guardians, parents and students roared with appreciation, so we know it is really important for our community. As a result of these strategies, our students graduate with far less debt than many others.

How does the demand for your programs today compare to pre-pandemic levels in terms of overall enrollment?

I have been here for seven years, and during the first five our headcount increased steadily, and we were fiscally responsible. As a result, demand was strong and we were in the good company of about a quarter of the roughly 110 colleges and universities in the Philadelphia area. We had surpluses every year! When COVID started, our student population suffered economic challenges. That meant we had to move beyond responsible to fiscally conservative and newly innovative. Between several good years and strong fiscal and innovation policies, we were able to weather the storm. Current admissions projections are trending better than pre-pandemic, which is a tribute to our strength as a community and the strength of our leadership teams. We will finish out this fiscal year with another surplus. That money will go directly back into meeting student needs in one form or another.

What are some of the challenges higher education is currently facing?

Primary, secondary and higher education are all facing challenges. I’m a firm believer that the funding mechanism Pennsylvania has for public schools is broken. Our education funding system is ranked 46th in the country. We have 501 school districts in the state and it is terrible to see that Chester, which is ranked between 498 and 501 in the state, is 15 to 20 minutes down the road from Radnor, which is usually ranked first or second. The difference between these two districts relates to economics, taxation and implementation systems. Our Pennsylvania constitution is not creating sufficient educational equity. This creates college preparedness disparities.

An additional challenge facing postsecondary and higher education in the Philadelphia region is competition and population. Pockets within our region are growing, but the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast are shrinking. We believe it will take two to three years for most institutions to recover from the pandemic, if they can. Right when that recovery happens, we are going to be hit with shifts in demographics, with many fewer college-aged people. It’s the baby bust lagging from the Great Recession. The competition will become even more fierce, and if you compound that with the potential for any unforeseen global crisis, as happened with the pandemic, you can end up with a beyond-challenging environment.

Institutions will find their footing by increasing fundraising endeavors, taking a bigger share of the pool of student candidates, bringing in more foreign students, getting involved with mergers and acquisitions, pursuing other forms of collaboration, or exploring auxiliary revenue enterprises. Those are the major options I see happening to successfully tackle the competition and the decreasing student-aged population.

What is your outlook for higher education institutions in the next three to five years?

I think the outlook is particularly great for students, but challenging for higher education institutions because of the issues noted. That said, Manor is uniquely positioned historically as the only Ukrainian founded college in the U.S. We are surrounded by the third or fourth most dense regional Ukrainian population in America. This fellowship buoys our intentionality towards humanitarianism and the promotion of western values. This is important to students: the notion of caring for our world and being a part of the solutions to global challenges.  The outlook for Manor is strong not only because of how we serve our students and steward our resources, it’s strong because of our moral direction.

We were recently featured in Inside Higher Ed, a national higher ed trade news organization, along with University of Notre Dame and Columbia University, lauding our humanitarian aid efforts for Ukraine. For a small college, we consider that pretty good recognition. We are blessed with this profile and we are working hard to remain true to what the college was born for: to fulfill our educational mission, and to be generous and use whatever is leftover from our real needs, to do good.

For more information, visit:

https://manor.edu/ 

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