SCUP North Atlantic Regional Conference

The SCUP 2020 North Atlantic Regional Conference is coming to New Haven, CT, to celebrate and showcase the region’s fine institutions while hosting a conference devoted to: Finding Your Niche: Institutional Strategies to Survive and Thrive.

In an environment where enrollment, retention, and other financial challenges are creating stress for institutions and even forcing some to close, others have recognized new opportunities and found success by understanding and capitalizing on market shifts and their own uniqueness. Finding the right niche may involve expanding into a satellite campus to support new programs or increasing enrollment or research. Alternatively, an institution may require consolidating into tested and trusted programs to maintain academic quality or even transforming curriculum or culture to better serve—and possibly expand—its established student base.

New Haven’s diverse group of colleges and universities each has a distinct identity, history, and constituency, in effect serving as a microcosm of the national higher education environment. Institutions today—in New Haven and across the wider North Atlantic region—are pursuing different strategies to respond to current circumstances while meeting critical planning objectives.