Can scholarships-for-all save a dying town?
by Kane Webb
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Sunday, August 26, 2007
True story. Back in April, I was flying home to Arkansas from Washington , D.C. , in one of those puddle-jumper airplanes about the size of a Cuban cigar. People were crammed in tighter than frat boys in a phone booth. So you couldn’t help but overhear what fellow passengers were saying.
A couple of suit-and-tied gentlemen sat in the next row talking business. Computers or software, something high-techy and portable. Clearly one man had the kind of cyber-job that allowed him to live anywhere. So the anywhere he was choosing to live, he told his row-mate, was El Dorado , Arkansas .
El Dorado ? Cyber-guy explained: He’s got young kids at home and El Dorado now offers free college tuition. The sooner you start your kids in El Dorado ’s school system, the more money you’ll get for college. A K-12 commitment earns the kid a scholarship for 100 percent of tuition and fees at an Arkansas institution for up to five years. (At today’s tuition rates, that’s some 30-grand.) Or he can take that same amount and apply it to any college in the world.
Another true story. Martin Crawford, 37, owned a small and successful business in his hometown of Memphis , where he’d lived almost all his adult life. Crawford and his wife Maxine, a schoolteacher, have five daughters, ages 11, 9, 6, 2 and almost 1. (Just writing the ages makes me tired.) The Crawfords moved to El Dorado this summer, where Martin works as a human-resources manager for Pilgrim’s Pride and Maxine as a teacher at Yocum Elementary School . Wanna guess why they pulled up stakes in Big City , South, and re-potted in li’l El Dorado ? Imagine the cost of college tuition seven years from now, 17 years from now. Now imagine paying for five kids to attend college all within a decade of each other. That’d bankrupt a Rockefeller.
One more story. A couple of weeks back, I told a knowledgeable friend that I was heading to El Dorado for the day. His response: “Did you lose a bet or something?” (He doesn’t have kids.)
So there you go: Anecdotal future and anecdotal present about El Dorado , Arkansas , the state’s Original Boomtown. Or at least that’s the chamberendorsed municipal advert. Which is telling in and of itself. If a town spends all its energy promoting its past, it must be trying to ignore its future.
Until about six months ago, El Dorado ’s faded memory of a motto was an exercise in irony. The boomtown was darn near bust. Then in stepped Big Oil, of all highly suspect industries, to save the day.
CLAIBORNE DEMING WAS THE MAN
Claiborne Deming keeps an office on the fourth floor of the relatively modest Murphy Oil building, an architectural homage to 1960s bland-ism that sits at the corner of Jefferson and Peach, about two blocks from the city’s Main Street—which is, and this is a sarcasm-free aside, vibrant and happening. Ever been to Main Street in Little Rock ? Think of the exact opposite and you’ve got Main Street El Dorado . But that’s another story for another time.
For now, let’s get back to Deming, the chief executive officer of Murphy Oil and the man behind the El Dorado Promise scholarships. As I researched this story, talking my way through school officials and city bigs, marketing types and regular folk, I kept coming back to Claiborne Deming. Because everybody else kept coming back to Claiborne Deming.
In the end, he’s the guy who decided to stake El Dorado ’s economic future on education. He’s the guy who embraced the idea of paying college tuition for grads of El Dorado High, put it before the company’s board of directors and the Murphy family. And Murphy is backing Deming’s altruism with a commitment of $50 million—$5 million per over 10 years—to guarantee two decades of scholarships. That’s real money, even for Big Oil.
Deming, I was told again and again, is media shy. Which is understandable, I guess. When you’re the head of an oil company and the press beckons, it’s usually not great news. I’d asked to shadow him one day, the better to see how a, well, a Claiborne Deming lives and works. That went nowhere.
But he agreed to some time in his office one morning last week to talk about the El Dorado Promise. When I enter his office, he eschews his desk to plop down on a couch next to me, and starts the conversation by questioning me about my New Orleans connection. (I lived there briefly, pre-storm, and still adore the city.) Murphy Oil had a headquarters and a refinery there, and, after Katrina, made the kind of news a Big Oil exec dreads by having to mop up an oil spill.
Not as much, if anything, was made in the press about the way Murphy rallied to rescue its employees and dozens of others trapped in a flooded building in mid-city New Orleans, going so far as to enlist Ashley Mason, a former Special Forces veteran who runs a law-enforcement training camp in North Little Rock, to do a snatchand-grab in the Big Uneasy. Murphy chartered planes, rented SUVs and boats, even bought a boat, to get the folks out. Mason and Co. used a jet ski to save a diabetic man who was almost comatose from a lack of insulin. It was real S.W.A.T. stuff.
“I went home that day after the rescue and thought, ‘We really accomplished something’ and I felt great,” Deming recalls. “Then I got a phone call in the morning that began, ‘We’ve got a problem.’ ”
The oil spill.
JOBS DRAINING AWAY
Deming’s introduction to the El Dorado Promise wasn’t quite so dramatic. “It struck me one day that we have to stem the tide of what’s happening in El Dorado ,” he says. “It’s not dramatic, but on the margins, a slow drain of jobs and population. At Murphy, we’d like the option of keeping our home office here.”
Or any office here. Since 1980, El Dorado has lost almost a third of its population, shrinking from some 30,000 to 21,530. Hundreds of jobs have fled “boomtown” as the city struggles to keep manufacturing jobs in an American economy that’s less and less dependent on them. Don Wales, chairman of the local chamber of commerce, tells me that 29 percent of the El Dorado workforce is in manufacturing. The national average is only 14 percent. So when those jobs leave, the workers left behind don’t have a lot of options. Besides, that is, the obvious: follow the jobs.
Deming’s reference to a slow drain became an unavoidable flood when Cooper Tire decided in 2005 to close its auto plant in town, relocating some 400 high-paying jobs.
The story of the El Dorado Promise is already legend in this town. Early last year at a meeting of an industrialdevelopment group, a local businessman brought in an article clipped from the Wall Street Journal. It was a story about a radical scholarship program in Kalamazoo , Michigan , a small, tired, manufacturing-based rust-belt town that was growing rustier as it, too, bled jobs and population.
Anonymous donors from some big businesses in and around Kalamazoo were paying college tuition for graduates of Kalamazoo ’s public high school, and this program, styled the Kalamazoo Promise, was already having an economic impact on the city itself. According to the Journal, before the scholarship offer, one homebuilder in Michigan hadn’t built a new house in Kalamazoo in years. After the announcement of the scholarships, demand returned, prompting the homebuilder to pay $7 million for three separate tracts of land.
HOME SALES ON THE RISE
El Dorado has experienced a similar housing boom since the Promise scholarships were announced six months ago. According to the Chamber, the latest figures to date show that, while home sales across Arkansas are down 7.44 percent, in Union County, home to El Dorado, they’re up 5.19 percent. Also, because the city has a shortage of affordable middle-income housing—homes in the $120,000 to $150,000 range—bankers and Realtors have formed a working group to find ways to meet new demand. All thanks to that newspaper clipping that made it to an obscure meeting, then on to Claiborne Deming.
By the time the idea of an El Dorado Promise worked its way up the chain to Murphy’s CEO, all the plan needed was a Fortune 500 company willing to part with tens of millions of dollars for the public good. Hmmm. Wonder who that could be?
“How many Fortune 500 companies are in towns of 22,000?” Deming asks. “We’re unique. We’re in the middle of a big pine forest, not really close to any big towns. Little Rock ’s two hours away. But if we can do this, and other people can lever off of it. . . . Look. After taxes, it’ll cost us about $3 million a year. For that amount, we can do something that might turn around a whole region. Think of all the billions of dollars spent in different programs that didn’t do a thing ultimately.”
Unlike the Kalamazoo Promise, which restricts its graduates to state universities and colleges, graduates from El Dorado High can go anywhere—from South Ark Community College to the moon, or maybe just Oxford . Private school, public school. Doesn’t matter. Murphy’s promise is to pay tuition and fees to the U. of Anywhere comparable to the highest tuition of any state university in Arkansas . (If tuition doesn’t rise before this is printed, that’s UCA at about $6,205 a year.)
On its face, the Murphy-backed El Dorado Promise might seem like a pricey way to buy some decent PR. After all, here is Big Oil, the most reviled business in the Western Hemisphere that isn’t spelled Halliburton, playing the It’s-all-about-the-kids card. Ah, ain’t that precious.
So it’s spending some of its profits on an education gamble that may not pay off in the long run.
A FAMILY LEGACY
But so what? Good publicity ain’t cheap in the 21st cynical century. What’s a Murphy Oil doing in the college-scholarship business? What’s the catch? If it’s not only good, old fashioned philanthropy, if it’s not just noblesse oblige, and if it’s more than good old-fashioned PR, then maybe it’s as simple as family obligation. Or at least family legacy.
The founder of Murphy Oil, Charles H. Murphy Sr., and his wife, Bertie Wilson, had three girls and one son: Theodosia Murphy Nolan; Polly Murphy Keller; Bertie Murphy Deming (Claiborne’s mom); and Charles H. Murphy Jr.
So when Charles Sr. died unexpectedly, the job of running, and expanding, the family business fell to No. 1 and only son, Charles Jr.
He was 21 at the time. College was out, big business was in. As with anybody who feels as if he was denied something special, Charles Murphy Jr. spent the rest of his privileged life pining for that something.
To quote an editorial printed in The Leader of Central Arkansas: “The younger could not go to college, so he educated himself in foreign languages and the classics. . . . Though largely self-educated, Murphy regretted his inability to get a college education when the burdens settled on him at such an early age, and he came to prize it above nearly all else.”
As I read the editorial to Deming, he nods. “You have to point to Charles,” he says. “He was so bright and so capable. He grounded himself in the Classics. He read all of Shakespeare. Memorized much of it. He taught himself to speak French. He read philosophy. He read all the Great Books.”
As part of an exercise at a family outing not long ago, Deming memorized the Gettysburg Address, which he recited to the clan. A couple of weeks back, he realized that he’d forgotten it. So he’s in the process of re-memorizing it. Which has launched him on a big-time Lincoln kick. After reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, Deming says he put down the book and dramatically announced, “ Lincoln was the greatest American.” No argument here.
As the Lincoln chat escalates, Deming gets more animated, and suddenly he’s practically jumping off the couch with enthusiasm as he considers the prose and leadership of The Greatest American. It feels as if we’re a couple of grad students boning up for the big exam—and it’s perfectly clear who’s going to score the “A.”
SCHOLARSHIPS WERE THE DECIDER
If Claiborne Deming is the face of the El Dorado Promise, the poster family has to be the Crawfords of Tennessee. Martin Crawford heard about the job before the scholarships. A headhunter had contacted him about a job in H.R., his specialty, at Pilgrim’s Pride, but Crawford was lukewarm about the idea of a move to, where was it again? El Do-what? Then he found out about the new scholarship program.
“That was about 80 percent of my decision,” he says. “It’s phenomenal for parents with young children.”
Crawford now uses the Promise Scholarships as a recruiting tool when he’s interviewing job candidates for Pilgrim’s Pride. When I spoke to him last month, he and his wife were looking to buy a new home and adjusting to smalltown life. “I’ve learned the concept of Southern hospitality,” he says.
There are other stories about other Martin Crawfords.
James Fouse, director of the Promise program at the school district, tells me about a teacher who moved in from nearby Hampton, and a man with two children who moved in from Russellville. He says he takes about 25 phone calls a day from out-of-towners interested in moving into the school district. He ticks off some of the locales: Tennessee , Texas , Mississippi , Georgia , Alaska ! Wales of the chamber says he’s tried to keep records of families calling for relocation packages—some 75 by mid-July, including folks from Washington state and Colorado .
The number of new students enrolled in the district backs up all the anecdotal evidence. At last count, Fouse had signed up 245 new enrollees since January 26th—the fateful day when the Promise scholarships were announced.
Hanging around El Dorado , listening to the movers and shakers and professional optimists, it all sounds so simple: The Promise scholarships will have a trickle down and trickle up effect. They’ll improve the performance of students coming up through the school system, as they’ll have something to work for—getting into the best college possible, to heck with the cost. They’ll improve the quality of students in the school system because the scholarships will attract families for whom education is so important it’s worth moving for. And they’ll send the city’s best-and-brightest to the best colleges, where they’ll get a degree then return home to start businesses, and attract them, and create jobs and a quality workforce.
. . . and they’ll all live happily ever after.
But seriously all you Promise Pollyannas, where’s the guarantee that any of this will play out? What are the odds that scholarships-for-all will translate into economic revitalization for a small town near the Arkansas-Louisiana border that will remain a small town near the Arkansas-Louisiana border? If you pay the way for, say, the valedictorian in town to go to Harvard, are you exporting your best-and-brightest, never to see them south of the Mason-Dixon again?
NO GUARANTEE
And who’s to say that companies looking to expand and relocate won’t prefer a big city already stocked with educated brainiacs? Or that families who move to El Dorado for the Promise may move out when the kids have graduated? Right now, the only guarantee when it comes to economic impact is uncertainty—and the excitement that a big, calculated, what’sto-lose? gamble brings. And maybe that’s enough, hope. It’s been in short supply around here.
“After these kids have gone off to college, if they return, there’s growing evidence of a higher concentration of highly educated people leading to economic growth,” says Eric Hanushek, an education wonk at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “But if you want them to come back, you’ve got to have jobs.” No matter what, Hanushek says, “it’s a very, very generous program.”
There’s no getting around the stunning generosity of the thing: Thanks to Deming and Murphy Oil, kids who never would have had a shot at college can now go wherever their grades will take them. And live better lives. And give their kids better lives. And pass on the value of an education to the next generation.
All of which is why the El Dorado Promise as a pure academic initiative might be that rarity: an education reform without real critics. Why, I even asked the most skeptical policy analyst I know in Washington , D.C. , to pick the program apart.
Question: How long can the program last if more and more families move into town and more and more kids go through the El Dorado school system, and tuition continues to skyrocket? At what point does a Murphy say, Enough. We can’t do this forever? Somebody will have to step up big time. Is it a great short-term economic boost, but not the way to do business long term?
Answer: Just because the program might not be able to sustain itself under mounting tuition costs and population increases doesn’t mean it’s bad. If it lasts for 20 years, it’s still great. Just make sure you move there before they run out of cash.
Then said Skeptical Policy Analyst ended with an emoticon. ;) An emoticon! From a Washington-based professional cynic!
I’m left with baiting the young woman at a restaurant on Main Street into playing the spoilsport. What about these scholarships? A real bummer that your class missed out, huh? She shrugs. Yeah, but her kids are eligible. They’ll go to college. They’ll do better. “It’s a reason to stay in El Dorado ,” she says. And I detect something in the tenor of her voice. It’s pride.
