A perspective from Nick Tranguch
I’ve spent the better part of my career in rooms where growth is the primary language: companies scaling fast, teams being built, numbers being chased.
But the institutions I find most interesting to work with now aren’t chasing growth the way a startup does. Colleges and universities are trying to do something harder: hold something together. Protect a mission. Serve students and employees and communities simultaneously, often with resources that don’t match the expectations placed on them. That tension, between what an institution is trying to be and what it can actually afford, is where most of my conversations focus when speaking with higher education leaders. Driving 100+ year old institutions forward under tremendous headwinds, this is where the most important work happens.
What the Enrollment Cliff Actually Does to a Benefits Strategy
When enrollment drops, the instinct is to cut. And benefits are often one of the first places leadership looks, because the line items are visible and the savings feel controllable.
What’s harder to see is what cutting in the wrong places costs you. Faculty and staff at small and mid-sized institutions often chose those roles partly because of benefits quality. When that changes, even subtly, you feel it in retention. You feel it in recruitment. You feel it in morale during an already difficult period.
I’ve watched institutions make benefits decisions during enrollment pressure that created a secondary retention crisis they weren’t expecting. The financial logic was sound. The human logic wasn’t.
That’s the conversation worth having before renewal season starts — not during it.
Shared Governance Is Not an Obstacle. It’s Information.
One of the fastest ways to fail in a higher-education partnership is to treat faculty senate or union input as friction in the decision-making process. I’ve seen it happen. A solution that looked clean on paper gets introduced without the right stakeholders involved, and suddenly you’re not dealing with a benefits question anymore — you’re dealing with a governance crisis.
What I’ve come to understand is that shared governance, for all the complexity it adds, actually surfaces things that a purely top-down process would miss. Faculty who’ve been at an institution for twenty years know things about how employees actually use their benefits that no claims report will tell you. The institutions that get this right bring their shared governance structures in early — not to slow things down, but because the input makes the decision better.
That requires a partner who understands how that process works and doesn’t get impatient with it.
Pride of Place and Why It Matters
BSI is rooted in the Lehigh Valley, and that’s not incidental to how we work with higher-education institutions. When we moved our headquarters to South Bethlehem, we engaged directly with Northampton Community College and the Bethlehem Area School District to support a scholarship program that helps students take the next step into higher education. We didn’t do this as a sponsorship exercise, but because we understood that the health of those institutions and the health of the community were the same thing.
That’s the lens we bring to every college and university we work with. These aren’t accounts. They are the institutions their communities depend on. Sometimes these are our neighbors. And when you understand that, you make different decisions about how you show up.
What Happens When the Benefits Partner Is Actually Present
At Wilkes University, the early work wasn’t strategy, it was presence. Our team was on campus consistently during the first two years of the partnership. Not for meetings, but to understand how things actually worked: how employees navigated their plans, where confusion was building, what historical issues had been left unresolved.
The insight that came from that presence couldn’t have come from a dashboard. You can’t see employee frustration in a utilization report. You can see it when someone pulls you aside after a benefits fair to tell you they’ve been trying to resolve the same billing issue for four months.
That kind of access changes what you’re able to fix, and how fast.
When Benefits Become Part of the Institution’s Identity
The further you get into a partnership with a college or university, the more the work stops looking like benefits consulting and starts looking like fitting into the way the institution operates.
At Monmouth University, that has meant showing up at everything from the President’s annual breakfast to their National Women and Girls in Sports Day celebration. It’s meant working alongside development and marketing on community engagement, and understanding what the institution is trying to build beyond its balance sheet.
This is what happens when a partner understands that a university’s ability to attract and retain quality people — faculty, staff, administrators — is inseparable from how well it takes care of those people. Benefits are part of that story. They’re just not the whole story.
The Question I’d Ask Any Higher-Ed Leader
If your benefits partner disappeared tomorrow, would you feel it before the next renewal cycle?
If the answer is no, that’s worth sitting with. Because the institutions I’ve seen manage benefits most effectively treat it as a continuous function, not an annual event. They have a partner who is tracking claims trends in real time, flagging cost drivers before they become budget surprises, and maintaining relationships with employees so that problems get surfaced early instead of late.
That model exists. It’s just not the default — and it won’t happen unless you demand it.
Nick Tranguch Chief Growth Officer, BSI Corporate Benefits