It’s Never the Carburetor

When a vintage BMW motorcycle won’t start, the owner always says the same thing: “I think it’s the carburetor.”

It’s never the carburetor.

It’s the points. It’s the condenser. It’s a cracked vacuum line you can’t see, or a petcock that’s been slowly failing for two years, or a ground wire that corroded last winter while the bike sat in the garage under a tarp. The carburetor is the thing people can name, so it’s the thing people blame. The actual problem is quieter, less obvious, and has been getting worse while everyone was looking at the wrong part.

I rode BMW motorcycles for most of my adult life — never rebuilt one, despite telling myself every winter that this was the year — but I’ve stood in enough garages, watched enough real mechanics work, and broken down on enough back roads to know what a misdiagnosis looks like. And I’ve been thinking about carburetors a lot lately — because I spend my days now talking to college presidents and board members, and they all say the same thing.

“It’s enrollment.”

It’s never enrollment.

Enrollment is the carburetor. It’s the visible symptom, the thing everyone can name, the number on the first slide of every board presentation. Enrollment is down, so we need to recruit harder, discount deeper, add a nursing program, launch an esports team, build a new student center, hire a VP of Enrollment Management with a capital-letter title and a six-figure salary. Fix the carburetor and the bike will start.

The bike doesn’t start.

Here’s what’s actually wrong:

The revenue model is a single-cylinder engine in a world that requires eight. A college that depends on tuition from 18-year-olds for 85% of its revenue is running on one cylinder — and that cylinder is shrinking every year as the demographic cliff steepens, as public skepticism of the degree grows, as families calculate the ROI on a $180,000 investment and increasingly say no.

Enrollment strategies don’t fix a revenue model. They optimize a broken one. You can recruit your way to a bigger freshman class and still lose money on every student because your discount rate is 60% and your cost structure was built for an enrollment you’ll never see again. Iowa Wesleyan’s enrollment was rising when it closed. The admissions team did its job. The engine was still broken.

The points are corroded. That’s the board culture. Most boards of struggling colleges are populated by alumni who love the institution as it was, not as it needs to become. They joined to preserve, not to transform. Every meeting is a referendum on whether things are “as bad as all that,” and the answer is always “not yet” — until the meeting where the answer is “it’s too late.” A board that asks “how do we get enrollment back to where it was?” is cleaning the carburetor. A board that asks “what should this campus become?” is checking the ignition.

The vacuum line is cracked. That’s the gap between what the campus offers and what the community needs. A 101-acre campus in a town with 25% poverty and a manufacturing plant ten miles away that can’t find welders is a vacuum line disconnected from the engine. The campus has classrooms, workshops, dormitories, dining halls, and green space. The community needs workforce training, childcare, health services, business incubation, and a gathering place. The two are sitting right next to each other, and nobody’s made the connection — because the college is too busy trying to recruit 18-year-olds from three states away to notice the 30-year-olds across the street who need a CDL.

The petcock has been failing for years. That’s the financial structure — the slow leak everyone can hear if they listen. Deferred maintenance growing by $2 million a year. Endowment draws increasing from 5% to 7% to “whatever we need this quarter.” Staff positions eliminated and never refilled, so the remaining staff absorb the work until they leave too. The petcock doesn’t fail dramatically. It drips. And one day you turn the key and the tank is dry and everyone acts surprised.

The ground wire corroded over the winter. That’s the loss of community trust — the quietest failure and the hardest to repair. When a campus stops engaging its town, when the president stops showing up at Rotary, when the college raises tuition while the town’s median income stays flat, when the dining hall goes dark on weekends and the gym locks its doors to non-students — the ground wire corrodes. And when the college finally needs the community to rally, to write to the legislature, to show up at the accreditor’s hearing, to support a transformation plan — the connection isn’t there anymore. It corroded while the bike was under the tarp.

Here’s what I’ve learned from motorcycles and colleges:

The owner who comes to you saying “it’s the carburetor” isn’t wrong about the symptom. The bike won’t start. But if you clean the carburetor and hand it back, you haven’t fixed anything — you’ve just given them a clean carburetor on a bike that still won’t run. And they’ll be back in a month, angrier, with less trust, and less money.

The mechanic’s job is to say, respectfully but clearly: “It’s not the carburetor. Let me show you what it actually is.”

That’s what we do at Campus Transformation. We don’t fix the carburetor. We look at the whole machine — the revenue model, the board culture, the community connection, the financial structure, the physical assets, the workforce demand within driving distance — and we tell you what’s actually broken. Sometimes the answer is that the college can be saved. Sometimes the answer is that the college can’t, but the campus can — and should — become something bigger, something that serves more people, something that runs on eight cylinders instead of one.

The hardest part isn’t the diagnosis. Any good mechanic can find the real problem in an hour. The hardest part is getting the owner to stop pointing at the carburetor.

If your board is having the carburetor conversation — “we just need more students, we just need a better marketing plan, we just need one more year” — it might be time to let someone look at the whole engine.

The first conversation is free. And I promise you, it’s not the carburetor.

Jeff Ritter is the founder of Campus Transformation. He spent 25 years as a professor and a lifetime riding vintage BMW motorcycles — though “rebuilding” is generous. He watched other people rebuild them, asked a lot of questions, handed them the wrong wrench at critical moments, and once successfully changed a spark plug that didn’t need changing. But he rode every model BMW made between 1965 and 2003, broke down on most of them, and learned more about diagnostics from the side of the road than any shop manual could teach. The metaphor stands. The mechanical credentials do not.