Q&A With Lloyd Hamm, Jr. of Anna Maria College
Lloyd L. Hamm Jr.
Title: Chief Operating Officer and Dean, School of Business; Anna Maria College, Paxton
Hometown and Residence: Upton
Education: Bachelor's degree and MBA, Anna Maria; certificate programs from Harvard University
(Watch and listen to a video clip from our interview with Lloyd Hamm.)
After many years in the banking industry, Lloyd Hamm, now a self-described “recovering community banker,” has returned to the place that helped launch his career — Anna Maria College — where he earned two degrees in the 1980s. His new mission: Launch a new business school at the Paxton-based campus that can become a destination program for hundreds of students from throughout New England.
But since he graduated, he has been no stranger to college life. A bookshelf in his office includes texts he helped write during the 1990s, when he was both a bank executive and an instructor at New England College of Finance in Boston.
The first question is probably the most obvious: Why is Anna Maria jumping into the business school arena?
Business majors in general, right now, are sought after. Anna Maria’s business program has been good, but not a destination program. My job is to create a destination program where people throughout the region would want to send their son or daughter because they know they’d get a values-based, first-class business education with opportunities for internships. What I hope to introduce is some pretty unique learning opportunities which lead to employment.
Have you talked with businesses locally, even to line up internship possibilities?
Almost every person I run into today, I ask. I have found business leaders to be incredibly receptive to a local business school that produces good, quality students, of course, (and are) willing to give them internship possibilities that could ultimately lead to employment.
Is there a concern among the school’s leaders that there are a lot of business schools out there already? Let’s put it this way: It’s a big boat.
It is. You have Nichols, which is predominantly business. Assumption has a business program. WPI (has a) graduate business program (that) is terrific. Clark has an undergraduate program but is really well known for its graduate school of management. Holy Cross has accounting and finance. But we tend not to compete for the same students as Holy Cross or even WPI, which is more the engineering side of it. So, when I look at it, I say, ‘Yeah, there’s competition, (and) competition will make all of us better. But I do believe there’s an opportunity, especially for the type of student Anna Maria has historically attracted, and their ability to have access to have first-class education in business. I know we compete against state schools, but I think we can offer a more personalized approach, one with closer interaction with the instructors.
You’ve spent much of your career in banks. What is it like to make a change from an industry like that into higher education?
I spent the last 31 years in banking, so I watched it grow and change dramatically. When I first went to Mechanics Bank in Worcester, they had just moved away from using debit cards; not debit cards as you know them today, but actual cards that they would stamp as they processed your checks. So I was on the forefront of designing technologies and driving technology into that arena. I was part of an industry that had to evolve to survive and compete. I think education is in that same situation. We can’t and will not be able to keep raising prices. The argument that trees don’t grow to the sky? Tuitions don’t grow to the sky either. And as a result we’re going to need to develop a destination program that remains affordable for families. Lower-, middle- and upper-class families all struggle with the cost of education.
That’s pretty tough for a small, private college today, don’t you think?
Absolutely. It’s always difficult because … if you were to drive by Worcester State, which is a very terrific state institution … look at their new buildings. They have 6-and-a-half million taxpayers in Massachusetts lining up to support that. We don’t get those same opportunities. It is going to be more difficult over time, in my opinion, for tuition-dependent schools like Anna Maria to be able to compete with the amount of money the state and federal government will be able to throw at significant state-run educational institutions.
We’re bringing a knife to a gunfight with what the state can do in supporting their institutions. So we have to do it in terms of the quality of education, the quality of instruction, and the experience that our student has.
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