PC, bad with money, in wrong business?? http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/12/12/oberlin-faces-budget-crunch-due-missed-enrollment-targets
the loss on the endowment is absolutely staggering. The total market is up 19% ytd. A monkey or dartboard could choose better investments than their million dollar advisors. Not only should the investment advisors be fired, but so should those responsible for hiring them.
Did they entirely clear their waitlist?
I don’t get it. I had two kids go to Ivies but Oberlin is my favorite school.
Maybe Oberlin is shooting itself in the foot. It sounds like an obnoxious place to go to school.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-oberlin-bakery-racial-dispute-20171210-story.html
Oberlin has been a bit of an acquired taste forever, so I don’t think it is that. For the right student, it is the perfect place.
There are other threads on this:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/oberlin-college/2016712-enrollment-drop-creates-financial-shortfall-p1.html
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/oberlin-college/2025563-oberlin-faces-budget-deficit-p1.html
After reading the original article, a few observations. I’ve spent my career in academia, in public institutions. There were years in which the faculty as a whole received no raises (except in individual cases of competitive outside offers or prior contractual promises), due to state budget constraints or poor economic conditions. It’s disappointing but not damaging in the long run.
Oberlin’s endowment is much smaller than that of some other liberal arts colleges in what I would consider to be its academic peer group (e.g., AWS, Grinnell, Carleton, and others mainly in the east, e.g., Bowdoin, Middlebury) but larger than others (e.g., Reed). My definition of academic peer group is based on the statistics on the percentage of graduates who later obtain PhD’s (stats available on college websites). It needs to cushion itself more from short-term surprises in enrollment.
I don’t think “politics” has a lot to do with the long-range success of colleges. I mean “real” politics. Rather, it’s the academic experience and reputation. I’m not happy with some of the things that are going on at my undergraduate alma mater (Reed), but I think the college’s leadership and faculty are outstanding, and the current issues will pass with Reed’s academic and liberal political reputation intact. I give Reed a good chunk of money every year.
Perhaps the HS grads are changing? Less into social justice ideals and more into preprofessional degrees? (Just a wild guess.)
Is that a fair comparison when ~1/3 of the student body are performing arts/conservatory types? (I’m guessing that they don’t head off to doctoral programs in the same % as liberal arts majors.)
Yes, the endowment is only 117th in the country in total size, $261k per student is still pretty healthy.
The endowment issues are head scratching, but in general I’ve always viewed Oberlin as a niche place and niche college popularity does ebb and flow and especially smack dab in the midwest but it is perplexing that they were unable to fill their class. At least on CC it is always showing up on many, many people’s “need to think about” lists even for kids that I would never peg as Oberlin types which always surprised me as I always thought that Oberlin was an acquired taste but like Antioch used to be.
@bluebayou Oberlin acquits itself well. (I’d like to see these rankings for top 20.)
https://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html and https://www.reed.edu/ir/phdrank.html.
@momofthreeboys I agree that the enrollment shortfall is headscratching. Was there a management issue of some kind? (I have a cousin who attended Antioch. She made out OK.)
re post#8, from what I can tell the current trend is to try combine social justice with a preprofessional degrees. I think advertizing that we are the place for you if you want to follow up undergrad with a 6-year PhD program into a declining job market for most PhDs may not be a winning selling point.
Although if they had just managed median endowment performance over the years, this wouldn’t really be an issue.
@turtle17, in my reckoning the PhD rankings are valuable not so much for potential future PhD students but as an indicator of the rigor of the academic curriculum. That’s what I looked for when my kids were applying to college. And for that reason my son applied to Williams, Carleton, Reed, and UChicago, among others. He subsequently chose not to seek a post-graduate degree, though considered law. But no question he got an outstanding education at Chicago.
Reed and Oberlin have been on this family’s long list forever. We keep coming back to those schools, but for several kids now (including some nieces and nephews here) neither school has made the short list.
The main reason has been the harshness of the rhetoric of the student bodies.
Reed: I know a student who is currently there and he hates what’s going on. Whether it’s the admin’s fault or not, it feels like too much of a risk for a student to choose. I wouldn’t what that sort of disruption to color my child’s college experience. So pointless.
Oberlin: Lena Dunham’s harsh, unyielding stances on things. She’s a “face” of Oberlin now and then those stances are underscored by the general obnoxiousness of the student body that goes up in arms because, I don’t know, the cafeteria attempted to serve culturally conscious food and, you know, got it a little wrong. It’s just so disheartening.
Why would you send a student into those environments? It’s too distracting from the many other things a student has to deal with. Why not be someplace . . . pleasant?
“The main reason has been the harshness of the rhetoric of the student bodies.”
There are a few schools we looked at where the students just seemed angry and unhappy. Maybe those students would seem unhappy at any school, but at a few schools it seemed there was a critical mass of these students, and if you didn’t believe as they did, you’d be shut of of the activities of the school.
Who wants to live with all that stress for 4 years?
I grew up not far from Oberlin and have a kid who likely could have been very happy there. A lot of what is written here is true, Oberlin has always been a kind of “niche” school, and you needed to have a certain outlook on issues to really thrive there. Oberlin has been proudly liberal/progressive for ever, and that has always been a piece of the ethos of the place, maybe more so than other schools. So they have, quite intentionally it appears, limited themselves to fishing for students from some portion of the more liberal of high school students every year. Given that in general we tend to be more liberal the younger we are, this is not necessarily a huge problem in itself. But, all of a sudden over the last several years people have started to publicize the types of things that occur at places like Oberlin, and things like the hoax hate crimes, cafeteria cultural appropriation, the various Lena Dunham embarrassments and the effort to hound a local shop out of business for daring to call the police on an African American shoplifter are out for all to see. I think these types of things turn off some portion of even the more liberal students out there, and the school is all of a sudden fishing in an even smaller niche market than it did previously. And even among the somewhat smaller slice of students who are not bothered by such goings on, Oberlin exists within a state which is far from the politics of New York or California. Ohio occasionally votes republican, and although the county in which Oberlin sits is reliably democratic, it is possible, even likely, that a student at Oberlin will get some republican cooties on them at some point.
My nephew is a senior at Oberlin. I will tell you the Jewish community is very turned off because of incidents over the past year with antisemitic posts by a faculty member and other antisemitic incidents in and around campus. Many Jewish alumni and donors were up in arms and stopped supporting the school. I believe the professor is gone now. That’s probably a small percentage of the overall drop but it’s still out there. My sister really wanted my nephew to transfer but he refused. Same sister just took younger child to Clark which they liked very much. In casual conversation with someone there, they were told they had some recent transfers from Oberlin who were uncomfortable with the almost combative atmosphere of the liberal students on campus.
Oberlin made itself a national laughing stock with the General Tso’s chicken idiocy. Especially since that dish apparently was invented in NYC and popularized by the Panda Express at a mall located near you. The Oberlin friend I have just shakes his head about that one.
How big is the market for kids who want to spend four years in a comedy sketch from Portlandia?
Well Oberlin isn’t alone in high percentage of PhD candidates and a social justice bent without the wacky stuff, social justice isn’t a synonym for angry rhetoric - that comes from the students who enrolled and what an administration and faculty model …Kalamazoo College, albeit smaller, is a great example of a college with strong social justice programs and also in the midwest. Kalamazoo College has always ranked very high for PhD production this year ranking 17th among the nation’s four-year liberal arts colleges for the percentage of graduates who go on to earn doctorate degrees but gets little love here in CC land. Makes you wonder for sure about “trendy” and “colleges” and " in your face progressiveness" in CC-land… So, my finger is on wackiness and some financial management leakage.
Is Oberlin progressive? Is it liberal? Remembering the root of the word liberal is the same as liberty; and means free, or freedom. Politically, liberal used to mean tolerant and broadly accepting. As many have shown here, Oberlin is certainly not broadly accepting. Even social justice is a hard to define phrase. When one has to modify the word justice, is the outcome really justice? Is it justice to favor group A now over group B, because years ago group B had been favored over group A? That might be social justice, but is it justice?
My S considered Oberlin a decade or so ago, but he was much a centrist politically, and just did not get a very welcoming feeling. I have to agree it appeals to a niche crowd and that cycles come and go on what is “in”.