Vermont’s Goddard College struggles to stay alive due to financial pressures and accreditation probation, according to today’s insightful article published in Inside Higher Ed:
I think it’s paywalled, but the gist of it is that Hampshire’s president has resigned suddenly, citing division over her leadership. This comes after the chair and vice chair of the board of trustees resigned last week.
No real further information—this was more of a breaking news blurb.
I am a consultant in the higher ed sector. The past 10 years have been brutal for many schools. The Great Recession (huge sudden descrease in home equity) wiped out a lot of the $ used to pay for college. And, then the millennials all finished college. Gens x and y are much smaller. So demographics are working against the industry right now. Most colleges had decades of being in a pretty easy business (how many businesses do you know which reject a significant proportion of their customers?). With the Recession, fear of debt grew. People were no longer willing to pay top dollar for anything other than an Ivy. So they either got their top choice school, or went to a state school. The in-between schools got crushed. And many did nothing to react to this problem thinking that once the recession is over, all will go back to normal. Nope, because the demographics are now in play. And now international demand is way down (federal policies). We will see many more schools close.
The UK has 130 recognized universities for a population of 65 million, of which the lower 30 one could argue are not fit for purpose. The state of Ohio has 126 4 year colleges and universities for a population of around 11 million people.
The UK has an area of 94,000 square miles, and a robust public transportation system. Ohio has an area of 45,000 square miles, much of which it’s inaccessible except by car.
The thread is concerned with struggling colleges and universities not being able to maintain enrollment goals leading to financial collapse. I am suggesting there are too many colleges, I used the UK and Ohio as an example. I am not suggesting population is the only consideration but I am not sure how public transport plays into the equation. I would argue size of student body and factors such as critical mass and economies of scale are far more important.
@elguapo1 – I’m not (I hope) starting a debate because they aren’t allowed, but I did want to point out that Ohio schools are unique in that many of them attract lots of students from the Eastern Seaboard, which arguably doesn’t have enough high-quality schools to meet demand.
…and many kids from the Mid-West go back east. There are simply too many schools which cannot attract a critical mass of students for reasons of quality of product, affordability and adverse demographics.
Couldn’t this whole back-and-forth be settled, at least in part, by doing three things?
Taking the number of students graduating each year nationally and comparing it to the capacity for incoming students each year, and
adjusting the numbers for historical retention rates to gauge if there's an oversupply of seats in classes past the first year, and
finding some way to adjust for the fact that the number of seats available isn't a static number year to year (this, admittedly, is probably the hardest part).
Until and unless that sort of analysis is done, claiming that there is or isn’t an oversupply of slots for college attendance is simply silly.
(And yes, I recognize that this wouldn’t address the financial stability issue—but it would at least answer one of the foundational inputs into answering such a question.)
I am currently reading Nathan Grawe’s “Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education” . Detailed book covering various issues, such as populations shifts, regional differences and a whole lot of other stuff. I would recommend it highly for anyone in higher ed, faculty or administrator. Covers in detail many of the issues that posts here have touched upon.
Okay—losing $10k per student sounds bad, but TU has less than 5,000 students. So yeah, they’re losing a cool $50M per year, but with an endowment over $1B (yes, over a billion)? They’ve got the luxury of of time to fix the problem.
This isn’t a financially driven decision, IMO—the financial messaging is there to provide a smokescreen for a restructuring that will, I’m predicting right now, involve at least an erosion of tenure and certainly a dilution of the faculty’s voice in running the institution.
@dfbdfb I have a very strong feeling that you are absolutely correct. This quote is a good indication of that: “programs seemed to be discontinued mainly because of faculty attrition rather than strategic decisions.” Basically, they’re closing down programs in order to reduce the number of tenure track faculty they will need to hire. Their decisions are strategic, but the strategy isn’t a more university that functions better and budgets better, but a University that is more under their control, without having to deal with faculty and their pesky ideas about “educational standards”, or “academic integrity”. It’s as though these people think that a university is about “education” or something equally ridiculous. Don’t they know that it’s all about “customer satisfaction”? That is why “shared governance” is such a bad idea. Left to themselves, these faculty would run the university like an “institute of higher learning”, or something equally ludicrous, instead of like a business.
What is interesting is that it’s reversing a common trend in many four year public schools, that of “mission creep”. In many public universities that were highly focused on teaching, faculty have been pressured to add research to full time teaching schedules because the school wanted access to research funds. This school looks like it’s reducing it’s mission, since cutting graduate programs cuts research. However, that may just be another way the upper administration is shooting itself in the foot just to reduce the power of the faculty, since only TT faculty can actually advise graduate students (their doctoral program is unlikely to be accredited if they have their PhD students advised by contingent faculty). So it seems that they’re willing to forgo research money so long as this would allow them to reduce the number and the power of TT and tenured faculty.
I think mission creep may very well be a challenge at institutions all the way up and down the Carnegie classification food chain. I think in times of “fat” many colleges and universities became everything to everyone. If X college was building a new program, center, accepting certain students, expanding their footprint then Y college did it as well. All with not too much regard to student success and retention, much less cost, as new students would replace the non returners. During those good years, colleges could have plowed money into their endowments, but they didn’t in order to be competitive in all the aforementioned areas.
And then student demand for that program falls so that the college has to maintain the costly underused program, especially if it hired tenured faculty (a multi-decade commitment) for it.