And the president resigned yesterday…https://www.hchc.edu/hellenic-college-board-of-trustees-announcement/ Oops, missed that it was in the Inside Higher Ed article.
My personal cutoff is $100 million. I figure that an institution can weather a four or five year storm with that amount.
Standard & Poor’s rates come college debt as well, so it’s worth checking them alongside Moody’s and Fitch.
Well, I may have to eat crow. Bennington College has raised half of their current fundraising campaign.
The current president is resigning and she has really brought in the dollars. Fingers crossed they can get the additional funds.https://www.benningtonbanner.com/stories/ban-l-silver-0423_web,571177
Oregon College of Art and Craft added to the list.
@SailingMomof2 Bennington has had issues in the past and at one point was looking to shutdown. They needed in the past to maintain 600 undergrad. Issues with Vermont is their shrinking student population.
96% of Bennington students are not from Vermont.
What is Tulsa doing?
Aren’t education masters programs cash cows?
Then again, they may not have been low-cost enough.
OCAC is a weird case—they announced in February that all of their degree programs were ending as of this May, but they waited until May to announce they were shutting down? Like, were they really going to remain as a going concern as a college without any degrees? I mean, sure, a college without degrees does sound kind of stereotypically Portland, but still…
Maybe it has already been discussed here but Southern Vermont College is honing their last graduation on May 12h and is closing this summer.
Do we have a comprehensive list of all the Vermont colleges shutting down?
@psych_ three souther Vermont, St Joseph and Green Mountain. Goddard is on watch. Vermont just has too many colleges
I think the city trend is also at play here as students seem to currently prefer a more urban environment with access to cultural and other offerings. Several students from my s19’s class are headed to Emmanuel, a comparable school academically to several of those in Vermont.
@MAandMEmom, yes.
Urban, pre-professional, and big name is in (note the rise of NYU and USC since the '70’s, when they were seen as schools for CUNY and UC rejects, respectively).
Rural, non-preprofessional, small to tiny LACs with only a regional or little-known brand and not much money are in big trouble.
In fact, 2 of 3 strikes (of being rural, tiny, and poor) against you makes life very difficult. I’ve been following the plight of Earlham with interest.
I agree…students don’t want rural schools any longer. I think “back in the day” going away to college was more like going to boarding school. You went there, lived and studied in the bubble. Now the world is much smaller. Wherever you are, you are more connected and more “on the move.” People didn’t even eat out much as recent as 30 years ago. Now that is nearly a daily occurrence for many.
Though: Define “rural”. Some isolated land-grant (and similar) publics attached to isolated small college towns are thriving, not just surviving (think Virginia Tech, Mississippi State, Georgia, Oregon,…), so it can’t just be the whole middle-of-nowhere thing.
An interesting article on how colleges in Vermont are being especially hard-hit: https://vtdigger.org/2019/05/05/college-enrollment-crisis-hitting-vermont-especially-hard/
When you have 30k students, faculty and staff, it’s no longer ‘rural’ but a city unto itself.
Some schools do just fine like Grinnell and Dartmouth, but other are definitely in the boonies. We looked at several small schools in tiny towns. I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could! I asked my daughter’s BF if he ever wished he’d picked a different school as some in the very small towns were ranked higher than his school in his sport. He said no, that Mt. Olive was a pickle factory and didn’t have a single store or restaurant open after 6 pm.
Yes, gigantic unis don’t suffer the ill consequences of being located in the middle of nowhere (ask PSU; or Cornell). I doubt students in those places feel like there is nothing to do.
Different story for a tiny LAC of 1K.
One big factor is that urban violent crime rates have really dropped over the past few decades (thank the banning of leaded gasoline).
A former co-worker of mine commuted in to downtown NYC have in the '70’s and '80’s. I asked him what it was like to work on Wall Street back then. He said “I feared for my life every day”.
I also knew someone who attended Stern in the '90’s and she said Washington Park was still pretty rough then, with regular muggings in the NYU area.
When the inner cities seemed like violent jungles, a small bucolic LAC seemed like an idyllic escape. Now being in the middle of nowhere is boring while urban areas are exciting (because your odds of being mugged/murdered/raped is much lower now).
We can see this in the different fortunes of Cornell and UPenn. Both are large Ivies with a reputation for being pre-professionally-focused. These days, Penn is way more selective than Cornell. Back around 1980, Cornell was far more selective than Penn.
I worked in NYC in the 80s and early 90s and often wandered at night, looking for a cab and not finding one. The area around NYU was pretty deserted after midnight; a cop once stopped me in Washington square park, befuddled by the barricades. The park is closed, he said. Why? Because of drug dealers, he said. I swung around, hand to my eyes, and said “Where? I don’t see any! “
Nothing bad ever happened to me, and I was never afraid for my life. Disgusted sometimes with the conditions in the street during the Dinkins administration, crack heads sleeping half nekked in bank lobbies, blood mixing with rain on the subway stairs…that’s why I left. It had nothing to do with leaded gasoline or violent crime. Broken Windows…