D Azusa Pacific University
D California Institute of Integral Studies
D Dominican University of California
D John F. Kennedy University
D Pacific Union College
D St. Mary’s College of California
D Woodbury University
C- Golden Gate University
C- Marymount California University
C- Southern California University of Health Sciences
C- Vanguard University of Southern California
Just read the wiki page on Bridgeport , they seemed to right the ship about 20 years ago and got their enrollment up , but as mentioned their endowment was pretty small. IIRC this is the 2 NY metro school with a good size enrollment that will be gone, with college of New Rochelle the other.
University of Bridgeport has been on shaky ground for a long time. It was “acquired” by the Unification church, had a 2 year faculty strike, lost its law school to Quinnipiac University. It also added a school of naturopathic medicine which has its detractors.
Colleges which survive this crisis should prepare for another one on 18 years. Birth rates have plummeted due to the virus and depression, with some estimates that births in the US are on track to be down 500k as a result.
They should’ve been preparing since the 2008 financial crisis. The US birthrate has declined considerably since then. Enrollment is supposed to take a big hit in 2026. They’ve known for years but still keep building. Look at Pa’s public school system. Not just a birthrate issue but shifting population out of the rust belt.
And not a closure or merger, but evidence of frantic budget cutting is the news coming out about colleges, even wealthy ones, drastically scaling back their sports programs.
If I read correctly it DOES NOT include closure or merger and IUP and WCU were specifically carved out. It’s a start but until consolidation is on the table it won’t be enough.
The predicted drop in enrollment as the result of the drop in birthrate caused by the 2008 recession can be easily offset by increasing the number of high school graduates who attend college. Only about 60% do so, and increasing that to 70% will more than likely offset enrollment. Of course, to do so, the country will need to invest in primary and secondary education, minimum wage, and other such investments in the people, instead of into investing money in the wealthiest Americans and into the top echelons of corporate employees.
Shifting the country to an economic model which helps expand the middle class, and shifting the model of financing high school education away from a system which ensures that low income families have the worst economic support for their education will prepare many more students for college.
Increasing minimum wage to that which would allow people to actually survive on a 40-44 hour a week job, and having a healthcare system that doesn’t bankrupt a family that has the bad luck of having somebody with appendicitis or some other medical condition. So then kids from families with income levels in the bottom 50% will be prepared for college, and their families will be able to afford college.
These students will enroll in the smaller public directionals in more urban areas (or close to them).
On the other hand, many rural colleges, especially public ones, are likely doomed, unless they find a way to attract urban students, since the local population which used to make up their student population is disappearing as people continue to leave the rural areas and move to cities.
The drop in birthrate caused by the present recession may be offset by a baby boom resulting from the first weeks when everybody was staying at home. Also, the recovery from the pandemic is indeed likely to by pretty dramatic, but it will only happen after there is either a reliable vaccine or a widely available effective treatment.
We had a virtual happy hour last night. The topic of baby boom came up. Whenever there’s a bad snowstorm my wife typically sees an uptick in deliveries 9 months later. Many of my co-workers have small kids. They all said that the lockdown has acted as a contraceptive because they’ve been WFH with kids. Adding another to the mix isn’t a priority. I’m curious if there will be a boom in December. Maybe I’ll ask my wife’s OB/Gyn friend if she’s getting more patients.
Do we really need 60% or 70% of our kids to graduate from college? It sounds nice but how many jobs require a 4 year degree? If that includes certificate programs and trade schools maybe. Even some of the admired EU countries like Germany don’t have that high of a percentage of college grads.
A kid in my son’s graduating HS class this year is skipping college for now. He’s a paid programmer already. Smart kid. The value proposition of college at current prices is dropping…maybe fast.
A state government that wants to offer access to higher education to students in rural areas may find that there are not enough students in commuting range to justify a full-range university in a rural area. I.e. residential college may be a necessity, rather than a luxury, for some in rural areas if they want to attend any college at all. But then funding residential college for some but not all (beyond perhaps the top students who earn scholarships or admission to a more selective flagship) students could be difficult from a policy and political standpoint.
Note that attending college does not necessarily mean completing a bachelor’s degree; some people attend college for programs or courses that do not lead to a bachelor’s degree but are necessary or desirable to enter their chosen profession (but there is also the unfortunate tendency for credential creep, where employers make a bachelor’s degree a requirement for hiring or promotion, even if the general or major-specific skills indicated by a bachelor’s degree are not required for the job or can be proven for the purpose of the job some other way).
https://educationdata.org/high-school-graduates-who-go-to-college/ says that 66.7% of high school graduates immediately went to college in 2017, although this is lower than for 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2016, and includes those enrolling two year as well as four year colleges.
I would say that the real issue is some sort of postsecondary education. I mean, you can make a decent living as, say, a plumber, but there’s actually some fairly specialized knowledge that requires math and physics beyond what’s required for high school graduation—and that’s why there are apprenticeship programs.
Now, whether those are attached to colleges or not, that’s the question. This is one area where community colleges have been doing a lot better than most 4±year schools, really.
Credential creep is a sad by-product of substandard high school education. If you are in a region of the country where the typical HS graduate is reading at a 7th grade level or does not know how to translate lbs into kilos, you are NOT going to able to hire HS grads as pharm techs, even though there is nothing magical about either an AA degree or a BA in qualifying a pharm tech. It’s nice to bemoan credential creep, but until a HS diploma means being able to read at a HS level and do basic math, it is pretty darn inefficient to be testing every single applicant in general knowledge.
I have worked for corporations which spend tens of millions of dollars a year on employee training, up-skilling and both hard and soft learning (i.e. technical and interpersonal/leadership skills). It is a point of pride what a high quality learning program can teach, and to watch employees advance based on the skills they have developed. I have never worked for a company which had success teaching someone how to read.
So- requiring a bachelor’s or AA degree is an efficient shortcut to getting the workforce you need where you need it. I would love the luxury of hiring HS graduates from terrible HS’s and teaching them all how to do fractions and percentages but that will be in my next life.
But have high school graduation standards been getting lower over the years or decades? I.e. do you think that there are many high school graduates today whose reading, writing, and/or math ability is worse than the minimum standard for high school graduates a generation ago? I.e. do you think that employers’ devaluation of high school diplomas (and the resulting credential creep) is based on actual devaluation of what a high school diploma means in terms of skills that the high school graduate has?
Yes- lower. Every single academic class in the US that has been replaced by sex ed, driver’s ed, just say no to drugs, etc. means a loss in competencies in that area for kids who are not taking the AP/DE/Honors curriculum. I’m not suggesting that sex ed is not important-- but back in our parents day, the hours HS kids are spending in these classes used to be trigonometry and literature.
Average hours spent in school has not increased, and so many more non-academic subjects are now taught. You need to teach a semester on cyber-safety and how to avoid bullying? Bye-bye US History from WW2 to the present.
When I was in HS, driver’s ed was taught by a local driving school which pretty much had the monopoly in my town. Yes- you paid for it, which meant that low income kids did not get their licenses at 16 when their more affluent peers did. Is that right? No. But now that HS has driver’s ed as an actual subject, taught during the school day, by an actual teacher who is an employee of the school system. And it’s free. But what classes are those driver’s ed students NOT taking during that period?
That same HS had as requirements the “holy trinity” of bio, chem and physics. No, everyone did not “need” physics. But now ONLY the college bound take the trinity, if the local newspaper is accurate. The non-college bound take earth science, a watered down anatomy class (the knee bone is connected to the hip bone, that sort of thing) and a “topics in contemporary science” class which covers recycling and why you should check the air pressure in your tires to save gas (seriously).
Do you think these HS graduates with no further science classes are prepared for the economy of 2025? And yet- I know teachers in the system, who say that since some freshmen can’t possibly take bio- that’s how poorly they were prepared from middle school- that at least they are getting something which approximates “scientific literacy”. But if you don’t know what an atom or a gene is- how literate can you be in the modern age?