Definitely surprising news about Mills…there are many schools with lower endowments and/or a more bleak financial picture. What happens to the $187M endowment money?
It looks like they’ll use some of it to wind down operations (which they’re doing over the next two years, making this a more orderly plan than most closures), and then repurpose some of it as an endowment for their planned Mills Institute (which looks to be a thinktank?)—the big thing is that they have to adhere to donor agreements as much as possible. So anything that’s required to go toward undergraduate education, say, would be spent during the teachout, and anything that’s unrestricted could go toward future plans.
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Is it possible that much of Mills’ endowment is restricted to purposes other than those needed to continue operating the college, so that it is actually short of money in terms of operating the college?
I suspect so.
One of the dirty secrets of college finances is that unrestricted endowment numbers can be hard to come by, and those are what’s really important when gauging fiscal health.
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Mills college will become an institute with no degrees offered. A think tank?
Notre Dame de Namur in California is not closing, as previously expected. It is changing its focus.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/Historic-Notre-Dame-de-Namur-University-will-16041538.php
That’s horrible!
Marywood College in Detroit tried that a few years ago. It didn’t work and they are now closed.
That was Marygrove College. I knew it would not work as soon as I heard their plan. There are too many people at the top level of educational organizations who don’t have any idea what it actually takes to operate a college. Cutting programs and number of students only goes so far toward cutting costs. There are certain things that still have to be done whether the school has 100 students or 3,000 students. The work/cost doesn’t decrease based on student numbers in all areas of operations. Unfortunately, the folks at the top rarely include the worker bees in discussions about things like cutting programs … and then they are so surprised to find out it didn’t work out the way they thought it would.
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Northern Vermont did not last long! Merger with Castleton and Vermont Tech to form Vermont state university. I think Vermont only needs one state university. They need to close all those campuses and pour resources into making UVM a better priced university for instate.
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About 10 years ago the Vermont legislature planned to merge the three state colleges into UVM. UVM had a fit and threatened to become a private university.
Vermont’s population does not seem to be highly concentrated in one metro area or region, unlike in some other states like Arizona or Hawaii. Burlington, where UVM is, is the largest, but with only about a third of the population., so about two thirds of the population would not be able to commute (less expensively) to UVM if it were the only state university, or if other state universities did not have suitable academic programs.
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But have a UVM with a few campuses works… this will not fix the problem as ppl are not used to a Vermont State University nor did Northern Vermont work… UVM - Castleton and maybe another campus… Vermont is unable to fund its universities. They can use community college of Vermont to plug those area with small centers with 12 locations I think it covers Vermont well. Plus the future is not great for Vermont. They’ve lost a few private colleges and other than UVM the rest of the state schools aren’t sustainable
I work at a university with a central campus and a bunch of outlying campuses (which used to be community colleges, but that was decades ago). Consolidation sounds like a good idea, but if you eliminate each campus’s autonomy it isn’t really a great model, and if you keep their autonomy you lose the savings you might have expected.
DFB- excellent point. I am old enough to remember the massive outpouring of enthusiasm when the AOL-Time Warner merger was announced. Depending on which newspaper you read, it was either going to create massive shareholder value by cutting costs, or create massive shareholder value by creating synergy.
Since neither proved to be true- caveat emptor. Modest cost savings, modest synergy, it’s taught in business schools today as a cautionary tale…
Vermont is small. The furthest you can get from Burlington and still be within Vermont is Brattleboro and that is about 150 miles from Burlington. There are residents in many states who live further from any 4-year flagship university than that.
Wyoming only has one university by constitution. U of Wyoming does have several satellite campuses and there are online courses, but almost everyone ends up in Laramie at some point. There are many community colleges too.
Many students live hours and hours away from Laramie by car.
Shhh! Don’t give the anti-publicly-funded-education folks in other states with the same stipulation (which includes, at the very least, Alaska) any more ideas than they already have!
Wyoming only has one private college that I know of (it’s a catholic school that is very religious and doesn’t take federal funds) so ALL schools, except one, are publicly funded - just the funds all go to one place. U of Wyoming is well funded and very cheap for everyone, residents and non-residents. Most residents don’t even pay the instate tuition as there are so many grants and scholarships. And Cheney scholarships are great.
I lived in Wisconsin when they merged the University of Wisconsin system with the Wisconsin State University system, and after I left Maryland merged its university system with the state college system. Not sure if it is cheaper to have just one governing body but those states did. Wyoming doesn’t have enough people to have two systems.
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But note that a university system with semi-independently governed universities setting their own courses and curricula is different from a single university where any campuses outside of the main campus are satellite or branch campuses offering a subset of the same courses as the main campus.
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