That’s very good for them. But next year there will be another shortfall, and another and another. If they get $6M, it funds six weeks of operations, and then it’s gone.
They have an endowment of $72M and debt of $79M., That’s not good.
This is hard. They can’t raise tuition (or cut FA) and fill their seats. They can’t cut expenses without a rebellion. Either of these risks what @Catcherinthetoast correctly points out is a death spiral.
If they want to solve this with endowment, they need to raise not $6M but something more like $30M.
What is a good resource to show the financial health of colleges? My D22 is looking at colleges now and although I am cheering on Guilford I am not encouraging her to look very seriously at it. I would steer her away from other struggling schools too.
BTW, Forbes gives Earlham an A-, not sure if things have tanked there since COVID or if Forbes is measuring it differently. Would you all agree or disagree?
Earlham has an endowment of $438 million, and so almost half a million dollars per student. So while they may have budget issues, they have some room to turn things around.
What @Nicomachus just said—having a cushion is good.
Also, Earlham may have a structural deficit, but their endowment hasn’t decreased from the time my oldest applied there (it’s actually ticked up a bit). So they’re keeping their head above water—but S&P suggests that they’re facing a revenue cliff in about two years, though I’m uncertain what that’s based on.
The article notes that this comes as the Biden administration is planning to go back to the Obama administration’s stance toward for-profits, though it didn’t draw a connection between those moves and this particular closure.
Yay! Yay! Yay! I’ve been a fan of Bard because of its strong liberal arts and Conservatory, but also because of its college program for prisoners. This documentary is available on PBS, Netflix, and Amazon. Fascinating to see intelligent minds expanding when given the opportunity of education in prison.
This is an interesting one—SACS (the regional accreditor for St Leo’s) effectively killed the merger, based on concerns about the ability of St Leo’s to financially manage the takeover.
Given that Marymount California lists about $60M in assets (though essentially all non-liquid) against $3.7M in outstanding debt, this raises some worries in my mind about the ability of St Leo’s to remain a going concern, you know?
Not a closure, but a dire financial situation: Henderson State University (Arkansas’s public liberal arts college) declared financial exigency earlier this year in the wake of nearly a decade of fiscal mismanagement under a previous president, and just announced that it’s firing 44 tenure-track faculty (plus not filling 12 open tenure-track lines) and 32 non-tenure-track faculty (plus not filling 9 open NTT lines), and phasing out 25 degree programs including math, history, English, bio, and chem.
If you look at where the cuts are, this will involve an implicit mission change from a LAC to more of a technical/job-training college with a particular focus on the heath and teaching professions.
https://hsu.edu/uploads/pages/financial_exigency_committee_recommendations.pdf indicates that these programs / departments are recommended to be reduced. The ones recommended to be eliminated are French, general studies, German, music performance and composition, accounting, management information systems, data science, finance, management, business information systems, marketing, and political science. But it looks like the various specialized business majors may be replaced by a general business major.
Those were the recommendations to the chancellor. The chancellor’s recommendations were just released, and go further than the committee’s recommendations, including closing the programs I listed: https://hsu.edu/uploads/pages/hsu_chancellor_recommendations.pdf
I wanted to mention this since this thread has frequently mentioned Earlham. My son applied there for fall of 2022 mostly because they had an interesting museum studies major, which is hard to find. He was given 40K merit a year, which is a very nice award, but the school seems very pricey for mid-west Indiana. Even with the declining enrollment they sent a lot of bells and whistles out with the admissions letter. I still couldn’t help but think about how are they staying afloat and maintaining dorms with less than 200 kids in the class of 2025? Interestingly on the parents’ FB page, 98% of parents seem to have athletes matriculating.
Odd that they will retain physics (0 graduates), computer engineering (0), and computer science (6), but will eliminate biology (15), chemistry (10), and English (16).
Not to mention getting rid of most arts (26 graduates), Liberal Arts (31 +5), English (16), and Communications (17).
It seems typical thinking of a certain type of university administrator - “to make money we need to teach STEM, and get rid of Humanities”. They repeat that mantra, make decisions based on that mantra, and ignore any facts which contradict that mantra.
I swear that there are conferences for these type of upper administrators where they sit in rooms chanting this, as well as chanting “Tenure Bad, Adjuncts Good”, and “No More Shared Governance!”.