Earlier this month (9 August, as far as I can tell), Stevens-Henager College in Ogden, Utah closed without warning.
It was founded in 1891, and had been a nonprofit college since 2018 (not sure what its history was in between).
It came to my attention through a Chronicle of Higher Education article on the precarious situation of colleges with enrollments below 1k students, and Stevens-Henager had had the largest percentage enrollment drop among all of them (97%, from 3,694 students in 2010 to 104 in 2020) aside from a small college of midwifery in Oregon (Birthingway College, also closing down but doing a teachout effective last December rather than an abrupt complete closure).
I have to think that dropping from being a small but decent-sized career college to being too small to continue ten years later means that there’s probably a story of some serious mismanagement to be told.
Seems like the closure of Stevens-Henager College and three other colleges also owned by CEHE occurred in August 2021 (i.e. about a year ago). A few months prior, its accrediting agency withdrew accreditation.
Has this one been mentioned here? (And this time I double-checked, it did happen earlier this year, not last year!)
St John’s University is still open, but has announced the closure of its Staten Island campus, which exists due to a 1974 merger with the former Notre Dame College of Staten Island, starting this fall and continuing the teachout through 2024.
UCLA pays $80M for Marymount’s campus located on two sites, the main campus was in Rancho Palos Verdes, and a smaller site in San Pedro (Marymount closed in August).
This article says UCLA can house 500 students at the two sites. It also sounds like it may have been a competitive bid situation (I expect there would have been developers interested in those sites).
Similar information but this is UCLA’s statement. It is too far from campus to house undergrads. I’m guessing it will be used for grad students in environmental fields.
Exactly. That’s easily over an hour drive in typical LA traffic. It would only be suited for some special program(s) where the classes and resources are self contained on the satellite campus near the housing.
The latter half of that sentence is the key and the same idea I was conveying in my post. It works if the grad students program and primary resources are on the satellite campus. It doesn’t if the area of study is primarily based in Westwood, as most of the core disciplines are. No grad student regularly needing to be at the Westwood campus multiple times a week would want to live there and it would be cruel to make them, since many can’t afford their own cars (or insurance or parking) and even if the school provides bussing it will be a very long commute.
And circling back around again, Montclair State and Bloomfield have announced a merger. It’s clearly a merger of the latter into the former, and it will involve the creation of a “Bloomfield College of Montclair State University” but I can’t find solid information on exactly what that will look like.
According to College Navigator, Bloomfield students generally come from poorer families (82% Pell, versus 48% at Montclair State), but the typical net price at Bloomfield is higher than Montclair State at all income ranges (96% of Bloomfield and 94% of Montclair State students are New Jersey residents).
Cabrini University looking for partnerships as it fights for survival. Universities in Pennsylvania seem to be struggling when they don’t have a well positioned brand.
I wonder when Penn state will start restructuring all these commonwealth campuses
That doesn’t sound like many, but considering that they only offered 28 majors before this and this means they’re cutting some of their programs that lead to teacher certification (which is often a lifeline for small colleges), this one’s clearly in trouble.
We are going to see more of this. I suspect that there are many small schools trying to turn themselves around … and they’ll eventually realize it’s not possible to keep going.
I just did a search on College Navigator and there are more than 500 4-year private nonprofit colleges in the U.S that have fewer than 700 undergrads. (Source) When I restricted the results to only include schools with housing, that left 307 colleges (source). I’d need to be pretty confident in the college’s finances for my kid to enroll in one of those schools (and there are some financially strong schools on that list, like Earlham and, I’m guessing, Juilliard). But I would imagine that a good number of those schools have some shaky financials.
Yeah, my initial filter on any colleges my kids have been interested in has been whether it has a >$250M endowment for a private college, >$100M for a public. (I can be convinced to drop the private college filter to >$150M if I can find reassuring information about things like their debt load.) It isn’t a perfect gauge of financial health by any means, but I don’t want to see a forced transfer no matter how nurturing of an environment places like Cazenovia College (endowment: $32.2M) might provide.
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