The lack of LACs in the West is a timing thing, mainly—the US settlement of the West coincided with (a) the development of Populism as a social phenomenon and (b) it becoming even more expensive to start a college. The passage of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts was a huge factor, too.
All of those make the large public college model more likely than small LACs, and also make small LACs without deep pockets or large population centers more likely to fail (and there were a lot of small colleges that failed in the late 19th century). Also, the earlier religious K–12 school→optionally adding a seminary→adding a few postsecondary courses→offering postsecondary degrees→closing the K–12 section model wasn’t nearly as workable given the West’s eventual demographics.
Not a closing but a merger. Pennsylvania College of Health Sciences in Lancaster, PA is merging into St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Programs will be offered in both Lancaster and Philadelphia.
It is very common in the healthcare sector and also IT. People pay for short term courses that lead to a diploma and they can then take certification exams. Most universities do not offer these courses/programs. Or, the offerings might be too deficient in some way. CNA, phlebotomy, coding boot camps all come to mind.
I went to regional financial aid meetings with quite a few financial aid folks from for profit schools … cosmetology, myomassology, aviation mechanics. They were very good career prep schools, with great placement records and financial aid practices that were on the up-and-up. Not all for profit schools are bad. Some definitely are … I dealt with that with students attending a now defunct for profit school that offered degrees you could earn for less at a community college.
Okay, point taken, @kelsmom and @1dadinNC, I phrased my comment badly.
My objection is to baccalaureate+ for-profit education.
(Recognizing that some of, e.g., the University of Phoenix’s professional master’s programs are pretty decent, by all accounts—but one exception doesn’t excuse the ills of the entire rest of the sector.)
There definitely are some bad players in the for profit sector. I just don’t like to see them all painted with the same brush. The Department of Education agrees that there are bad players, and unfortunately the taxpayers are in the hook because there has been blanket loan forgiveness for so many of their former students.
There needs to be more transparency around careers/education and who makes what doing which job.
It pains me no end to see and hear about low income kids attending a for-profit college for a degree in “Criminal Justice” because someone claimed it was the first step in becoming a lawyer. It makes sense of course- if you don’t actually know anyone who is a lawyer. And the for-profit colleges allegedly “training” students to become a Medical Examiner, using up all their Pell in the process. But if you don’t actually know any doctors (personally), it might make sense that you can become a Medical Examiner with a degree in “Forensic Studies” (logical, right?) and not understand that in most states, you FIRST get a Bachelor’s, then an MD, and THEN you become one of those cool docs on the FBI shows on TV.
Losing accreditation in August 2023. Most likely will close after that. Boston has so many educational choices, of all types, I am surprised that they had any students.
Close to a year ago, we were discussing the closure of Marymount California University, which had attempted to merge with St Leo University. Everything was a go, but it was nixed, in a major plot twist, by the accreditor:
To be clear, they’ll still have five satellite campuses scattered across the country and a (by all accounts) robust online program plus their main campus in Florida, but St Leo has been a model of slow but steady growth through expansion for better than two decades, so this is a huge shift in not just strategy but identity—and really, that’s the sort of shift that makes me wonder if there’s more of a fiscal crisis underlying it than the blandness of the announcement lets on.
My reasoning: Their endowment has been overall flat the past several years ($62.2M in 2016, $68.2M in 2020, $64.6M in 2022), but given how high the average rate of investment returns for college endowments was over that time period, and that I think the drop from 2020 to 2022 doesn’t include the entirety of the down year for endowments that the full calendar year 2022 was (and definitely does include 2021, which was a solid up year), yeah, we’re probably looking at a sizable structural deficit.
And if there’s a structural deficit, an endowment of less than 9 figures means you don’t have a lot of time, and so you get crisis-level action.
Not technically closing, but Trinity International in Deerfield IL (Suburban Chicago) is going to a fully online model, and closing down the undergrad residential college (except for BA/MDiv program) at the end of this semester.
The headline isn’t claiming that this is cause and effect, it’s pointing to these seemingly contradictory trends which are occurring at the same time.
It’s still the headlines of a media outlet that wants you to read the article, but it’s more of a teaser than clickbait. Not “Thirtyfive colleges will close this years, and number 7 will shock you!!”, but something more intelligent and relevant.