Simmons University in Boston may cut liberal arts departments. Simmons has been on shaky ground for the past decade. They recently sold their residential campus and they are building a new residence hall on the academic campus.
Simmons may cut liberal arts departments (insidehighered.com)
Eliminating literature, modern language, philosophy, and sociology…dang. Those seem like such essential departments at a university. It seems that the issue is less the 11.5% enrollment decline since 2019 and more that it’s losing between 50-62% of tuition money from the majority of its grad students who are doing online learning. That percentage, and the fact that it goes until 2039, is the big problem. Frankly, I’m pretty stunned that their lawyers and finance folks thought that contract was a good idea.
It’s sad. I remember when Simmons was a high quality option for Bostonians who did not want to head out to Western MA for Mt. Holyoke or Smith…
With 2500 or so students Simmons is the size of a LAC, but it has never been a LAC. Simmons has always offered a range of professional programs: education, business, nursing, social work and library science. It has the only library school in Massachusetts. I wonder what their future will be? Going coed at the undergraduate level? Merging with a neighboring school? I can imagine Northeastern and Boston University salivating at the prospect of acquiring their campus and successful programs.
My D20 is a rising sr. there. Rumor amongst the students are that the school is going to get “Wheelocked” in the next few years.
She has had a great experience there, but the planned elimination of the res campus alone was enough of a change that is going to fundamentally change the experience for future classes that she said she couldn’t really recommend the school to prospective students.
Physical Therapy too - I graduated from BU, but I worked with a number of Simmons grads. I know the professional programs have generally been the bigger draw, but hollowing out the liberal arts base won’t make it more appealing to anyone. 
I agree that they seem ripe to be swallowed by a larger school. Lots of redundancy with BU and Northeastern’s existing programs, but I don’t know whether competitors who don’t have such programs (BC? Tufts? Brandeis?) would be looking to make that investment or not…
Oof. I know someone who is supposed to attend Cabrini in the fall as a freshman, and play a sport.
Interesting students are not part of the deal! Villanova gets more land to expand. Would have thought Eastern University might take the campus as it’s next door. I wonder if Villanova was pushed to take the assets to keep them for future use by the church or order.
If I was a Cabrini student I would avoid Rosemont
The college of the Fenway schools need to fully merge to survive. They lost wheelock and although Simmons, Wentworth and Emmanuel college are financially strong merging might strengthen them especially that all three have a business school.
Just wondering what you all consider a healthy endowment and endowment amount per pupil is?
Daughter was looking at small LACs and I set the bar at at least 100 million in endowment. Her current schools seems to be ok (514 million and just over 2300 students) but it still makes me very nervous seeing all the closing and predictions of more to come.
My filters are $100M for a public institution and $200M for a private one (ignoring $/student), though admittedly I’m probably more strict about it than needed.
We focused on the endowment per student. Didn’t have a cut off, but the higher the better! Actually that’s probably not true. Lower than $200,000/student would have been a negative.
Simmons and Wentworth are not financially strong. Simmons had an $11.5 million deficit last year. On a per capita basis that would be like Northeastern or BU having a deficit of $125 million/year. No school can continue for long with that.
True but last year every university was hit with a major loss in their investment… their assets are strong and just like their deal for the dorms they can sell the buildings But keep the land. Unlike Mount Ida, Newbury and Wheelock they have a good portfolio of assets. If they all merge Wentworth becomes the engineering, Simmons liberal arts, Emannual education and MCPHS the health and medical school. MassArt would be interesting if it can join.
Since MassArt is public and Emmanuel is Catholic a merger would be impossible.
You really need to look at the endowment carefully as 200 million means nothing if it’s fully restricted. I usually look at non restricted in the financials which means they can take the cash out when they need it to cover deficits. If that’s in the negative then that’s not a good sign but then you wonder where the cash was invested
Cabrini was sitting on 41 million in unrestricted cash. Even that didn’t save them which tells me they had issues in their investment allocation
I was surprised by this article regarding Seattle Pacific University:
Just an observation:
As state schools struggle their need for students will start to impact private schools that rely heavily on instate students and lack brand recognition.
Pennsylvania is a major example with all the merger taking place. Penn state with its DUS school (community college hidden into university Park) and regional campuses struggle to increase enrollment dipping into the PASSHE universities pool. PASSHE will then go aggressive into the private schools applicants and as we know the pool keeps shrinking.
Same goes to every state except Arizona 