Enrollment trends are a critical indicator of a college’s financial health. Once enrollment begins to experience steep declines, it’s very difficult to turn it around.
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Just saw this also. Cabrini is $49M in debt. Villanova bought the land/campus. Sounds like Cabrini credits and fin aid will be honored by Eastern, Gynedd Mercy, and Holy Family. Students also could try to transfer to Villanova through an expedited process but nothing is guaranteed there.
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St. Joseph’s (Philadelphia) and Immaculata (and probably others) are also providing guaranteed admission and seamless transfer of credits and financial aid.
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Seems like this thread is a good place to urge students (or parents) to check the bond ratings of the colleges to which they will apply. It’s not the only indicator of fiscal viability/solvency, but it’s pretty important. See article below.
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Colleges have to submit a lot of data to Moody’s to determine their bond ratings. Among the data submitted are number of applications, acceptance rate, yield rate. retention and graduation rates. So this data is not only used for the USNews rankings!
If someone is going to lend a college millions, they want assurance that the school will be around long enough to pay off the bonds.
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An added bonus is that submissions to Moody’s are far more likely to be truthful than those to US News, due to the financial fraud penalty implications.
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Again, with the caveat that public universities, where most students get bachelor degrees, are different, since their finances are also dependant on state funding, and decisions as to whether a college should be closed are made at the level of the state legislature.
On the other hand, the financial health of a college, even a public college, can determine the amount of financial and merit aid that a college will have available. So
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They still get a bond rating.
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So here we go two branch campuses at University of Wisconsin system shutting down. One by way of a merger and the other complete shutdown.
UW system did not have a say about this.
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I got cut off when reading the article but it looks like those are very small 2 year campuses of U of Wisconsin and there are 4 year campuses available in the same areas to serve those students. The UW-Milwaukee campus isn’t closing, it’s the UW-Milwaukee Washington County branch.
In the last 20-30 years, a lot of the schools have opened branch campuses. Now with the ease of online learning, those branch campuses may not be needed as much. Students may have had to drive 30-45 minutes to attend a class but now can just log in. That may make more sense than having in person classes for 10 students on the branch campus.
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I’m confused by the fact that online learning is touted as a good alternative for students … yet during the Covid lockdown, online learning was vilified as having ruined young people’s lives. I’m not saying that to you, @twoinanddone, but rather as a general observation when discussions of closing college campuses come up.
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These were stand alone community colleges merged with the UW system to help them with the decline of students. That seems to have failed.
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In the early 1970s, the UW system merged with the Wis State Univ system, but there were still some separate community college systems. Some of the UWs then (over the years) opened some branch campuses. So in one town you might have a UW, a community college, and a tech school, all receiving funds from the state.
As funds get tighter, the ‘system’ might have to decide whether to have brick and mortar branches or increase online learning. I know in Wyoming which only has one state university system (there are community colleges but only one 4-yr school), the school has increase the number of online classes only available to students who are not in Laramie while trying to continue to offer courses at the campuses in a few cities and towns. They limit the online courses to those not in Laramie to make sure those who can only attend online get priority for those classes. States with rural populations have to offer different types of educational opportunities. Milwaukee may not need a 2 year college but someone in northern Wis might need online opportunities (may be the only option for them).
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Whether online learning is positive or negative depends on the students and situation. Community colleges and other colleges serving adult learners had been using online classes successfully for a number of years prior to the pandemic. Online classes are great for motivated adults who need to work around family and work responsibilities and aren’t interested in using their classes as a way to build social skills. Totally different situation for kids and for traditional-age college students wanting the social benefits of a traditional residential college experience.
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I agree with all of that.
Brick and mortar colleges thinking about entering the online space now will find themselves late to the game and competing with behemoth, well oiled online operations with strong capabilities and proven results…schools like ASU, Western Governors, SNHU, and Liberty each have 100K+ online learners.
Though “brick and mortar” colleges have been in the online space for a long time already. My first job out of grad school was at a private institution that would (at the time) never have let on in its promotional literature that it had online classes—and yes, it certainly wasn’t a huge proportion of their offerings, but they were there.
And that was more than 20 years ago, and that institution wasn’t remotely (ha! pun!) alone in that even at the time.
Now, as for SLACs and similarly situated institutions, sure, online classes don’t have as long of a history. But it isn’t like the University of Phoenix invented online learning, they just grabbed enough venture capital that they could spin it up into a massive operation.
ETA: In fact, the community college near where I grew up had “telecourses” back in the late 70s/early 80s as a sort of proto-online learning—you could tune in on one of the independent TV stations at certain times of the day and watch a course. (Of course, you’d only have access to the assessments and the materials and all if you registered.)
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The situation with the PASSHE schools in Pennsylvania has been discussed here in the past. But a similar situation exists with the 24 or so regional campuses of Pitt and Penn State.
Pitt Titusville has 23 students!
Pitt, Penn State branch campuses bleeding enrollment; decline expected to continue | TribLIVE.com
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Pennsylvania is an amazing study of regional variation. It is a very conservative state, squeezed between 2 liberal cities. The cities have some fantastic schools. In the middle, you have Penn State. All of the regional campuses of the bigger schools are generally less attractive, less wealthy towns that have struggled with the rise and fall of industries that used to provide stable jobs.
A few decades ago when college became mandatory to get a “good job”, PA invested in regional campuses. Now, there is a many who question the value of a degree, and the locals in many of those smaller towns struggle to see the ROI for spending a great deal of money just to get the piece of paper.
The cost of commuter education is simply too high. Potential students have to see the option of getting a degree as more of a “why not” than the current sentiment of “why”? My kids laugh at us when we talk about saving money all summer to pay for college. Thirty years ago, my wife worked all summer, every summer, to pay her way through all 4 years of school (with small loans). Not a dime of help from her parents.
Those opportunities that we took for granted don’t register with today’s teens. The cost of college and the underinvestment by state governments has finally caught up to itself. Some contractions may not be a bad thing.
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But then doesn’t rural PA geography also mean that a commuter based college there is commute accessible to fewer students than it would be in less mountainous geography? I.e. more campuses or locations needed, increasing costs and spreading academic resources too thinly.
We can’t change the geography, and fewer people tend to live in the mountains.
The PSU campuses are in towns with larger populations. When those campuses are no longer affordable to the local community, it’s a problem. I’m not advocating for more campuses, I’m suggesting that the ones already in place need to be seen as an opportunity by the locals, not an expensive deferral of a local job that didn’t require the degree anyway.
With so many jobs being remote, those already living in lower-cost locations have advantages in the job market that they aren’t capitalizing on. The barrier to entry is too high, and the lack of leadership in showing how the local college can provide those opportunities is problematic.
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