@MYOS1634 using your comparison, if a surgeon lost (died on the table) 57% of patients I doubt anybody would be questioning why the hospital was closing. Did SBC question the girls who left? "did they really transfer because “stabuck is 30 minutes away”? Then bring start bucks to campus… I suspect it’s something more. Class room experience is heart beat of education. That the job of the teachers not research.
Are we really going to blame the faculty for SBC’s closure? Really???
@Pizzagirl I read 350 faculty. Was that a misprint?
Blame no. But ignore their cupidity in a 57% grad rate is naive.
Lots of catch 22’s apparently were faced by the school. If you need more students, you may be inclined to deploy more people to travel and recruit them. If you want to attract students, new programs can be viewed as a help (SBC is one of about 2 women’s colleges with an engineering dept.), but programs aren’t always cost effective. The huge marketing efforts did not hit home with enough prospective students and likely alienated some women who may have a positive experience there. Cost reductions in a super small school involve a decline in possible majors, as there are very few professors in some smaller departments. They eliminated the German and and engineering business major a few years ago. Many renowned and capable faculty saw the handwriting on the wall and began to leave for new opportunities. Many stayed. Surveys have found SBC to have one of the higher levels of student engagement and relationships with faculty are a hallmark of this (NSSE).
You can’t be a little bit pregnant or run a “half-college”. They tried a lot of things and the strategies did not work. I’m betting that while some circumstances at SBC are unique, there will be valuable case study information to be gained by other small LACs struggling in the current environment. Dozens of schools have come forward with modified transfer application dates for these students. That is a win on both sides.
Ugh. I keep seeing Sweet Briar banner ads on this page. So sad!!!
Cupidity? Faculty greed played a role in the College’s demise?
As others have pointed out, 57% isn’t all that bad. It sounds like a lot of students transferred out to larger schools. It’s too bad Sweet Briar couldn’t have developed some type of “Oxford at Emory” model with a university in the state, but I’m guessing they explored that option and it just was’t viable.
Ole Miss has a better six year graduation rate, 58.7%.
A little off topic but an interesting side note to SBC’s discount and merit offerings. My D’s friend is a current sophomore at the school. D’s friend had already committed to the school. After she paid her deposit she gets a letter from the school stating that she is eligible for even more merit aid if she took the SAT’s again and got a higher score. That is exactly what she did. I thought it was strange they would do that considering she was already willing to go for what they were offering. Maybe an attempt to raise their rankings. This is the only time that I have heard of this happening. Not sure if this is commonplace.
Culpability
I love the jump to conclusions here about the 57% graduation rate. One number, to a whole lotta conclusion.
SBC has a freshman to sophomore retention rate of 70%. The graduation rate needs to be looked at in this context as well.
Since we freely extrapolate here on CC, I imagine that many to most of those students decide that a very small, single sex college in a rural area is not what they wanted for their college experience.
I think many high school students think a small rural college is just what they want. And maybe it is for a year or two and then they realize they want more choices and a bigger community. 600 students is smaller than my sons’ elementary school. It’s very limiting.
"using your comparison, if a surgeon lost (died on the table) 57% of patients I doubt anybody would be questioning why the hospital was closing. "
Sorry, this is a terrible analogy. There have been numerous studies pointing out that surgeons with a high mortality rate (barring the drug addicts and the ones who leave mid-procedure to go cash a check, which actually happened and was the subject of a massive lawsuit a few years ago) are often the most talented and gifted surgeons in the country. Why? They do hundreds more procedures per year than their less capable colleagues. They take on very tough, hard cases that nobody else will touch. Their patients are much sicker with much lower survival rates to begin with.
If your child (god forbid) was ill and you were told that the survival rate was extremely low but XYZ surgical procedure could save him/her, you would want the surgeon who had done the procedure over and over again. Sometimes with a sad but not unexpected outcome, but sometimes with a happy ending even though the statistics would not be in your favor.
Blaming the faculty here (who rarely have input into the admissions strategy, and NEVER have input into how the endowment gets spent or deployed, and NEVER have input into how to utilize a line of credit or when to access the bond market and NEVER make decisions around optimizing cash flow) is unbelievably callous.
But faculty do drive the class room and advising experience. IMO many school ignore that simple foundational piece. Who do students interact with every day? Teachers and cafe workers.
" if a surgeon lost (died on the table) 57% of patients I doubt anybody would be questioning why the hospital was closing. Did SBC question the girls who left? “did they really transfer because “stabuck is 30 minutes away”? Then bring start bucks to campus…”
Starbucks is a private enterprise. They place their stores where they want to. SBC has no control over that.
Your “surgeon lost 57% of patients” is a poor analogy for many, many reasons.
“But faculty do drive the class room and advising experience. IMO many school ignore that simple foundational piece. Who do students interact with every day? Teachers and cafe workers.”
Even the best faculty can’t make up for the smallness of the town. The only reason Grinnell can handle it is that they have beaucoup bucks to create an on-campus experience that makes up for the fact that it’s in the middle of nowhere. SBC didn’t have that option.
And anyway, it takes money and staff to do all the things that you think should have been done. If the yield is low, that doesn’t mean the admissions staff are underemployed. It just means they have a low yield.
@mathmom I agree with you about the small school environment and why some kids choose it. My daughter went to a very small private school. Her graduating class in 2014 was 28. She knew from the start that she was going to look a smaller schools. She ended up going to a LAC with around 2100 students and is doing very well there and has made many new friends. If we pushed her to go to one of the large in-state flagships she would have been swallowed up and would be back home by now. Each student is different.
@scsiguru I totally agree that small rural schools have a definite target. I find it impossible to believe that SBC model and environment doesn’t have appeal. I saw an article about how the college changed it’s recruitment strategy in 2011 and enrollment dropped like stone afterward.
Single-sex is a hard sell (and I have a daughter at a single-sex school). The ones that do well typically have guys in close proximity - Bryn Mawr with Haverford, Barnard with Columbia, Smith & Mt Holyoke with the 5 college consortium - Wellesley doesn’t have as close a proximity to Harvard and MIT as they let on, but they’ve got quite a good historic reputation. Single-sex in a smaller town is a harder sell for today’s young women. It’s a shame. Maybe the buildings can be repurposed into a beautiful resort by a developer?
But 2100 is more than three times bigger than Sweet Briar - that already gives you more choices both for friendships and probably for classes. I think the best tiny schools probably run on a different model all together like Hampshire (1400 students - so still more than twice as many not to mention the availability of the five college consortium).