@Pizzagirl It not the physical geographic proximity to other schools and consortiums, the combo programs are big draw too. For example, 4-1 MBAs.
I wonder if SBC considered partnerships with major Us for 4-1 physc , MBA , M Ed? Or even semester exchange programs with large urban Us? But that takes facility and department heads committed to working outside their bubble and some serious advising to keep girls on track.
@single sex isn’t that hard of sell once the girls see the bang for the buck. I’m sure that some crappy womens colleges exist. But the remaining seven sisters are thriving for a reason…
Well, physical geographic proximity was key for our applications…
Kodak lost the photography business because they were slow to understand that photography was moving to cameras and digital and was NEVER going back to film. I don’t blame the guy who ran the production line or the guy who drove a forklift at the warehouse- they don’t get paid to convene a meeting with the board of directors to outline that their business model has exploded.
Similarly, the faculty at SB isn’t responsible for raising the red flag to alert the board that demographic, financial and social trends have created a perfect storm to drive down applications and yield, and that those trends are not going to reverse in the near future.
Meanwhile, there are still fixed costs. Even if you send x% of girls abroad or to another college for a semester, the facilities still need maintaining and the current profs still need paying.
Coming up with partnerships with major u’s, semester exchange programs, etc. TAKES MONEY to do – these programs don’t invent themselves, they need staff / coordinators to make them happen. You can’t critique them for having “excess staff” at the same time you critique them for not doing enough. Doing more requires staff which costs money.
SBC did have direct connections to at least one larger university, AU’s Washington Semester, with coursework and internships. They also had well-regarded study abroad programs.
Assumptions about professors dropping the ball stand in contrast to the level of engagement objectively reported as well as the nature of the educational experience when classes are small, professors host students at their home and know them well enough to suggest appropriate opportunities.
Other than some road sprawl (Walmart not far, burger places,) it’s isolated. A gorgeous campus, but you need to be self resourceful. Not that far from the Appalachian trail, sleepy little intersections, maybe with a gas station, maybe not, back roads stretches with few homes, etc. For anyone interested in local culture, environmental issues, outdoor things, pretty neat. But 700 total students is mighty small. So many kids today want more. Remember the last Seven Sisters are in the Northeast, an entirely different draw, overall.
Yes, something more, like Oxford at Emory could have done it. Or maybe a few highly focused grad programs. But this is still remote. While Grinnell is 1700+, coed, and an hour from Des Moines, SB is an hour from Lexington or Charlottesville. Two hours to Richmond. The closest town is 2200 people and a density 1/3 that of Grinnell, IA.
They were already cutting back faculty, btw, eliminating or merging some majors, etc. But the weight of supporting that sort of plant on a limited number of students- most on finaid- is too much. And don’t forget that the possibilities for future donations was impacted by size and the changing demographics, too.
In general, I find it hard to blame faculty. I think this is more “the perfect storm.” A string of interrelated challenges.
Boring college administrator here. The research on student drop-outs suggests that students leave first for financial reasons, and second because they can’t cut it academically. Neither of these is the fault of the faculty. The financial part, if you want to blame somebody, would be the fault of the financial aid staff. The ‘accepting people who actually can’t cut it academically’ would be the fault of the admissions staff. Suggesting otherwise is a little bit like blaming the waiter for the quality of the food in the restaurant.
“Single sex isn’t that hard of sell once the girls see the bang for the buck. I’m sure that some crappy womens colleges exist. But the remaining seven sisters are thriving for a reason…”
I’m not really sure I’d call single-sex “not that hard of a sell.” The remaining Sisters no longer are the default for smart girls that they were in Hillary Clinton’s day. Convincing girls they will still have access to boys is a BIG thing that takes them out of the short list for many girls. I’m also not sure I’d say thriving. They’re still pretty niche-y.
“single sex isn’t that hard of sell once the girls see the bang for the buck.”
I’m wondering if you have been involved in recruitment for single sex schools. I’ve never heard this kind of pronouncement from anyone who has been. I’m on the board of my local Bryn Mawr club, which is responsible for college fairs, interviews, yield parties, etc. It is an EXTREMELY hard sell. The club has recruited zero of our daughters to our own league (though one did go to Scripps). I have clients who get mad at me for mentioning women’s colleges, like I’m crazy for suggesting something so dated.
“the remaining seven sisters are thriving for a reason…”
The reason they are thriving relative to SBC is money. But they are not thriving relative to their position pre-1970s or to their coed peers. Every woman now at Yale, Princeton, Williams, Amherst, Bowdoin, and Dartmouth would likely have been a Seven Sisters recruit in 1966. Compare the fall in status of the Sisters to the enormous growth in selectivity, wealth, and power of the Ivy League over the same time period.
Wellesley is the closest thing to an exception. I coached a student with a real shot at Yale to the Wellesley ED admit she wanted this fall. But she’s rare.
“Remember the last Seven Sisters are in the Northeast, an entirely different draw, overall.”
Not only are they in the Northeast, they’re in pretty highly populated areas of the Northeast. Even Mt. Holyoke is a lot closer to civilization than Dartmouth, Colby, or Middlebury.
This isn’t Monday morning quarterbacking, it’s a post-mortem.
I think the pool of young women who want the experience Sweet Briar offers is much smaller than it was in the past.
I don’t think equestrian sports are a big draw these days. When I was a child, quite a few middle class people had “backyard ponies” in the suburbs. They rode through backwoods paths to existing riding rings. Just about all of that has disappeared. Riding in the well-to-do suburbs in the Northeast is now a solidly upper class sport.
Parents aren’t focused on protecting their daughters from young men these days. It is very hard to persuade a girl to look at a single sex school.
Were there any full pay students? People criticize the high tuition, high discount model, but I think full pay families can be regarded as canaries in the coal mine, so to speak. They tend to have access to good college counseling. If you can’t persuade anyone to pay full asking price, you should re-examine your model.
"@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. "
SB. vs. Grinnell? SB vs. Hampshire? SB vs. Middlebury? In what lifetime would SB win a shoot-out vs. these schools?
Times have changed.
Faculty are not teachers. Its not their job to keep their adult paying students engaged.
The financial part, if you want to blame somebody, would be the fault of the financial aid staff.
Yikes, them’s fighting words (says the boring financial aid director). I don’t set rates, I don’t “give” myself money, I don’t screen the students to find out if they can pay before accepting them, I don’t make the decision as to whether or not they can actually afford to attend …
The bottom line is, though, that the faculty and staff in all likelihood did everything they could to do their jobs to the best of their ability. If anyone might have made a misstep, it would have been at the top (including the board) … but even then, ultimately, it is possible it was inevitable. Sometimes even well-run businesses fail due to their business environment, and it follows that the same could happen to schools. We don’t ever want it to happen, but it “can.”
I don’t think you have a good grasp of what this metric really means. Yes, on the surface, it means that only 57% of students graduate after 6 years. We got that already… However, being the smart people we are on here, we should be able to figure out why these values are what they are, rather than just looking at them at a superficial level.
As @ucbalumnus pointed out, a big reason why some graduation rates are low is this: a bar was set, and students were expected to reach that bar. Naturally, the weaker/less motivated students won’t be able to reach the bar, and at a less selective school there will be fewer strong students. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but… you get the rest. The rigor was there, but the students chose not to figure out how to make it all work. That’s not really the schools fault IMO…
The faculty should not be expected to hold the hands of students trying to graduate. They are not babysitters. Sure, they can offer tutoring services (which SB likely did), and have student-friendly open door office policies (which SB likely did), but ultimately it’s up to the students to take advantage of all of that.
Graduation rates, like acceptance rates, are very misleading, I believe. Most unknowing people take them at face value which is unfortunate as they don’t contain the context needed to tell the whole story.
From what I read SBC needed to fill 300 seats next year to turn a profit. They could not find 300 girls (transfer international even) to make it work? The focus was placed on recruiting Equestrians…? Maybe one if those 10 admissions officers could have stopped by commity college transfer office? This has very little to with the previewed appeal of wens colleges and more to so with a college it’s admin and factually chairs not understanding the students.
Oh please. You don’t know that the faculty (I assume that’s what you meant) didn’t “work outside their bubble.” Really, this blaming of the myriad problems faced by SB on the professors is absurd. It’s like blaming climate change on the ocean.
“From what I read SBC needed to fill 300 seats next year to turn a profit.”
You may need to exercise a little more judgment about what you’re reading. First you told us that you read that there was one faculty member for every two students. (That number actually included janitors and cooks, not just faculty.) Now you’re reading that they could “turn a profit” if they fill 300 seats. Sure, they would have enough operating income for next year if they filled 300 seats AT FULL PRICE. That can’t be done. I don’t who you think is coming out of community colleges in Virginia, but there aren’t 300 young women who can afford $40,000 a year and can’t get in anywhere better than Sweet Briar.
FULL PAY internationals ? unlikely.
And 300 full pay enrollment with 20% yield? If you believe that, I’ve got a piece of the True Cross to sell you 
300 girls who want to live way out in a rural area without access to … well, anything (internships, boys, movie theaters)… tough sell.
community college students tend to have jobs and sometimes family obligations, they can’t just pick up and move to a college, especially if that college is going to cost much more than the local public university they can commute to.
At rural colleges, the main reason students transfer is isolation. After 1-2 years, they’ve “done it all, seen it all”, want to meet people, get internships, drive to a bar. They may do okay academically but choose to go elsewhere.
At this point, I’m not sure why we’re saying “they should have done this, they could have done that”. It looks like they’ve been trying for the past few years, and nothing worked.
@momneeds2no, give up on the 57% thing, seriously.
It seems that a certain segment of the country’s educational critics and policymakers have seized upon college completion rates as the metric of quality. This is silly at best, and clearly blind to the facts. As others, including me, have pointed out already on this thread:
→The way we measure graduation rates assumes that someone will go to a college straight out of high school (or, in some cases, a stint in the military), attend full-time, and then graduate from that same college. This used to be the case for pretty much every college student, but it isn’t anymore—there are many more people who attend college part-time, transfer between colleges, and such. Students who transfer count against the college they started out at, and don’t count for the college they transferred into, for starters—that’s a big one, especially for a school like SBC which, it seems, had a pretty good number of transfer-outs.
→You mentioned that 57% was their 6-year graduation rate, as if that’s a problem, as opposed to a 4-year graduation rate. Sorry, but that’s the metric everyone—yes, the Harvards of the world included—uses. This allows some slack in the measure to allow for students who have a difficult freshman adjustment, earn two degrees, change their major radically, enroll in a 5-year program, face serious medical issues, take brief time off for other completely reasonable reasons (e.g., their National Guard squadron is mobilized), and so on.
→Student outputs aren’t entirely dependent on student inputs, but there’s enough of a connection under a wide enough variety of circumstances that it’s clear that there really is an independent effect. If a school lowers its admissions standards, its degree completion rate will drop. In fact—though this is based more on anecdotal evidence, and therefore not as reliable a theory—lowering admissions standards in an attempt to admit more students may lower institutional degree completion rates more than one would expect from the degree to which inputs were lowered, because high-input students to do come in may be more likely to transfer out to a place that they see as commensurate with their abilities and needs (and see the transfer-out problem for completion rate measurements, above).
→You seem to think that the job of professors is to make sure students pass their classes. This is, to put it directly, ridiculous. The teaching side of a professor’s job is to attempt to transmit material to students, and to assess whether the students have acquired that material. (This was traditionally done via lectures and exams, and the process is pretty clear there, but it’s the same at core with more modern, experiential methods of teaching.) There will be students who, when assessed, do not demonstrate acquisition of the material. At that point, it is the job of the professor to record that fact. To do otherwise, as I’ve noted earlier, is simply a step on the way to becoming a diploma mill.
→And I’ll repeat that concept, just to drive it home: You want a 100% graduation rate? Get thee to a diploma mill. It’s the only place that’ll ever happen.