@Pizzagirl yes I agree that WCs are niche market, just like engineering schools. I see a continued demand for the niche of quality WCs. When womens colleges focus only on the “womens” aspect an ding ore the “college” aspect that’s thing turn south.
Al – as the old business saying goes: What gets measured gets managed.
Totally agree we have way too many 4 year colleges, 4 year college students and money directed to 4 year colleges. Very expensive and lousy outcomes.
That’s why I (for pretty atypical reasons) love Obama’s idea (which will never happen) of every kid getting free 13th/14th grade at a CC. That would pop the over-investment and over-spending on 4 year college faster than anything else I can think of. We need more education of our kids beyond high school, but we need a LOT less of 4 year college than we have today.
Somehow, it needs to become OK for a good chunk of middle class kids to just have a 2 year degree and then have that 2 year degree be an entre for a good job and life.
momneeds2no: I am having trouble figuring out from where you are getting your moral certainty that you know better than Sweet Briar’s administration and trustees.
As I said, I am very close to a woman who is a trustee of a women’s college that is not part of the group f/k/aSeven Sisters. We were talking about Sweet Briar, and I mentioned the “30 minutes from a Starbucks” line. She said, “It’s not funny. We don’t have a Starbucks nearby, either, and all of our research says that’s a problem.” (The college of which she is a trustee is in a major urban area, but obviously not in the part of it with a Starbucks on every block.)
As for the graduation rate, you are right that it means that they were not enrolling students who would stay there, but you are wrong to leap to the conclusion that the academic instruction was the problem. As many have said, every indication is that most of the 43% of students who left without graduating transferred to another college from which they graduated. It may even be an indication of academic success: Students who could not get accepted at W&L or Virginia Tech coming out of high school may have been able to transfer after a successful year or two at Sweet Briar.
blossom: In a non-bankruptcy scenario, there isn’t some detailed body of law to dictate what happens to the endowment. If the institution can pay all of its debts without violating endowment restrictions, it will have a lot of latitude in proposing what to do with the endowment, provided that they are acting in good faith to honor restrictions, and they are basically matching the purpose. The Virginia Attorney General will have to weigh in, and his or her approval may be necessary, and maybe court approval, too, but generally the board and administration will control the process and set the agenda.
That can only be a small part of the problem. A $5,500 to $7,500 direct loan is not much compared to a $65,000 cost of attendance at many private schools. And if you believe some of the claimed costs, even a $65,000 cost of attendance is a subsidized number compared to a $90,000 cost to educate each student at some of the elite privates (the subsidy coming from donations, endowment investment income, and other non-tuition sources).
On the common public school side, the increase in cost borne by the student comes in large part due to reduction in subsidies from state governments.
You may have more of a point with respect to those parts of the for-profit education industry that have made their business model based on collecting students’ financial aid money.
Re debt, on the conference call, the president mentioned $25 million in bonds and $28 million in deferred maintenance on the campus – which is a form of red ink, since it will be deducted from any possible sale price. They didn’t discuss debt outside of the bond issue.
I’d love to be at Sweet Briar for a summer camp experience. 8 weeks in great weather would be a fantastic way to enjoy that location. Multiple years, mostly winter, not so much.
Mom2 – here you go:
"Graduation rate performance: The difference between the actual six-year graduation rate for students entering in fall 2007 and the predicted graduation rate. The predicted graduation rate is based upon characteristics of the entering class, as well as characteristics of the institution.
This indicator of added value shows the effect of the college’s programs and policies on the graduation rate of students after controlling for spending and student characteristics such as test scores and the proportion receiving Pell Grants."
For this and other reasons, USNWR’s ranking for SBC dropped 50 spots in 10 years. That’s a lot.
Since I’m on mobile it’s hard for me to check but how do the top tier women’s colleges such as Scripps, Wellesley, and Barnard compare in their predicted vs actual graduation rates?
I believe you are mistaken. I went to a girl’s boarding school in northern Virginia. We had a lot of wealthy southern girls but also a fair number from the mid-Atlantic states, quite a few internationals students and about 1/3 of the class was from the DC area. In my day the prestige schools were the seven sisters and the Ivies which had just gone co-ed two years before. The ones who ended up at Sweet Briar were not from the top of class though many of them were riders. It was not a high prestige place - we thought of it as a place where the not-so-bright went. I actually think its reputation (with things like their engineering offerings) may be better now than it was then despite the more recent drop in rankings.
I also know that selling the idea of a single sex school is very hard. You’d think selling a high school would be easier, but it’s not. Parents like it, but their daughters don’t. The selectivity of my school plummeted when Exeter, Andover and all the other New England boys schools went coed.
@ucbalumnus I agree completely that the higher cost of public education at state universities is a big part of the problem as well. I think it’s more complicated though, since state subsidies to higher education are just shifts in who pays the bills from state taxpayers to households who have college age children, which actually on balance transfers money from the poor to the rich. They’re quite regressive actually. But having public university tuition increasing at high rates does allow allow private schools to raise their tuition more as good quality competition from public universities becomes more expensive.
I think the situation with loans is more complicated than just the limit in the aggregate annual subsidized loan amounts. There’s a whole host of moneys that the Federal government has pumped into the system that’s allowed college cost of attendance to rise at the rates it’s been. Here’s a nice overview of Federal assistance to higher education. http://pnpi.newamerica.net/spotlight/federal_student_aid
Besides just the aggregate dollar amounts, the most important point I would make is that you need to think about the effect on the margin. An increased dollar of Federal aid (in the form of subsidized loans, unsubsidized loans, grants, etc) allows the student who’s just on the cusp of revolting against the high prices to swallow hard and sign up. This means the amount of push back against price increases is much reduced. And families who have savings may not take the aid but they’ll have to empty their bank accounts further. So that extra $1 of government subsidy may raise costs by $2 or $3 across the entire system.
Oh, and some (but not all) of the for-profit executives should be thrown in jail. As near as I can tell, there are some outright crooks whose business model is to have the students take out $30,000 in loans, give $20,000 to the for-profit, and keep $10,000 for themselves to pay rent or throw a party or buy a nicer car or something.
Consolation - I don’t know the last time you were back in the town of Wellesley, but the Starbucks is quite literally on the first corner when you walk into the town from the campus :-). There’s also a Peet’s a block or two down. I think the town of Wellesley could do a lot more to cater to the students, and has a rich-suburban feel vs a college-town feel, but at least you do have what you need nearby.
In grad school at UVA, I had lots of classmates who had gone to all the various schools in that part of the world. Richmond, UVA as well as the single sex schools – W&L, VMI, Hampden Sydney, Sweet Briar, Mary Baldwin, etc. Those kids all loved their schools and I (as a Yankee) was completely unfamiliar with that whole college ecosystem. It was very 50s retro at that time (the 80s) and mostly pretty cool. But you have to adapt or die.
Nearby W&L, for example, is crushing it. Small, rural, still 50s retro (85% Greek), but highly ranked, selective and (since 1985) coed. Small, non-rural, single sex and selective still works (the remaining seven sisters).
Small, rural, non-selective is not what I’d want to be selling these days. Small, rural, non-selective and single sex is even tougher. I wonder how Hampden Sydney is doing…
I doubt SBC could have pulled off small, rural, non-selective but now trying to go co-ed. I think they had to play the single-sex cards they had. I myself would have downplayed all the finishing school stuff (the pink/green school colors, the horses, the Vixens team name) but without those things then what else did they have to sell?
Man, you guys must all be from the east coast… Lol. I’m cracking up at how you all think Sweet Briar is so rural. I just looked at a map and it’s less than a mile from a town of 32,000 people, and a mere 10 miles from another town of 78,000 people. Less than 15 miles from a Target, Olive Garden, etc.
Look up Deep Springs College if you want to see a real rural college. 
Sample of one, I had never heard of Washington & Lee before CC, and I would still have never heard of it outside of CC.
Which town of 32,000? Amherst, VA has 2,231. Sweet Briar, VA supposedly has a pop. of 860, 30 of whom are males according to Wikipedia.
^ Confusion between Amherst County and the town of Amherst.
“Sample of one, I had never heard of Washington & Lee before CC, and I would still have never heard of it outside of CC.”
I’d never heard of it either. So it took me extra time to figure out what some of my UVA classmates were talking about. DUBya-Nell…???
Great school. Great guys. My female classmates loved their manners and accents. Drank bourbon like it was water.
If Sweet Briar doesn’t qualify as rural I don’t know what does. It has its own hunt trials course. Hunt – like in fox hunting.
^ Oh, is that where the expression “The Fox in the Henhouse” originated?
To stay with the theme, I have to admit that every time I saw the name Sweet Briar, it made me think of Splash Mountain:
http://thefw.com/things-you-didnt-know-about-disneys-splash-mountain/
I’ve known several W&L grads, but had never heard of Sweet Briar. A friend’s son (she and her husband are both professors) paid a lot for their son to go to W&L (full pay) and now he’s on to med school/phd program.
Two law schools in Mpls/StP ‘merged’ this year too (I think it was more of a takeover by one). Schools are just too expensive to run with just a few students.
But of course having a Starbucks 2/10ths of a mile from the edge of campus (ahem, Church St., Wellesley) doesn’t hurt either. :0)
Niether ofy girls had perfect SATs or GPAs. But thank goodness they were smart enough no to chose a college based upon the distance to Starbucks.