Guys, it’s not just the majors. It’s that EVERY college and university in the US needs to have:
office of international students – visa compliance, etc.
counseling center
medical facilities
office of assessment and accreditation
subscriptions to library databases
a gym
food service with trained staff, etc.
disability services
expensive software to run online course components
an IT department
an attorney on staff
diversity coordinator
LGBT coordinator
some kind of office dealing with religion
etc.
This is HOW you end up with 570 students and 300 staff. What we are starting to see is the ‘unbundling’ of this stuff, with large parts of it being outsourced or contracted by outside firms. (I.e. you can pay a team of people to come in and do your assessment stuff without making them full-time staff; you can partner with a Doc in the Box in your community, use someone else’s study abroad programs, maybe have an attorney on retainer who is not staff, etc. etc.) However, I"m wary of the fact that if too much of this does get outsourced, you end up losing some of the identity and ethos that makes a university your university rather than just ‘a university’. And I’m not sure that people who come in and perform these services on a contract basis really understand your university – I know because I"ve done some of this stuff on contract for other universities.
My sense is that perhaps Sweetbriar studied and considered ‘unbundling’ and decided that you lose too much if you begin carving up your uni in this way.
And sometimes unbundling doesn’t save you anything. If a college let go its entire legal staff (risk management, immigration/international students, various compliance, etc.) it would likely cost MORE to replicate that infrastructure with outsiders. Just one complaint to your bio or psych department from PETA on the use of animals in your labs… if you are paying a non-employee vs. an employee, your legal bills will skyrocket in a nano-second.
@Mom24boys on your list of non religious, etc… Warren Wilson is Presbyterian (as in Agnes Scott) but they are not religious in the same way Liberty, etc are. But if someone is looking for no religious affiliation at all, FYI.
To some extent, what has been characterized here as academic specialization or limitation is actually a designed attempt by a few colleges to eliminate traditional disciplinary boundaries. To lose colleges of this type would be to lose, taken as a whole, some of the vitality and range of the American college experience.
Wells appears to be holding their own, and they are doing a lot of things right IMO. We were impressed by our visit there a year ago. They have cross-registration with Cornell if you need to pick up courses that aren’t offered at Wells (though it is a half-hour commute). They are doing some new building. If you want personalized attention and want to know most of your classmates, it is an excellent choice in my view.
Antioch is another one that seems to be doing well in coming back.
I’m a native Virginian, and grew up about 90 minutes from Sweet Briar. As long as I can remember, it had a very distinctive niche–it really did have that “finishing school” for the well-off horsey set brand. Even in my day (back in the 70’s) very few women wanted to go there–I don’t recall anybody from my high school going there, and I only knew one other person who did so. From what I’ve read, the school did not move too far from that niche–even as that market group was shrinking. I think only really radical changes could possibly have saved it–changes that would have completely changed its character–and they probably needed to be done ten or more years ago.
As for the graduation rate, I suspect that a significant number of students were essentially treating it as a junior college and then transferring–perhaps thinking it might be better to start college in a single-sex environment.
Oglethorpe University, Agnes Scott College, Spelman College, Georgia Tech, Emory and about 20 Atlanta universities and colleges are part of the Atlanta Regional Council for Higher Education’s (ARCHE). This allows cross registration between the member institutions. Being in Atlanta is a huge plus for these smaller colleges.
And yet neither of my kids would look at Oglethorpe or Agnes Scott despite their never ending postcards, brochures, calls, texts last year. Oglethorpe sent my daughter something every day. Free application. Guaranteed merit aid. She had zero interest, mostly because it was in Atlanta.
We used to drive by Soka every Sunday because it was near the hockey rink. Never saw anyone on the campus. Never knew anyone who wanted to go there. It has a high number of international students. It is in a bedroom community. To me, it looked like a business complex, not a college.
Hunt, even in the 70’s, it was roughly 50-50 Yankee and Southern Belle. And back then, both sorts were thinking careers and the growing empowerment available to women. A small percentage of women rode. My friend from DC took her horse- but we should separate what trappings we hear of from what realities and challenging futures those women may have aimed at. And went on to achieve. We give more credence to other small schools, don’t seem to refer to them as niche or “second rate.” I also wonder, if SB were some typically institutional looking place, an ugly student union or crappy dorms, rather than all those Georgian buildings and rolling lands, cows,and yes, horses, would we be making assumptions?
There are so many colleges on CC that people like and tout, that I had never heard of before. Just not knowing a place beforehand, we all learn on CC, doesn’t mean there aren’t plusses. Just sayin’.
And, the demographics changed radically, from then to today. Just the % of kids on FA shows that.
“I also wonder, if SB were some typically institutional looking place, an ugly student union or crappy dorms, rather than all those Georgian buildings and rolling lands, cows,and yes, horses, would we be making assumptions?”
It would be a totally different place, IMHO. Speaking just as a visitor/guest and not as an alum, the physical experience has/had everything to do with what SBC is.
Hanna, there was lots of critical thinking going on and encouraged, even then. Despite the beauty. I took my D1 to see it. That trip, we also visited UVa. She quickly realized (in Charlottesville,) that she’s too Northern (and she’d already spent 6 years at an all girls hs, wanted boys around,) plus needed a bigger dept in her major. But she was captivated.
I don’t see critical thinking as set up in any contrast to beauty or bucolic surroundings and didn’t mean to imply such a contrast. (Bryn Mawr is similarly beautiful, though in a different style.) But I do think there are colleges where the tangible experience is inextricable from what the college is about, and this is one.
“Hunt, even in the 70’s, it was roughly 50-50 Yankee and Southern Belle. And back then, both sorts were thinking careers and the growing empowerment available to women.”
Most people thought SBC was a horsey finishing school. That’s the brand no matter how many students actually rode horses. So unless there’s sufficient buyers for that brand, SBC has a problem.
80% of womens colleges have closed or gone coed in the last 50 years, so there’s clearly a tide going against you. Those that remain seem to be doing so on the basis of (i) very strong academics and/or (ii) the “girl power” thing (which I think is very valuable).
SBC never had (i). And (ii) is a pretty confusing sell given the bucolic campus and…those darned horses.
As noted below, back in 2006 SBC tried to rebrand/rethink itself under the slogan “Think is for Girls.” Seemed to be pretty well thought out. But it didn’t seem to work.
Maybe as part of the rebranding exercise they needed to shoot the horses and turn the stables into engineering labs instead.
All I know is what people in general in my town in Virginia thought back in the late '70s. Friends at U.Va. also referred to Sweet Briar women unflatteringly. If they waited until 2006 to try to do a major rebranding, I think they just waited too long.
Having no prior knowledge of SBC and no dog in the hunt, “Think is for girls” is just a bad, bad branding idea. It feels like “career Barbie” and implies that girls weren’t supposed to think before but now we’re promoting it.
It does seem to me that SBC was/is a victim of its own branding. Pink and green colors, girlier fonts on the website, the flower symbol, which is even used as the school’s favicon (the symbol you see in the browser’s address bar), all scream “preppy lightweight,” an image not helped by the name of the school itself.
I don’t think that shooting the horses would have helped. Rebranding is hard because you run two risks – you’ll lose the people who liked your ‘old’ brand, and you won’t win the people who liked your ‘new’ brand. People who don’t like the ‘horses’ probably would have attended other colleges in the first place, and people who do like the ‘horses’ will feel turned away. Did college students even realize that Sweet Briar was rebranding?
Not to mention that shooting all those horses would have gotten them in trouble with PETA.
(I assume we’re using ‘horses’ as a metaphor similar to ‘Starbucks’ from a few pages ago, so please let’s not act like anyone is blaming the literal horses for everything.)