Hollins University had a $180.6 million endowment.
http://www.hollins.edu/who-we-are/our-president-leadership/
Aren’t there kids who committed or got accepted recently? From what I see, there is a Facebook group for the class of 2019
Yes, students were accepted and some were touring campus today.
When Vassar went coed they went from pink and grey to maroon and gray.
My niece graduated from Sweet Briar last spring. I’m very curious what she thinks. She got a job straight out of college, but related more to her experience with horses than her education I think. 
Although SBC has an endowment of $94 million, it also has liabilities of over $29 million, according to their last audit, including bonds that will need to be paid. During the last couple of years, SBC burned endowment at a fairly rapid pace and was suffering with tuition discounting.
So maybe I have a bad memory on endowment amounts…but what about Mary Baldwin with less than half an endowment of SBC and hasn’t closed its doors!
Still…doesn’t explain how as late as last week they were still asking alumni for money, enrolling students and business as usual with nary a word to any of us. Even parents of current students were crassly notified in an email.
I’m seeing banner ads for Sweet Briar on this thread. Kind of disconcerting.
Yes, many colleges do not want senior-level transfers.
But all students other than those who will graduate will be impacted, since the announcement comes rather late in the academic year, so many schools’ transfer application deadlines have passed. Also, since Sweet Briar had to discount its costs (i.e. give lots of scholarships and financial aid) to attract students, that makes the cost to the students even more of an issue than the usual worse scholarships and financial aid for transfers at many schools.
I hope they use the endowment money to help students transfer, perhaps for merit aid to similar schools.
Can a school do that with endowment finds that were intended to go to (now defunct) programs rather than the general college pot?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2013/07/24/is-your-college-going-broke/ is a 2013 article in Forbes that discussed the possibility of a college going broke. The associated table at http://www.scribd.com/doc/155687329/Forbes-College-Financial-Grades-As-and-Bs gave Sweet Briar College an A grade for financial health.
Obviously, the grading methodology described at http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2013/07/24/behind-forbes-financial-grades/ did not capture all of the risk factors that Sweet Briar College had.
Many, many colleges have transfer deadlines in March and have said they will work with these kids given the circumstances.
@Rdtsmith, I’d rather that SBC used the endowment to give faculty and staff a generous severance rather than burn through that endowment and leave them with nothing.
Nobody wants to see their college close up shop, but if the end is coming and there is no foreseeable way to stop the decline, better to give the workers a cushion in their transition (they’ll need it), rather than sputter towards the bitter end.
Yes, if they can use the endowment money to give generous severance to employees and top up financial aid and scholarships to transferring students, that may at least cushion the blow to all of those affected.
One of the articles mentioned that the decision to close was made at the end of last week. So last week was presumably “business as usual” for all of those not trying to figure out how the school should handle its impending financial problems and enrollment decline.
If they had earlier publicly said that there was a possibility of closure, that would have almost guaranteed closure, since few students would apply or matriculate, and most current students would send out transfer applications.
We toured Hollins, Sweet Briar and Mary Baldwin with my daughter this year. She ultimately decided not to apply to Sweet Briar because it was too rural and there weren’t any boys nearby. She also is rebelling against the Christian high school we sent her to and said that part of the reason she wouldn’t consider SB is because it was ‘too close to Liberty’ – Wonder if others made that association. (I.e. Liberty is quite conservative, therefore that part of the country is quite conservative, therefore SB).
My sense is that Mary Baldwin will survive because they have already begun doing things like offering programs to people of both genders who live in the community (i.e. come back part-time and get an MS in accounting). They are also doing some online education for people elsewhere in the world. They have thought a lot about how to make themselves valuable to the community. However, they appear to be also practicing some serious tuition discounting, and accepted my daughter within 72 hours of applying, which implied to us that they were desperate for applicants. Again, a very historic school and one where it would be a shame to see it close.
My sense is that SB was more conservative than the other two,and less feminist. That mattered to my daughter and was one of the reasons why she decided not to apply.
Obviously, they have been planning for this as a possibility for a long time, but until the final decision gets made, things have to be business as usual, or else the final decision gets made by default. If the college had stopped fundraising, upgrading its facilities, and recruiting students, it would quickly have lost the possibility of remaining open even if its board preferred to take that chance.
I have this mental image I can’t shake of the Bobs from “Office Space” advising the board, “We find that there’s less likelihood of an ‘incident’ if you continue fund-raising and admissions right up until the day before.”