Funny how that works!
I think we all agree (even the SB boosters) that at a macro level, we have a surplus of seats in higher education, at least given the current demographics. I guess it’s reasonable that we may have disagreements about which institutions ought to close to provide some market correction to the over-supply.
My first choices would be the for-profit colleges, given their abysmal grad rates and high rates of federal aid abuse. I think it would take me a long time to worry about Merced and Wisconsin.
Barrons mileage clearly varies from mine.
Mount Holyoke offers a joint engineering degree with Cal Tech, Dartmouth, and the University of Massachusetts. Approximately 25% of Mount Holyoke students major in the sciences.
The Mt Holyoke programs are 3-2 programs that end with the student earning a degree from both places. Lots of LACs have these kind of arrangements.
Comparing MHC and its science center to the offering at SBC shows what insurmountable odds the middling school faces to change its fortunes. See https://www.mtholyoke.edu/about/science
That and digging into the comprehensive reviews and disclosures by MHC on the DIFFICULTIES to keep an all-female school afloat and selective at the same time.
I suspect MHC is the most precarious of the remaining Seven Sisters - and it still has historical prestige SB couldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. Notably, it’s also the most rural.
According to the [2015 Survey of College and University Business Officers](Closure Concerns and Financial Strategies: a Survey of College Business Officers | Inside Higher Ed) by Inside Higher Ed and Gallup (full text available for free download), while only 1% of profiled non-profit private colleges stated that they might have to shut down over the next five years, 27% believe they might have to in the upcoming decades.
Sweet Briar now will also have to fight against a coming demographic bust similar to what happened in the late 1980s, early 1990s in addition to its well publicized problems. After all, just look at the [age pyramid of the US as of 2015](The Next America | Pew Research Center). My age group, the 20-25, has far more people than in the 10-14 and 15-19 age range.
But how many students actually complete the 3+2 program by transferring to the “2” school? For MHC, Caltech and Dartmouth transfer admission may be competitive enough that few who try get admitted, and some MHC students may not find a good social fit there, and UMass may be too expensive for a non-MA resident on significant financial aid.
Normally I wouldn’t post of here because I’m not a parent, but I saw that I was mentioned earlier (I’m the student who was going to go in the spring and then was accepted at ASC) and I thought I’d weigh in because I see a lot of people who are arguing/argued that SBC no longer has a place in the community. Most people recognize that they were a school for preppy, horsey types, which I can’t argue with. But they also had the capability to draw a lot of A-class students who wanted to go to a women’s college but not foot the bill of the Seven Sisters. Or ones who wanted a less competitive/aggressive atmosphere. Or ones who wanted to be at the top of their class and/or have a large subset of students who were more there for their particular programs than academics so that their efforts could receive more attention by faculty. Why these people weren’t coming I don’t know, but I know that they do exist. If they had spent more effort on these groups of students instead of scraping the bottom of the barrel of their traditional crowd they would have been able to increase GPAs and test scores which might have led to an increase of higher paying students in the long run as selectivity increased. Again, this is my opinion as a eighteen-year-old only.
For me, personally, my parents were fairly well off but not interested in paying 50-60k for anything that wasn’t Ivy. The only one I was interested in and applied to was Yale and I’m not ashamed to say that I didn’t get in. Paying full price for Washington and Lee or accepting a place off of Wellesley’s waiting list wasn’t worth it to me. Even accepting ~14k/yr scholarships at Smith or MHC wasn’t worth it when I could have 22k/yr or 28k/yr at ASC and SBC respectively.
What happens next year is still up in the air.
Because this thread should end on a positive note!
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1859836-celebrating-sweet-briars-rebirth.html