@northwesty, Harvard may be the only school that can go on without any major changes even if they stopped charging any tuition.
Maaaaybe YPSM, Rice, the WASP LACs, and Grinnell.
I think you’re right, intparent. The type of girl who would be attracted by that sort of thing probably wants much better access to boys!
I used to work with a woman (a couple of decades senior to me) who was a Sweet Briar alumna. She pledged a million bucks to them a few years back. I’m not sure if it was a bequest or whether the gift has already been realized, but I’m sure this was devastating news for her, as SBC was hugely important to her. And I can’t imagine she would have contemplated a gift of that magnitude if she thought the school was going to close within a decade of her pledge.
There’s a lot more info here:
http://transition.sbc.edu/alumnae/alumnae-faq/
http://transition.sbc.edu/news/faq/
I really think this decision is going to impact the fundraising at many other small LACs as well. Unless they’re among the truly elite, alumni are going to think twice before committing a lot of money.
“I think you’re right, intparent. The type of girl who would be attracted by that sort of thing probably wants much better access to boys!”
SBC made more sense in the 1950s, when the boy access was by trucking kids to/from single sex UVA and W&L. Exactly as it is presented in William Styron’s “Lie Down in Darkness” (soon to be a major motion picture).
I don’t think it ever really adjusted – it still seemed mostly known for the “bring your horse to college” thing.
“If Sweet Briar wanted to survive as an independent school, I think they would have had to start by changing their name, going coed, and increasing the size of the student body, for starters.”
Which is another way of saying that Sweet Briar was doomed unless it became something completely different than Sweet Briar.
Yes I’m biased but…IMO the remaining sister schools MHC smith WC Barnard BMC (andScripts) have stayed true to mission of women centric ed, while adapting to the times and trends in higher ed. Each of these schools offers co-circ and extra-circ involvement with neighboring to tier institutions either thru consortiums or co-enrollment programs. It’s not just a matter of budgets and numbers. Forecasting is about preditictimg market trends and rolling with the times. With that in mind, the sister schools are uniquely positioned.
SBC watched the vitriol and lawsuits that RMWC went thru in going coed and did not have the stomach or the staying power and other assets to do that. It took a good 5 years and is just now showing success. A lot of people got very hurt in the change.
On the alumnae call, Pres. Jones predicted that in 25-30 years, only Wellesley, Smith, Mt. H, and Bryn Mawr would be left as freestanding women’s LACs. (Barnard is in quite a different position as a component of a research university.) I expect that Scripps is safe, too, but it’s hard to argue with him beyond that.
“That matrix has some strange placements. The University of Southern Maine, which is in financial trouble and has been firing professors and closing departments, is in a “healthy” quadrant, and Amherst is not? I don’t think so”
I only looked very briefly, but Grinnell was in a “bad” quadrant? Grinnell, which has more money than God, in a low cost part of the country? That surprised me. But I didn’t fully take the time to grasp the matrix.
I wonder if the speed of the closing has anything to do with an offer to buy the campus? I can imagine someone like Liberty University may have approached them and said - we’ll pay you x million if you shut down by May. Otherwise, as long as they still had tens of millions in endowment, any logical person would have announced that they were closing after another academic year, to give time for staff to find new jobs, for juniors to graduate, and for younger students to have a choice in transfers.
I’d rather spend that extra year paying people to work instead of handing them large severances.
That year delay also may have provided time to become a branch of another college.
By the way, a group of Mormons bought another nearby rural Virginia college that went bankrupt. It is Southern Virginia University. It was a women college until the early 1990s - Southern Virginia College for Women. I wonder if they would want to buy Sweetbriar.
@Pizzagirl, I have taken (well, maybe better: tried to take) enough time to fully grasp the matrix, and it’s basically an attempt to come up with a measure where schools can have pressure put on them to contract for business management consulting services. (Hmmm…I can’t imagine why a business management consulting firm would put out something like that, can you?) It also oversimplifies what’s really a number of different financial measures into 2 axes rather than the 4 or 5 it really needs, and assumes that higher education needs to invest in stuff with a 5-year time horizon rather than one the order of multiple decades or even centuries.
“If I was in that situation, I would have tried to become a branch of a larger college.”
They did try. Too much debt and deferred maintenance. No one wanted in.
While I suspect the underlying data is accurate, the matrix itself is highly suspect.
Yes, @momneeds2no, the Sisters are in more urban/suburban locales and have other colleges close by (often adjacent) to form a consortium with, so could provide more opportunities to prospective students.
What could Sweet Briar do?
Yes, endowment numbers can be deceiving. There are a number of colleges that have debt that is greater than their endowment. Even the universities with enormous endowments typically have enormous debt.
Debt can be OK if it needed for essential long-term capital projects and the payments are sustainable. Some of those capital projects become essential in order to attract and retain students who will pay close to sticker price. Some debt can be paid off with an independent revenue stream, such as for an affiliated hospital or parking decks.
However, too much debt can certainly be a killer. I know of one private college that structured their debt for a new science building with a huge balloon payment in a few years. They were hoping that money would fall out of the sky to pay it off.
Colleges want the flexibility of unrestricted giving. However, if a person wants to make a very large gift to a college with questionable finances, they probably should restrict it. Certain types of restrictions may allow the money to be returned and re-directed by the giver to another institution if the college goes belly-up.
What does President Jones know of other woman’s colleges, places like Mills College or Spelman College? Those small LACs have used their distinction to survive and thrive. Maybe SBC would be announcing new initiatives today and rather than closure if the school had copied a few things from Mills and Spelman.
I agree that something seems a bit fishy , especially since they have the funds to continue for another year and support student in either graduating or transitioning to other institutions. I suppose they have 100 or so rising seniors. Who wants to bet that a title transfer / lease option for the existing physical plant is in the works?
Being located in a major metro area is a tough thing to copy. So is having a brother school across the street like Spelman. At Mills, at least, 16% of its undergrads are adult returning students, which is only possible in a pretty populous area. Besides, I don’t really know that Mills and Spelman are thriving financially. Better than SBC, I’m sure, but beyond that?
@LakeWashington, I don’t know anything about Mills, but I’m not sure how you propose to turn Sweet Briar in to an elite HBCU. Being the A-A Wellesley/Barnard among both prospective students and recruiters (and being located in a major metropolitan area; as is Mills), gives Spelman a certain staying power that SWC doesn’t have. That’s why I think ND and BYU will weather whatever major changes roll through higher ed in future decades as well. Being the aspiratinal dream school of a certain segment of the population (because of emotional/cultural attachment rather than academic prowess) gives you a staying power that other colleges of the same academic rank don’t have.
BTW, I think Agnes Scott will survive as all-female as well. It’ll become mostly a feeder for Emory’s and GTech’s (and possibly other schools’) professional programs, but it will survive. Being in metro Atlanta helps in that regard.