Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[apl68]

"Guilford College, in North Carolina, plans to eliminate 30 percent of its full-time faculty positions and discontinue nearly half its academic majors" per https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/11/09/guilford-plans-layoffs-tenured-and-visiting-faculty

Action that drastic, in response to enrollment declines that drastic, doesn't leave one feeling optimistic about their chances.

[polly_mer]

"Guilford College, in North Carolina, plans to eliminate 30 percent of its full-time faculty positions and discontinue nearly half its academic majors" per https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/11/09/guilford-plans-layoffs-tenured-and-visiting-faculty

Action that drastic, in response to enrollment declines that drastic, doesn't leave one feeling optimistic about their chances.

Yep, truly dire financial straits that are obvious to the most casual observer who is honest.

[polly_mer]

More news from Vermont:  Due to low enrollment, the Albany College of Pharmacy will close its Vermont branch in June

[polly_mer]

In Arkansas, Henderson State has been approved by the HLC to merge into the Arkansas State University system with contingencies: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/nov/11/college-merger-advances/?news-arkansas

[spork]

Courtesy of IHE: All employees of Allegheny College will be furloughed for two weeks:

https://triblive.com/news/pennsylvania/allegheny-college-will-require-all-employees-to-take-a-2-week-furlough/.

Allegheny's Form 990s show positive net revenue produced by sales of assets. I assume this is from the sale of investment securities.

[secundem_artem]

More news from Vermont:  Due to low enrollment, the Albany College of Pharmacy will close its Vermont branch in June

25 years ago there were ~ 70 schools of pharmacy.  Now there are ~ 145.  Every busted ass bible college afraid it could not make payroll in a town big enough to need 2 hookers opened up a pharmacy school.  Student interest and demand for seats in pharmacy has significantly declined in the last 8-10 years, the size of graduating HS classes is shrinking and will bottom out in 2026, and the number of seats available is growing.  Polly can do the math better than me, but even my feeble brain sees this as a looming crisis.  It's a classic Malthusian growth model.

[Hibush]

More news from Vermont:  Due to low enrollment, the Albany College of Pharmacy will close its Vermont branch in June

25 years ago there were ~ 70 schools of pharmacy.  Now there are ~ 145.  Every busted ass bible college afraid it could not make payroll in a town big enough to need 2 hookers opened up a pharmacy school.  Student interest and demand for seats in pharmacy has significantly declined in the last 8-10 years, the size of graduating HS classes is shrinking and will bottom out in 2026, and the number of seats available is growing.  Polly can do the math better than me, but even my feeble brain sees this as a looming crisis.  It's a classic Malthusian growth model.

Albany was one of the first, and their Albany campus is thriving with a robust pipeline to the pharmaceutical industry. What has failed is offering a pharmacy program physically at the University of Vermont. My guess is that serious pharmacy students in Vermont chose to go the few miles to Albany.

[TreadingLife]

Hey, here's a "new" idea.  Tuition resets are all the rage right now.


Gordon, Houghton and Seattle Pacific are all members of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, but spokespeople at each college said they did not consult each other about the tuition resets.
"Our intention was to be the first mover on this," said Mouttet. "

Lol, first mover. Can we all drop the delusion that our school will be the first mover on anything. Everyone is looking to boost graduate enrollments with new, crappy masters and certificate programs. We have all tried to reinvent the general ed curriculum to make it more relevant and to tackle the "big ideas" or the "pressing challenges of our time" (insert your buzzword of choice). We're all doubling down on the liberal arts and professing our commitment to diversity and social justice, however performatively we can sell that idea.

Here is another "new" idea.


The university will need to admit 50 to 75 more students to maintain its net tuition revenue, said Nate Mouttet, vice president for enrollment management and marketing at Seattle Pacific. Gordon's enrollment has increased slightly from year to year, so net tuition revenue should remain steady, Sweeney said.

First, this is WAY easier said than done, especially if you care about retention rates. Just because students can fog a mirror on their admissions application doesn't mean they have what it takes to graduate. Net tuition revenue will fall once they leave the college. They never want to talk about that fact or how they plan to prevent it from happening in the first place. Let's just focus on the temporary boost in applications (2-3 years at the max) until that marketing gimmick wears off and everyone returns to the prior steady state. Nevermind the fact that other schools are trying the exact same strategy, so that's going to undercut the impact as well.  Also, people like rollback prices at Walmart, not when they are buying an educational experience. As we have learned with COVID, the college experience is more than the classwork, and who wants to be perceived as having given their child the Walmart/Dollar Tree level of the college experience? Status matters, even if ability to pay is a real issue. For better or worse, price is a proxy for quality.

One other uncomfortable truth is that the college-bound population is shrinking, so good luck trying to "grow" when everyone else is trying to "grow" their way out of this problem. Then again, they are merely trying to be the "first" to do this.  Bless their hearts.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/11/11/private-colleges-slash-sticker-prices-emphasize-affordability-avoid-blaming-pandemic

[spork]

Gordon College received $33 million in contributions in FY 2017, resulting in positive net revenue of $24 million. For FY 2018, it was $1 million in the red. In 2019, it received a donation of $75 million. So it will probably be solvent for another few years. But it's not viable on its own.

[apl68]

In Arkansas, Henderson State has been approved by the HLC to merge into the Arkansas State University system with contingencies: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/nov/11/college-merger-advances/?news-arkansas

As noted earlier on this thread, the merger with ASU has been in the works for some time.  It will be interesting to see what practical effect this has on Henderson and its educational offerings.  The article notes that they will no longer have their own Board of Trustees.

[spork]

Misericordia University stops awarding tenure:

https://www.timesleader.com/news/809417/no-mercy-at-miseri-faculty-administration-clash-over-tenure-and-layoffs.

[polly_mer]

Misericordia University stops awarding tenure:

https://www.timesleader.com/news/809417/no-mercy-at-miseri-faculty-administration-clash-over-tenure-and-layoffs.

Last I checked, tenure itself does not come with additional costs.  The claim that suspension of awarding tenure is somehow related to finances, even while people in their sixth year can apply for promotion and a raise, is weird.

Misericordia looks to be in bad shape according the internet scraping.

Only 2000 students, but also only 43% of faculty are full-time.

83% acceptance rate and 70% graduation rate suggests low standards or a self-filtering group.

$51k sticker price, but $24k average price is bad news with a very high discount rate.

The sales pitch is liberal arts college, but College Scorecard lists the biggest number of degrees as mostly career-related like nursing/allied health/related health, business, and teacher education.  There is an entry of general liberal arts studies in the top 10, but that is not English (7), history (8), math (3), philosophy (4), or chemistry (listed, but 0 for the given year).

It looks a lot like faculty at Misericordia would be better off focusing their efforts on getting a different job, probably not in Pennsylvania higher ed due to the demographic shifts and far too many seats seeking too few students, instead of writing blogs complaining about the suspension of awarding tenure.

[spork]

Misericordia's FTE undergraduate enrollment fell by nearly 20% from FY 2014 to FY 2019. I suspect it fell even more for the fall 2019 incoming cohort. Then the pandemic hit.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

Last I checked, tenure itself does not come with additional costs. 

There can be extra transactional costs for getting rid of people on implicitly permanent contracts.
E.g. extra severance pay may be required; declaring financial exigency to get rid of tenured people may trigger clauses in bonds covenants etc

The college lives up to its name (though, not the meaning they likely thought about): misericorde - a dagger used to deliver a death stroke.

[Vkw10]

Misericordia University stops awarding tenure:

https://www.timesleader.com/news/809417/no-mercy-at-miseri-faculty-administration-clash-over-tenure-and-layoffs.

Last I checked, tenure itself does not come with additional costs.  The claim that suspension of awarding tenure is somehow related to finances, even while people in their sixth year can apply for promotion and a raise, is weird.
[snipped]
The sales pitch is liberal arts college, but College Scorecard lists the biggest number of degrees as mostly career-related like nursing/allied health/related health, business, and teacher education.  There is an entry of general liberal arts studies in the top 10, but that is not English (7), history (8), math (3), philosophy (4), or chemistry (listed, but 0 for the given year).

Proceeding with promotions and raises but not awarding tenure suggests that board and administration want to make future faculty reductions easier, but are also concerned about retaining some of the faculty due for tenure and promotion. Suppose the T&D class included a nursing, philosophy, history, chemistry, and education assistant professor. Three in disciplines with few majors and many underemployed Ph.D.s, one with many majors and usually easy to find adjuncts to teach one class, and one where recruiting faculty is tough. The university is setting up to reduce faculty selectively over the next few years, so it's a longer-term financial play.