Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[spork]

Bacone College declared bankruptcy.

[spork]

Keystone College: https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/news/keystone-college-cuts-29-faculty-staff-positions-closes-three-low-enrollment-programs/article_208d089c-46f6-5368-89a5-714d4b4e58d0.html.

This is just fiddling around the edges. The school should just close now instead of dragging out the inevitable for another 3-5 years.

[treeoflife]

Bacone was coming for a long time.

[Hibush]

Another CHE article on "The endangered small college" made me think of another dynamic leading to some of the radical experimental colleges failing. They looked like the niche they developed in the '60s, for instance, has had sustained interest. But why are they not filling even their very modest target enrollment? It could be that larger schools also noticed the need and developed programs that attract students with the same values. But those schools operate more efficiently through scale, and have more capacity to accommodate fluctuations in interest.

In the tech world we see a lot of novel ideas being developed by startups. Most of those realize that they will never grow to their potential as an independent company, but hope to be bought up before a big company steals their great idea and executes it better. Of course, most simply run out of money and close the doors. Is there an analogy to distinctive small schools?

[lightning]

Keystone has only an $8-million endowment. The land that the campus sits on is worth more than their endowment. Brutal.

[apl68]

Keystone College: https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/news/keystone-college-cuts-29-faculty-staff-positions-closes-three-low-enrollment-programs/article_208d089c-46f6-5368-89a5-714d4b4e58d0.html.

This is just fiddling around the edges. The school should just close now instead of dragging out the inevitable for another 3-5 years.

Keystone says that they've just signed with "investors" of some kind who are going to help bail them out.  You have to wonder who that could be, and how legit they are.  Scam artists seem to prey on desperate colleges.

That article is something of a two-for-one.  It also mentions a small church-affiliated school called Clark's Summit University, which I don't recall seeing mentioned here before.  Their enrollment has dropped by almost half in recent years, they've cut expenditures and still are running a substantial deficit, and now they've furloughed their staff.

[dismalist]

Another CHE article on "The endangered small college" made me think of another dynamic leading to some of the radical experimental colleges failing. They looked like the niche they developed in the '60s, for instance, has had sustained interest. But why are they not filling even their very modest target enrollment? It could be that larger schools also noticed the need and developed programs that attract students with the same values. But those schools operate more efficiently through scale, and have more capacity to accommodate fluctuations in interest.

In the tech world we see a lot of novel ideas being developed by startups. Most of those realize that they will never grow to their potential as an independent company, but hope to be bought up before a big company steals their great idea and executes it better. Of course, most simply run out of money and close the doors. Is there an analogy to distinctive small schools?

Well, yes, in some negative senses. Non-profits cannot be subject to a hostile takeover. Essentially, management of non-profits can't be bought out. If they don't get cash, why should they leave their sinecures until the sinecure goes bust? They can't even be forced into bankruptcy.

[spork]

Eastern Nazarene College will close:

https://enc.edu/news/board-announces-developing-plan-for-closure/.

[Ancient Fellow]

That article is something of a two-for-one.  It also mentions a small church-affiliated school called Clark's Summit University, which I don't recall seeing mentioned here before.  Their enrollment has dropped by almost half in recent years, they've cut expenditures and still are running a substantial deficit, and now they've furloughed their staff.

Clarks Summit, if I recall correctly, is a rebranded old-school fundamentalist Bible college of the sort that has a drastically shrinking constituency. There's probably little in the way of best management practices that could overcome that.

[apl68]

Eastern Nazarene College will close:

https://enc.edu/news/board-announces-developing-plan-for-closure/.

They speak of "transitioning to a new educational enterprise."  I wonder what that means?  Turning their campus over to a private K-12 school? 

Anyway, it looks like they plan to do the right thing by closing down in an orderly manner and providing teach-outs for their students.  Maybe other schools like Trevecca can benefit from the transfers.

[apl68]

And it's hard to know what kind of economy we actually have now: inflation is slowed, and the unemployment numbers are decent, yet I constantly hear from students, people in our town, faculty members whose spouses/kids are looking for work, that it seems virtually impossible to get callbacks when applying to those "now hiring" jobs.

The work economy is indeed strong, but attitudes are horrible. Wages are rising faster than inflation due to the labor shortage, and employers are paying despite the higher interest they have to pay. But why are attitudes so bad?  Who is having trouble finding work? Is it the college graduates who spent time argued due dates and fighting for extra credit when they didn't do the regular credit?

I think it is critical to deal with the widespread low confidence in a hot economy. I don't understand why it is, but the consequences of letting it fester are dire.

The statistical methodologies used to calculate official inflation rates and rises in wages are not capturing the lived experience of large numbers of people.  Many ordinary, everyday expenditures, like grocery prices--the sorts of things that people can't get away from on a day-to-day basis--have risen and are still rising well beyond the overall rate of inflation.  A great many people have not had rises in wages sufficient to compensate for that.  They're seeing what looks like a permanent decline in their household standard of living due to inflation.  And that's a dangerous situation. 

Cheerful talk by public officials about rising wages beating the official rate of inflation risks undermining public trust.  It's due to flawed statistical models and experts getting out of touch with ordinary people rather than intentional deceit, but ordinary members of the public are going to assume that it is deceit.  As an editorial I saw recently put it, ordinary people hear the reassurances about rising wages and declining inflation as the experts saying "Who are you going to believe--us or your lying eyes?"  It's not just perception.  Many people are losing ground economically, and those who try to tell them that they're not are just going to make them mad.  That could have terrible consequences in upcoming elections.

[methodsman]

Bacone College declared bankruptcy.

The should rename themselves Bacon College and everything would work out ok.

mm

[spork]

Lesley University

[kaysixteen]

That is a real shame about Eastern Nazarene, but, well...

1) I worked for them as an adjunct for one course, hired at the last minute, in the fall sem of 2019, the last semester before the world changed as we know it.  But even then, the class I taught, 'Reading for College', was a remedial course given to freshmen who could not pass a diagnostic reading exam given to all frosh.  It was a high school level class, and I was hired to do it largely because of my unique background as a humanities PhD and MLS who had taught a variety of study skills and reading type classes at various levels.  The students in this class were not very, well... some of them should not have been in college.  The diagnostic test was designed for the school by an outside vendor, and the deal was that after the class was almost over, in early Dec., we would have the students retake the exam to see how they did on it, how much they improved.  But around Thanksgiving, when I emailed my supervisor (she was the director of something like 'Study skills center', or thereabouts) to ask when this test would be administered, did I have to allot class time for it, etc., she told me honestly that it would not be administered at this time because the school lacked the money to buy access to it from their vendor.   Certainly the course salary they paid me then was much less than I have ever been paid for adjunct work in southern NE, and those assignments were much earlier than this one.

2) As this pretentious press release noted, they have had multiple presidents, admins, etc., and have somehow pumped huge money into campus improvements.   When I was there  the campus was beautiful.  But they had almost no endowment, and obviously were heavily reliant on a significant annual subsidy from their denomination.

3) The land and buildings both at ENC are, largely because of the condition of the buildings and the value of the land, south of Boston, on which they are situated, are worth millions.  I will be very interested in what becomes of them.

[apl68]

Lesley University

Sounds very bad, what with huge amounts of debt and declining enrollment.  What's most striking is how bad morale seems to be among both faculty and students toward the administration.  There have been multiple votes of no-confidence of the President and Board of Trustees, and students have been actively protesting poor living conditions and even telling prospective students to stay away.

Meanwhile they've eliminated their entire English faculty, and nearly all of their science and mathematics faculty.  So no STEM majors.  A big part of their brand seems to be "expressive therapies," which sounds like one of those narrow specialties that's no longer drawing many prospective students in today's environments.