Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[selecter]

Webster University losing giant bags of money. Fast.


https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/as-annual-losses-reach-25m-webster-university-looks-to-pivot-student-focus/article_67d29702-415a-5817-aadd-1f0b572586ee.html

[apl68]

Webster University losing giant bags of money. Fast.


https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/as-annual-losses-reach-25m-webster-university-looks-to-pivot-student-focus/article_67d29702-415a-5817-aadd-1f0b572586ee.html

Nothing unusual, unfortunately, in the strategy of jettisoning liberal arts and going big on more vocational STEM and business degrees that are what the vast majority of potential students now want.  It's a perfectly understandable response to the market.  Webster, however, seems to have decided to take the plunge and go very, very big with lots of borrowed money.  And the gamble has clearly not paid off.  Another case of "just because you're willing to sell out, doesn't mean anybody will be buying."

They're in this shape and got a C- rating for their finances.  Imagine what it would take for an institution to make a D....

[spork]

Update on Birmingham-Southern: https://www.wvtm13.com/article/birmingham-southern-college-meeting-with-students-to-discuss-options/42782235#. Can't tell if its president is trying to blow smoke or is just stupid when it comes to numbers.

[TreadingLife]

Update on Birmingham-Southern: https://www.wvtm13.com/article/birmingham-southern-college-meeting-with-students-to-discuss-options/42782235#. Can't tell if its president is trying to blow smoke or is just stupid when it comes to numbers.

Are you questioning whether the baseball team is ranked first and the softball team is ranked second? lol. 

[apl68]

They're admitting more students and still running seriously in the red?  Is that because enrollment dropped drastically at some point and is just now starting to rebound?


Asking the state legislature--any state legislature--for a $30 million bailout in today's climate seems like a forlorn hope.

[spork]

Number of applicants and number of admits is different from number enrolled.

[Wahoo Redux]

Philedelphia Magazine: Temple Student Strike Turns Ugly as School Ends Some Tuition Aid

The standoff began last week with several hundred Temple University graduate students — who also work for Temple as part of their graduate studies, as graduate students tend to do — walking out, picket signs in hand, to demand better pay and benefits from the state-funded public university. This marks the first time that members of the 20-year-old Temple University Graduate Students Association Local 6290 have ever gone on strike.

******

"Any Temple employee that decides to strike forfeits their pay and complete benefits package," explained Temple University senior vice president and chief operating officer Ken Kaiser. "Tuition remission is part of the TUGSA benefit package. Therefore, they are no longer eligible."

A little more thorough coverage:

Business Insider: Students who participated in a strike at Temple University are being told they will lose their tuition and health care benefits

[ProfessorPlum]

Update on Birmingham-Southern: https://www.wvtm13.com/article/birmingham-southern-college-meeting-with-students-to-discuss-options/42782235#. Can't tell if its president is trying to blow smoke or is just stupid when it comes to numbers.

Birmingham-Southern president isn't blowing smoke. Without state funds, the school will have to close at the end of the semester. This article provides a detailed explanation of how BSC got to this point: https://www.al.com/news/2023/01/whitmire-looking-for-a-way-forward-bscs-time-is-running-out.html?outputType=amp

[Mobius]

Philedelphia Magazine: Temple Student Strike Turns Ugly as School Ends Some Tuition Aid

The standoff began last week with several hundred Temple University graduate students — who also work for Temple as part of their graduate studies, as graduate students tend to do — walking out, picket signs in hand, to demand better pay and benefits from the state-funded public university. This marks the first time that members of the 20-year-old Temple University Graduate Students Association Local 6290 have ever gone on strike.

******

"Any Temple employee that decides to strike forfeits their pay and complete benefits package," explained Temple University senior vice president and chief operating officer Ken Kaiser. "Tuition remission is part of the TUGSA benefit package. Therefore, they are no longer eligible."

A little more thorough coverage:

Business Insider: Students who participated in a strike at Temple University are being told they will lose their tuition and health care benefits

As expected during a strike. While I agree they have issues they'd like the university to address, strikes are not consequence-free actions. This Tweet is a bit over the top: https://twitter.com/jennarsterling/status/1623387037817802752?s=42&t=niuOqykc9uIqRWo3ZrFXQg

[apl68]

Update on Birmingham-Southern: https://www.wvtm13.com/article/birmingham-southern-college-meeting-with-students-to-discuss-options/42782235#. Can't tell if its president is trying to blow smoke or is just stupid when it comes to numbers.

Birmingham-Southern president isn't blowing smoke. Without state funds, the school will have to close at the end of the semester. This article provides a detailed explanation of how BSC got to this point: https://www.al.com/news/2023/01/whitmire-looking-for-a-way-forward-bscs-time-is-running-out.html?outputType=amp

Thanks for the link!

So, another case of a downward financial spiral begun when a school tried to fancy up  a dreary postwar utilitarian campus.  I've noticed that tower architectural follies seem to be very common on such fancied-up campuses.  Wonder why?

I've often worried that Alma Mater, which has rebuilt a great deal of its campus since I was there in the 1980s, has spent itself into trouble.  So far they seem to be doing okay, so perhaps their gamble of spending on pretty architecture to convince prospective students that it's a good place to be has been paying off.  They never built a tower, though.  The newer buildings are all functional as well as pretty.

I know of a library that did something a bit like this some years back.  They spent millions they didn't actually have remodeling an historic structure downtown into a fancy branch library.  The library's director was greatly admired for his achievements, until he died and it was revealed that he'd left the library hopelessly in debt.  The situation was so bad it took a couple of searches to find a new director willing to try to fix the mess.  She's done a remarkable job of doing so. 

It goes to show that comebacks are sometimes possible.  I wish Birmingham-Southern could pull it off.  Again, though, if their survival depends on getting millions from the Alabama legislature, it's very hard to see it happening.

[Wahoo Redux]

IHE: A Harbinger for 2023? Presentation College to Close

Lower Deck:

The small private institution is closing due to enrollment challenges and other issues exacerbated by COVID-19. Some higher education experts expect more closures to follow.

While many of the colleges that announced closures last year cited the coronavirus, in part, for putting them out of business, experts note that federal government funding during the COVID-19 pandemic may have kept many institutions alive. Now that the spigot of federal relief funds has been shut off, higher education observers believe that other embattled institutions may ultimately succumb to closure, a path that many were on prior to the pandemic.

And in a higher education world divided into haves and have-nots, analysts see particularly choppy waters ahead for nonselective private nonprofit institutions and increased operational challenges for underfunded regional public universities.

[Hibush]

The Chronicle has an article on colleges that have continued to lose enrolment compared to those that bounced back. They find 573 institutions are continuing to drop. Those appear to be in two categories, one the super-dinky (<200 students to start) or community colleges.
Some public R1s had a big drop but came right back.

[ciao_yall]

The Chronicle has an article on colleges that have continued to lose enrolment compared to those that bounced back. They find 573 institutions are continuing to drop. Those appear to be in two categories, one the super-dinky (<200 students to start) or community colleges.
Some public R1s had a big drop but came right back.

BPCR - can you post the text?

[Wahoo Redux]

There are a number of graphics, data tables, that don't come through.  I think you can get a pass to look at these things just by signing up for their newsletter with an email.

Big Drops in Enrollment Hit Colleges in the First Fall of the Pandemic. Who Was Able to Bounce Back?
By  Brian O'Leary and Audrey Williams June
FEBRUARY 14, 2023
After the pandemic began in early 2020, colleges grappled with a frightening prospect: What if first-time students skipped going to college in the fall?

Many colleges' fears about attendance, of course, came true. And the drop in first-time students — whose numbers drive enrollment each year — proved to be especially steep at community colleges.

A big question loomed for the following fall: Would enrollment be able to bounce back?

A Chronicle analysis of federal data offers some insights about how the enrollment of first-time, degree-seeking students at more than 2,600 colleges in our sample fared the following year. Read on to see whose enrollments recovered, whose started clawing their way back, and whose kept falling.

But first, let's look at how pervasive the declines were in the first fall following the pandemic's start; enrollment in The Chronicle's sample fell at about three in four institutions.


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We were particularly interested in what happened at the harder-hit colleges, where enrollment dropped by 10 percent or more. Despite high hopes that first-time student attendance would rebound in the fall of 2021, that outcome largely didn't pan out, The Chronicle's analysis shows. The inability to recoup enrollment losses was most evident at public colleges.


For some types of colleges, the road to recovery was more uphill than most. Of the 560 institutions classified as associate colleges and whose first-time student enrollment fell by at least 10 percent in 2020, only one in 20 recouped the students they lost the following year. On the other side of the spectrum, about 25 percent of doctoral institutions saw enrollment return to pre-pandemic levels.


Of the 1,257 colleges whose enrollment fell by at least 10 percent in the fall of 2020, 137 recovered the first-time students they lost by the fall of 2021. Another 540 didn't fully recover but saw enrollment headed in the right direction. At another 573 institutions, however, enrollment continued to drop. And at seven institutions — three of them community colleges — first-time enrollment dropped in 2020 and stayed at the same level the following year.


Methodology
Data is from the Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (Ipeds). Enrollment data is for all first-time degree-seeking students. Only degree-granting Title IV-eligible colleges in the U.S., including Washington, D.C., in 2021 are included. Colleges that did not have 2019 and 2020 data are excluded.

[spork]

Per the story in today's Inside Higher Ed: Whittier College. Deficits in FYs 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2021. Its FTE undergrad enrollment climbed fairly steadily from only 1,026 in 2006 to 1,763 in 2020. Then a 14% drop to 1,473 in 2021. The numbers don't make much sense to me, unless the college was only attracting students by increasing its discount rate so much that it couldn't cover its operating expenses.