Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[apl68]

Siena Heights will close after the next academic year.

This school has a lot of the hallmarks leading to dire financial straits: 1000 on-campus undergrads, small town in the midwest (halfway between Toledo and Battle Creek), a Catholic legacy but no longer having the financial support. Pretty low rankings in many fields. Tried adding a lot of online students. Also added a few grad degrees (master in business and nursing) to claim to be a university.

Online course offerings...a business grad degree...a nursing degree.  Sounds like they followed the standard struggling small college playbook to the letter in trying to find ways to attract students.  It's almost like teenagers trying to assert their individualism by all following the same teen fad of the moment.  Aside from their Catholic identity, which had probably become greatly watered down over the years, they evidently didn't have much to make them stand out from the next small regional college.

Sounds like they weren't necessarily doing anything "wrong."  It was no doubt enough for many years in terms of brand identity simply to be "the Catholic school in this region."  And then it wasn't anymore, and they tried to find other things to do, and with their resources there were only a few things they could afford to try, and it was the same few things that lots of other small regional colleges in the same boat tried.

At least they've decided to close in an orderly fashion, with a year's notice given, instead of engaging in the kind of increasingly frantic and delusional fight to survive that leads to the kind of sudden middle-of-the-semester collapses that some students and employees have found themselves caught in. 

[selecter]

Showing my ignorance: I was quite surprised to find it wasn't the *only* college in Adrian, Michigan, pop. 20, 645.

[apl68]

Tried adding a lot of online students.

It is very mysterious to me why failing institutions think this will work. Why would students pick a small no-name institution for an online degree when they could do one probably for less money and certainly with more course offerings at one of the big ones?

I know of a small town--well under 10,000 people--that used to have its very own municipal zoo.  In the 1950s a local roadside menagerie attraction went out of business, and the city took it over.  Back then it cost a little bit of nothing to run.  It made a nice place for local families to visit on a pleasant afternoon.  The local main employer gave them a bit of financial aid now and then to get new animals and build new enclosures for them.

Over the decades the zoo business became much more highly regulated.  Older facilities got grandfathered in, with the understanding that they would eventually modernize.  The money to do so never became available in this case.  Eventually even the little bit of corporate aid they got dried up.  The increasing regulations meant that the city was draining its tiny coffers just barely keeping the little zoo open.

They kept telling themselves that it was worth it to keep the place open, because it was a great tourist attraction.  But they had no advertising budget.  There wasn't even a sign on the main highway pointing toward the zoo.  You could drive right through town and never know it was there.  I knew people within an hour's radius of the town who had never heard of their zoo.  The only way to find out about it was to visit the town and have somebody take you there.  Eventually the city ran into a budget crisis, and the zoo was the only low-hanging fruit they had to close, so they did.  They should have done it long before they did.  But the City Council didn't want to upset everybody by taking away the zoo.  And so everybody kept telling themselves that they had a "tourist attraction."

Why would anybody drive an hour or more to see this threadbare little menagerie?  How would they ever find out about it in the first place?  People didn't ask these questions.  They knew about the zoo, and it was fun and important to them, so they assumed it would be to others too.  Right?  They just didn't have enough perspective to realize how insignificant and unsustainable their local pride and joy actually was, for anybody from out of town.

I suppose a similar sort of wishful thinking explains why certain little endangered colleges thought that online classes with their name on it would pull students in.  They simply didn't realize just how little their brand name counted for out in the wider world.

[selecter]

Nailed it. It's a shame, truly, but these shabby, lovable zoos can't last.

[Puget]

[/quote]

I suppose a similar sort of wishful thinking explains why certain little endangered colleges thought that online classes with their name on it would pull students in.  They simply didn't realize just how little their brand name counted for out in the wider world.
[/quote]

Oh, I'm sure this is true, but colleges have boards specifically to provide oversight and perspective when administrations are slipping into insular magical thinking, or at least one would hope they function that way. The answer may be that such institutions stock their boards not with savvy outsiders, but with alums and locals who fall into magical thinking right along with the administrations.

[Puget]

Tried adding a lot of online students.

It is very mysterious to me why failing institutions think this will work. Why would students pick a small no-name institution for an online degree when they could do one probably for less money and certainly with more course offerings at one of the big ones?

I suppose a similar sort of wishful thinking explains why certain little endangered colleges thought that online classes with their name on it would pull students in.  They simply didn't realize just how little their brand name counted for out in the wider world.

Oh, I'm sure this is true, but colleges have boards specifically to provide oversight and perspective when administrations are slipping into insular magical thinking, or at least one would hope they function that way. The answer may be that such institutions stock their boards not with savvy outsiders, but with alums and locals who fall into magical thinking right along with the administrations.