Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[Hibush]

This thread was started by Spork nine years ago and has had a steady supply of new content.

Link

I thought it would be good to discuss which schools have financial woes in a single thread.  Post as a sockpuppet if you want.

First off, more news from Birmingham Southern College, which as been discussed extensively in this thread. Looks like the president who was forced to resign may have received a $2.5 million golden parachute.

The most recent entry from the old site brings up a new university.

Link

Eastern Mich University offers buyouts to faculty, staff after prior layoffs, job cuts.

The buyout is up to a year's salary but they'll pay it monthly over FIVE years into retirement accounts.

"Eastern, like other Michigan universities, has faced a steep decline in credit hours being taken by a falling number of students and has several steps to try to stabilize the budget and pay for upgrades, including privatizing a number of services."

https://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2019/05/16/eastern-michigan-university-buyouts-faculty-staff/3694401002/

[spork]

Thank you for re-starting this thread.

[apostrophe]

+1

[dr_codex]

A very important thread.

EMU hits close to home; several good friends work there.

[spork]

Enrollment declines spread to higher tier private institutions: https://www.chronicle.com/article/enrollment-shortfalls-spread/246341/?key=HI0G__j9xid1wSeqaH-M7iq1V3A7vMOcUeZ4AogupR6T3Gngey_NdYHtxB_4RNqBZlJxZElnc3Jzb1NpNjZXVkRRRnYwX1BwQkJDMnNJVTNWV0tKU3VqT29zOA#.XOPMlWt5btM.twitter.

(Twitter-derived link, not sure how long it will remain active).

[Scout]

Enrollment declines spread to higher tier private institutions: https://www.chronicle.com/article/enrollment-shortfalls-spread/246341/?key=HI0G__j9xid1wSeqaH-M7iq1V3A7vMOcUeZ4AogupR6T3Gngey_NdYHtxB_4RNqBZlJxZElnc3Jzb1NpNjZXVkRRRnYwX1BwQkJDMnNJVTNWV0tKU3VqT29zOA#.XOPMlWt5btM.twitter.

(Twitter-derived link, not sure how long it will remain active).

Just in case, here's one from LinkedIn

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Enrollment-Shortfalls-Spread/246341?key=HI0G__j9xid1wSeqaH-M7mNFlrkHQzpYv1P8vOStX2eZZZpbxO55-uDLtIFJjp4-N0xsZXlRM2ZHanU3R1JubnRVN3ZrTHBaSnMwS3dEYmdWNDlJcEZzdWZCMA

[Hibush]

Enrollment declines spread to higher tier private institutions:.

This article emphasizes Bucknell and Ithaca College, both of which found the last few admits would have needed a bigger discount than they could afford.  These places are in a region (rural Pennsylvania and adjacent Appalachian New York) that is supersaturated with small colleges (both public and private) and has a local population that is declining in both size and interest in higher education. The top institutions draw from outside the region, but it is still a really tough market.

Bucknell noted that Penn State, not other small privates, is the main competitor. Penn State gets a little support from the state, but among the lowest in the country. So it can't underprice the privates by that much.

[SLAC_Prof]

Another reality of this shift: while marginal institutions may in fact close, and others will get smaller (are already), still more will have to shift their missions to stay open. My own school is seeing a shift in who we enroll, and a relatively sudden one, as we strive to recruit from outside our home region (midwest) and to diversify. The problem is that many of the new(er) admits are not prepared for college in the same way as our traditional enrollment base, but we have not adjusted the curriculum nor provided any additional faculty development. We have no remedial courses and faculty are not trained in remediation, yet we now have 10-15% of students in a given class clearly unprepared for college to the same extent as our students even five years ago. This is creating a serious problem: faculty are struggling to pull up these less-well-prepared students while simultaneously not losing the top 15% that are still enrolling.  I have found it very challenging to have students with, for example, 30+ ACTs and those with ~20 ACTs in the same class doing the same assignments-- and the students have expressed their concerns as well. For example, I've had to spread out reading assignments...so now I have 1/5th of the class finishing a novel in a week while another 5th takes three weeks to read the same text and still lags in comprehension. Or peers reviewing essays where one might need a bit of reframing of the introduction while the other is struggling to reach a junior-high-school level of mechanics and grammar.

I assume this is happening or will happen at more schools. How we deal with it is currently not even being discussed by administration on my campus-- faculty are simply shaking their ends at end-of-semester and sharing tales of grade distributions that have suddenly gone from bell curves to flat lines, and unprecedented numbers of students who simply chose not to submit assignments or in some cases even attend classes regularly. So clearly retention and persistence to graduation will start to slump before long as well.

Not dire financial straits (yet) but already stumbling into dire functional straits in our case. I fear leadership simply isn't prepared to deal with this, at least not on my campus and not in the short term.

[Tenured_Feminist]

SLAC_Prof, we are dealing with the same thing at my public R1 urban school. We were and are not prepared to handle it.

https://thelinfieldreview.com/21810/archive/news/years-end-means-losing-faculty/ Oregon's Linfield College looks close to death spiral.

Seems that Ithaca and Bucknell share the problem of being close to a competitor institution that's likely chasing enrollments to these colleges' detriment. (Ithaca - Cornell, Bucknell - Penn State.)

[apostrophe]

https://thelinfieldreview.com/21810/archive/news/years-end-means-losing-faculty/ Oregon's Linfield College looks close to death spiral.

"This balanced budget required roughly $2.57 million in position reductions. These reductions are split between staff and faculty and they're split in the following way: $280,000 in staff and $2.3 million in faculty." - that does not look good (my emphasis).

[mythbuster]

Another article in the Linfield student paper talks about the closing of dorms. A third dorm will be closed this year, with 2 having been closed the previous year.  Sad to see, I applied for job there almost a decade ago, and thought it would be a nice place to work.

[mythbuster]

Double post, but I found this interesting from the Linfield wikipedia page:
   "For six consecutive years, as of 2006, Linfield was named the No. 1 college in the western region by US News & World Report for the Comprehensive Colleges-Bachelor's category.[9] In the U.S. News and World Report College Rankings for 2007, Linfield College was recategorized and ranked as a Liberal Arts College in a restructuring of rankings.[10] In 2011, it was ranked 121st among liberal arts colleges."

I wonder if this shift in category had an effect on their recruitment? It's a big hit to no longer be able to say "We're #1", and it can be very different types of students who are looking for SLAC vs a comprehensive U. This, right at the depth of the recession, might have been the start of a steep slide in enrollment.

[marshwiggle]

Double post, but I found this interesting from the Linfield wikipedia page:
   "For six consecutive years, as of 2006, Linfield was named the No. 1 college in the western region by US News & World Report for the Comprehensive Colleges-Bachelor's category.[9] In the U.S. News and World Report College Rankings for 2007, Linfield College was recategorized and ranked as a Liberal Arts College in a restructuring of rankings.[10] In 2011, it was ranked 121st among liberal arts colleges."

I'm wondering if the recategorization indicated a narrowing of offerings, and then  over the next 4 years things kept going downhill. Anyone know how/why an institution would get recategorized?

[Tenured_Feminist]

I think it would be almost impossible, given the timing, to disentangle the effect of the rejiggering of the rankings from the financial crisis.

[spork]

Double post, but I found this interesting from the Linfield wikipedia page:
   "For six consecutive years, as of 2006, Linfield was named the No. 1 college in the western region by US News & World Report for the Comprehensive Colleges-Bachelor's category.[9] In the U.S. News and World Report College Rankings for 2007, Linfield College was recategorized and ranked as a Liberal Arts College in a restructuring of rankings.[10] In 2011, it was ranked 121st among liberal arts colleges."

I'm wondering if the recategorization indicated a narrowing of offerings, and then  over the next 4 years things kept going downhill. Anyone know how/why an institution would get recategorized?

Institutions get re-categorized when the profit-seeking entities that generate the rankings, like U.S. News & World Report, adopt new scoring systems in an effort to prevent additional publicity about the rankings being gamed and fraudulent. The only market segment that pays any attention to these rankings are international students.

Linfield College's main campus undergraduate FTE enrollment fell from 1800 in 2006-07 to 1660 in 2016-17. It's online undergrad FTE fell from 280 to 176 during the same period. It's nursing program enrollment in Portland was flat. My guess is that non-nursing enrollment numbers continued to drop over the last two years.

If the numbers in the article about Linfield are correct, the college's administration wants to eliminate about one-fifth of the college's full-time/tenure-stream faculty. Probably the only positions that are secure are those in nursing and business studies. Expect entire majors/departments to be wiped out.