I feel that @eyemgh’s comment from another thread really applies toward what happened at some of the schools:
The brute force ROI piece is going to an in-state two or four-year public college. It will get you from Point A to Point B, which for many Americans, is the main point of a college education. But becoming part of an intimate, like-minded community (like the student who had been a foster care mentioned) or having a niche program in closer proximity to home (as was the case for the student from Massachusetts), or, or, or, was part of that “extra” that those students/families were willing to pay more for. Unfortunately, they selected institutions that did not attract enough paying students to keep up with their models.
She accrued over $100,000 in student loans across her four universities
This, however, was extraordinarily ill-advised. Obviously, most of us CCers known that it was $28k in federal student loans and the rest was probably a bunch of loans co-signed by her parents. Regardless, however, taking out that substantial an amount of debt means that paying for the extra options wasn’t really affordable.
The part that I really found jaw-dropping, however, was this:
Over 500 private, nonprofit four-year institutions have closed in the last 10 years, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. That is three times what it was in the decade prior. Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO, estimates at least 1.25 million students were affected by these closures. (Many more for-profit institutions have closed in this period as well.)
@airway1, among others, helps keep us aware of many college closures, but 500 nonprofit closures in 10 years affecting 1.25 million people is way more than I would anticipate. Most of the colleges I hear about closing count their enrollment in the hundreds. Even if each school had 1k undergrads (and many have less than half of that), it would be 500k affected students. I’m really curious if anyone can provide more info on the numbers the WSJ used.