For-profit Paier College is being sold, and legally cannot hold classes until the sale is approved by the state (Connecticut)—and so its fall semester has been indefinitely postponed until after that happens.
Which is not a closure, but for a for-profit that enrolls fewer than 150 students anyway, that may be enough to push it over the edge.
Number is irrelevant, since the differences in enrollment are so large. You can have 25% of all colleges, but enroll only 10% of all colleges students.
For example, the 13% of colleges which enroll 10,000 or more students enroll 60% of all students. The 12% of the colleges that enroll 5,000-9,999 students account for another 18% of all students.
It seems they are having accreditation issues… I think a few years ago they teamed up to buy the campus of Uof Bridgeport with Goodwin and moved into some of their buildings… if well known Art colleges are closing we shouldn’t be surprised if they close
Lackawanna and Pierce merging in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania again! Keystone College merging with Washington DC Washington Institute for education and research… seems to be a new think tank in DC
Free link above. I cannot help but feel that all of these small, non-selective, private four yr colleges were offering studies that could have been obtained at a lower cost at in-state public two and four year colleges.
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.
This doesn’t de facto rule out the experiential component. Year after year 80% of respondents report that they were happy with their undergrad. And, all we know is what we know. Affirmation is very powerful so we tend to credit the institution when the bulk is probably baked into the individual.
I wonder if there’s a correlation to debt ?
Here are some lists of recent college closures, but it is not obvious where the above number of students is coming from:
What @ucbalumnus just said—I see no way that this claimed 1.25M affected students came from ~500 nonprofit college closures. Unfortunately, I can’t find the SHEEO report that says that that many have closed—I was hoping to find a list, because I can’t think of any that would have been large enough to get to that total.
Now, if that 1.25M students includes for-profits—which have been, according to the BestColleges article ucbalumnus linked to (but again without a full list), ~80% of the college closures during the past decade and a half—then yeah, I can see how we get there, because you have for-profits like the Corinthian Colleges, which enrolled 110k at their peak.
(Also, a reason actual lists are important is that you can see if the numbers are being fudged one way or another: I looked at one list—though, unfortunately, only of “selected” institutions—and it included IUPUI with its ~28k students. I mean yeah, sure, if you squint that one’s a closure, but only kindasorta—it’s more a negotiated divorce than anything else.)
Article says 99 schools closed from 2022-24. 
Yet another Art College in trouble, this time in California with the California College of Art needing to cut its USD 20 million deficit. Keep in mind its endowment is USD 40 million 
https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/sf-cca-art-college-19717095.php
UT Health San Antonio and UTSA merging. Seems wise with both being in the same system
Interesting merger… never heard of them… 
Although it’s a merger and yet another Pa school… it seems Gannon will control this merger creating a three state campus network (Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida)
More and more mergers of university with multiple campuses joining Arizona State and Northeastern who have been active in merging across state lines
I know Columbia College has been mentioned here before. They are planning to cut and/or consolidate over the next year, with all changes taking effect in 2025. Columbia College Chicago cutting these ‘underperforming’ majors – NBC Chicago
That’s too bad. They had some interesting niche programs.
I think Columbia college is smart. Every college can’t be everything to everyone. They aren’t getting rid of entire departments, just limiting what degrees can be earned in very specific areas. One can still get a BA in Dance, just maybe not in a very specific kind of dance (and limited classes may still be available in that particular style of dance, just not enough to make it a stand along major).
In the 1970s, most schools had general majors, maybe with a specific emphasis. When I was in school with dinosaurs, there was English and you could take Women’s Studies classes and some Black studies classes (even Indian Studies classes which now would be Native studies). The degree was in English. Then came the 1980s and they started adding the stand alone Women’s Studies department and major, and then more and more.
Many schools can’t afford to have all the stand alone majors, the departments with a secretary and a copy machine and separate budgets. My daughter was a history major but within that department there were areas of concentration like Native studies, art history (also a stand alone major but that required a lot of art classes), Latino studies, Asian history, etc. The degree was in history.
Anyway, I think Columbia will be a stronger institution if they limit their focus to the ‘main’ major and let the students find specialties under that major. Call it a concentration. My daughter has a ‘certificate of concentration’ in museum studies, but her degree is BA (History). If everything is under one department, there is only one chair of the department, one department meeting, one set of administration for the Dean of Arts and Sciences to deal with.
I think an employer is going to be happy with a BA in Theater and Dance if the applicant says “Oh, I took 50 credits in musical theater and was in 6 plays in 4 years” as with a BA in Dance.