Concord University in West Virginia and Clemson University in South Carolina were both founded shortly after the Civil War. During the 20th century, each grew rapidly. Now, the two public universities that sit just 300 miles apart face very different circumstances.
Clemson, a large research university, enrolled its largest-ever freshman class in 2017 and in December broke ground on an $87 million building for the college of business.
Concord, a midsize liberal-arts school, has seen its freshman enrollment fall 19% in five years. It has burned through all $12 million in its reserves and can’t afford to tear down two mostly empty dormitories.
Unable to read beyond the pay wall but i would say Clemson had a leadership with vision and determination. Concord had a leadership that was satisfied with the status quo and ignored what was changing in the higher education landscape.
Well, it’s their money. However, colleges like Capitol Tech take kids that are much less impressive on average than those at the WASP LACs and produce grads that on average earn a lot more 6 years out (and potentially at a lesser cost as well; getting a full-tuition/ride scholarship at Capital Tech also doesn’t seem that difficult). All with almost no full-time faculty (which may actually be a plus).
Concord was primarily a teacher’s college with a few programs dedicated to retuning adult students for a total of 20 majors max. It’s not a liberal arts college despite its claims.
In an environment where teacher recruiting is down and returning adults may well take a course at a time, they have an uphill battle compared to Clemson, which has always been known as a tech school and is benefitting from a tech recruiting boom.
Clemson is in the south, an area of the country that is growing in population. Concord is in West Virginia, a region of the country that is losing population! It’s easier to grow when the population is growing, not when it’s shrinking.
In short, comparing Concord and Clemson is comparing apples to kiwis…
Concord and Edinboro, now, that’s a valid comparison: both rural former teacher’s colleges in regions where the population is shrinking. But while I can’t read the full article, I’d be surprised if their current situation weren’t similar.
Many of the PASSHE schools, like Edinboro, have little desirability among Pennsylvanians with good stats. The faculty unions are concerned about preserving existing jobs which has limited the system’s ability to start new programs in the in demand fields. A system wide evaluation concluded essentially that nothing should change. That made the union happy but the death spiral continues.
While a rigorous liberal arts education can prepare a student for most any career, third tier colleges do not provide anything approaching a rigorous education for anyone except a small handful who attended because it was the only option that they could afford.
@ucbalumnus: “But then the WASP LACs and other super-elite private schools are finishing schools to prepare for consulting and investment banking jobs, right?”
Some HBCUs have been able to get away with less than stellar science facilities, but, in today’s world, even a small LAC has to provide a place for STEM kids to land. I don’t know a lot about Concord College, but, I’m betting they either ran out of donors or just couldn’t come up with a plan that would attract people looking for naming rights.
err, it’s a small public school, a former teacher’s college in rural WV (the village where it’s located has 1,000 people). I doubt they ever had many donors in the first place.
@ucbalumnus College ultimately prepares you for a career (which you might refer to as “job training”) and I don’t know too many students who go to college and don’t plan on getting a job after college. However, there are many classes students take in college that only expand there knowledge without specifically “training” them for a job. That is where the education part comes in, and in some cases is as valuable or even more valuable than the courses specific to a particular career.
The summary of the article is that over the past few years, the bottom 20% of colleges (as ranked by the WSJ) are struggling and facing an evolve or die situation while the top 80% of colleges continue to grow.
Several factors are contributing (e.g. falling birthrate, shrinking pay advantage for college graduates, states cut funding to public colleges, and growing student debt). Additionally, competition from technical schools (e.g. Silicon Valley coding bootcamps) that offer faster, cheaper credentials is rising.
Hence the title: “U.S. Colleges Are Separating Into Winners and Losers”.
Even non-career-specific course work is, in theory, learning how to learn and the practice of such (whether that is true in practice is something that occasionally gets discussed on these forums). That is, at least in theory, something that employers may find valuable (although it is often not tested directly in the hiring process, due to the difficulty of testing it directly in a job interview).
65% of their students never graduate. Universities like these are scams and more of them need to close down.
They mostly only exist to take advantage of the desperate and gullible who should be taking classes at a community college. It’s really disgusting. Think about the tens of thousands of lives ruined by just this one college – years of life and vast sums of non-dischargeable debt and tax payers fronting the Pell Grants and subsidized interest rates.
Regarding the job training vs. education to be an educated person:
In the old days, college was almost exclusively the latter. Ever since the college-for-everyone movement, colleges have undergone a natural split between the former and the latter. Often there’s a split within one institution, where some students are leading a life of the mind as English and classics majors, while others are in the business school learning how to be supply chain managers. This was bound to happen as a HS degree was no longer sufficient for employment and vocational and technical schools declined. Now it’s all lumped into “college.” But employers know the difference. They know that the individual with a B.S. in supply chain management is not the same as the individual with an A.B. in Philosophy. Each has its own path.
@brantly: “They know that the individual with a B.S. in supply chain management is not the same as the individual with an A.B. in Philosophy.”
Didn’t get the same education, you mean.
The same person could actually study both. I’m sure there are people out there who majored in philosophy and got a supply chain management masters later.