Agree.
And a timely announcement from today. Who knows if these programs will attract students, but highly respected names/companies are involved in this particular offering (AI bachelor’s). Degrees like this represent legit competitors to the traditional four year residential college model.
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/14/khan-academy-ted-ets-institute-college
Since they’ve started talking about closing, I’ve always felt that one possibility was a shift to a combined secondary/ post secondary boarding school. Sort of like Simon’s Rock. They offered the type of education that is well suited for that. But, with SR’s closing of it’s MA campus, perhaps the pool for that isn’t as big as I imagine. I do know that parents in this area are very eager for a Montessori-esque type high school to open.
Search didn’t result in anything; don’t think this has been posted.
“A small Massachusetts private Catholic college may not have “sufficient resources” to keep operating and continue educating students this year and next, according to a warning from state officials on April 10.
The Massachusetts Department of Higher Education’s notice to Anna Maria College in Paxton is part of a series of notices the department has made when colleges are at risk of closure in order to make it a less volatile process for the college community.
The April warning isn’t the first sign of difficulty at Anna Maria. The college’s accreditation agency, the New England Commission of Higher Education, issued a letter in March 2025 saying that it was “in danger” of not meeting institutional resources. The agency questioned whether the steps it was taking to build enrollment and reduce expenses would be sufficient for its viability.”
Agree, 100%. I think many of us use our educations every day in ways in which we can’t quite or don’t fathom. Not just in our jobs, but in other areas of life, including debates on internet message boards. Or dealing with others in a variety of ways. Your education is helping you in ways that you probably don’t think about most of the time because it’s hard to imagine the you who you would be without it. At this point in our lives, our education is like an appendage - it’s just there and I use it without any thought.
I grew up in a working class town where I had no friends–my only friends were children of my parents’ friends who lived a train ride away. Going away to college (state U) broadened my horizons in so many ways, making friends for life, absorbing coursework, working on the campus newspaper and in student government, etc. I graduated as a very different person than the miserable 18-year-old who started.
The point being, that many people learn not only a broad spectrum of information that makes them an interesting person, usually with base knowledge about many things, but they can learn to socialize, interact/work well with others, etc. These are all important soft skills. But for those who think college is a glorified trade school, I disagree. Some choose to pursue a pre-professional degree, but it is the minority of college students who do that. And has been noted by many, what one chooses to major in in college often has little to do with their career.
Hillsdale is teaching the Project 25 training programs. No wonder they got an exemption 
The image shown does not prove that claim. It shows business 19% + health professions 13% + engineering 6% = 28% pre professional majors, and social sciences and history 7% + biological and biomedical sciences 7% + psychology 6% = 20% liberal arts majors, while not mentioning what the other 42% were in.
I linked the full reference and a few other pages in a previous post. This was just one example. It was linked in a discussion about the # of engineering majors. (6%)
Based on the table at Bachelor's degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by field of study: Selected academic years, 1970-71 through 2021-22 , for 2021-2022, the total number of bachelor’s graduates was 2,015,035, of which 1,193,909 (59.3%) were in more overtly pre-professional majors. (Of course, graduating with pre-professional major does not necessarily mean that the job market for the associated profession is favorable for the job seeker.)
The following were the majors that I counted as pre-professional majors for the above:
Agriculture and natural resources
Architecture and related services
Business
Communication, journalism, and related programs
Communications technologies
Education
Engineering
Engineering technologies
Family and consumer sciences/human sciences
Health professions and related programs
Homeland security, law enforcement, and firefighting
Legal professions and studies
Library science
Military technologies and applied sciences
Parks, recreation, leisure, fitness, and kinesiology
Precision production
Public administration and social services
Theology and religious vocations
Transportation and materials moving
The ones that I counted as liberal arts are the following:
Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies
Biological and biomedical sciences
Computer and information sciences and support services*
English language and literature/letters
Foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics
Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities
Mathematics and statistics
Multi/interdisciplinary studies
Philosophy and religious studies
Physical sciences and science technologies
Psychology
Social sciences and history
Visual and performing arts
*If we move “Computer and information sciences and support services” to pre-professional majors, the percentage in pre-professional majors increases to 64.6%.
Note that the mix of majors overall among bachelor’s graduates of all colleges appears different from the mix of majors among bachelor’s graduates of the colleges commonly talked about on these forums.
In order to graduate from a four-year college, regardless of degree, a student takes and has to pass a distribution of classes outside the professional major.
The categories are way too broad and overlapping, and we are way off topic.
This is kind of wild in the eye-popping numbers sense: PennWest (Pennsylvania Western University, formed not that long ago by the merger of three PASSHE universities, the former Edinboro, Clarion, and California Universities of Pennsylvania) missed its enrollment target this past fall by 4,800(!) students (paywalled, sorry), which translates to a shortfall of $63M in tuition revenue.
Not much beyond that in the linked news blurb, but programmatic cuts are expected, and it’s just another bit of the slow-motion death-spiral narrative engulfing the PASSHE system.
Notice of Privacy says that the target enrollment was 14,425, but actual enrollment was 9,625, resulting in $53 million less tuition revenue.
It also mentions that total PASSHE enrollment is down 28% since 2012-2013.
It’s official:
100% - even when I was looking at schools (not THAT long ago) it was just alternative - and somewhat prestigious even. plenty of highly successful and famous alums - Ken Burns potentially most notably.
In a recent discussion in another thread, the endowment per student ratio was brought up. As that’s sometimes been discussed in this thread (or similar ones), I thought it might be good to share a snapshot of where the schools and endowments are at this point in time.
If the school was mentioned in SY25-26 in this thread, then I provided a brief reason as to why. The other schools were those on a particular student’s application list that can serve as a reference about other colleges that are familiar to many on CC, though that does not mean that a school wasn’t mentioned in a previous school year.
The endowments per student are gathered from College Raptor, except for Rider. Per College Raptor’s website, “School data is from 2023–2024 (top 500 results shown) for schools with at least 100 undergraduate students.”
| School | Endowment per Student | **Mentioned in SY25-26 closings | mergers | risks of closing thread** |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Smith | $810,917 | |||
| Hamilton | $664,862 | Mentioned because of waiver on endowment tax | ||
| Hillsdale | $642,738 | |||
| Earlham | $594,568 | Cutting programs for financial sustainability | ||
| Vassar | $527,784 | |||
| Middlebury | $502,668 | Closing its Monterey language institute | ||
| Mount Holyoke | $476,654 | |||
| U. of Health Sciences & Pharmacy in St. Louis | $454,090 | Bought out by WashU | ||
| Wesleyan | $427,458 | |||
| U. of Tulsa | $426,037 | Article about financial challenges | ||
| Oberlin | $378,565 | |||
| Kenyon | $312,998 | |||
| Centre | $312,174 | |||
| Dickinson | $270,845 | |||
| Kalamazoo | $221,789 | Article on financial challenges | ||
| Conn College | $220,154 | |||
| Brandeis | $202,774 | |||
| Willamette | $175,952 | In talks to join with Pacific U. | ||
| Wheaton (MA) | $153,602 | |||
| George Washington | $136,985 | Sold property | ||
| Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences | $115,500 | Merging with Russell Sage | ||
| Queens U. of Charlotte | $96,958 | Being taken over by Elon | ||
| Augustana College | $86,983 | Bought out Trinity College of Nursing | ||
| Guilford | $64,898 | Bond rating decreased to junk | ||
| Saint Michael’s | $63,128 | Article about decline | ||
| Simmons | $61,225 | Bond rating decreased to junk | ||
| Saint Mary’s College of CA | $58,020 | |||
| Elon | $57,421 | Taking over Queens | ||
| Rider (endowment listed as $73M by @dfbdfb in post 2171 and 3,863 total enrollment per Rider’s website) | $18,897 | Placement on financial probation | ||
Other schools that were mentioned this year that were not listed in the 500 schools provided by College Raptor are listed below:
Those schools may be closing, merging with others, or have had mention of financial difficulties.
But many schools with smaller endowments are paying bigger (maybe through merit) than these….and those are the ones that eventually will falter. But they are trying to stay solvent today.
To provide additional context (and perhaps hope), below are the endowments per student for some additional schools. I’ve added members of the Ivy League (the athletic conference) as well as HBCUs that have been referred to as the Black Ivies. Since two of the Black Ivies did not have an endowment listed in College Raptor’s website, I added Xavier (XULA) in Louisiana.
| Sports Ivies and Black Ivies (except Xavier) | Endowment per student per College Raptor |
|---|---|
| Fisk | Not listed in College Raptor |
| Clark Atlanta | Not listed in College Raptor |
| Princeton | $3,716,273 |
| Yale | $2,406,879 |
| Harvard | $1,907,729 |
| Dartmouth | $1,248,237 |
| Penn | $893,096 |
| Brown | $629,512 |
| Columbia | $480,106 |
| Cornell | $358,369 |
| Spelman | $185,817 |
| Morehouse | $94,677 |
| Dillard | $88,562 |
| Howard | $86,677 |
| Hampton | $67,022 |
| Tuskegee | $58,410 |
| Xavier (XULA) - added as alternate Black Ivy | $56,629 |
There’s a big swing between the wealthiest and least wealthy Ivy League schools. But if one looks at the endowment/student of the Black Ivies, there are students getting solid academic preparation from schools that have far more limited financial resources.
St Augustine’s, a HBCU in Raleigh, has filed for bankruptcy, but is still trying to stay afloat.
