We will miss you..: College closings, mergers, risks of closing

Parents Forum
2468

Let’s bring all this back to Lesley. The core faculty is comprised of 80 non-tenure track professors, so it seems the school has already lost an ability to hire the best faculty, no offense to non-TT faculty. Non tenure track faculty are easily replaceable and at relatively low cost, so whether or not they are unionized likely doesn’t matter much to a potential sale IMO.

We can debate all day whether or not colleges are like businesses, but this sounds similar to employees in a corporation. Only 32% of full time faculty in the US at this point are tenure/tenure track. There aren’t many colleges left where most of the faculty is tenure/tt and have been there for decades.

Non-profit colleges without a strong unrestricted endowment, like Lesley, can’t function if it’s costing the college more to offer an education than they are charging even full pay customers. On a quick look, it looks like Lesley offers around an average 50% tuition discount (industry average per Nacubo is 56%.)

In business terms, that means they have little pricing power in their market…they have little pricing power because there is not much demand for what they are offering. Harsh but true.

Maybe there will be a merger/acquisition in Lesley’s future, who knows. But the school is not on good financial footing, nor does it have strength in the marketplace, so the administration’s options and that of the employees to negotiate higher salary/benefits is limited.

Lastly, as much as some might like to hold their noses at the idea of students = customers, that is the market reality. Physicians also had to deal with that shift in perception that they are just another service provider.

IMO that ship has sailed for colleges, there is no going back to a time when many students were just seeking an education without regard for factors such as ROI, having access to tenure/TT faculty, participating in R-1 research (just to name some attributes that today’s college students/customers may be looking for, and the schools that hit on one or more desirable attributes will likely see more demand.)

It’s a painful situation for any industry that has more supply (college seats) than demand for said seats. And the customers who do have demand are behaving differently than they did in the past. College competitors are also behaving differently by offering products that are in demand…three year bachelor’s degrees, fully online bachelor’s degrees, etc.

All of these changes mean this thread is going to continue to see plenty of action.

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2469

Not sure this need a separate thread.

I am wondering where to find what kind of discount is calculated for a certain school.

How much weight we may put on the financial situation when choosing a certain college?

Some schools are giving big merit aid/discount, and are them some kind of danger? Such as Muhlenberg, Gettysburg, Union College, RPI, Dickinson etc.

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2470

We have had a few threads that talk about how to see if a college is financially strong/stable. It requires some research for sure. Beyond the finances I would look to see how enrollment is trending because how the market is reacting can be instructive.

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2471

For Lesley, I just looked at the average aid from Niche (source is ipeds tho) of $19K and that is roughly half of Lesley’s tuition and fees ($18.2K tuition and $525 fees each semester). Caveats are that the years are a mismatch, and I’m not sure if the $19K aid includes pell grants and federal loans.

https://www.niche.com/colleges/lesley-university/scholarships-financial-aid/

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2472

When a campfire is dying out, one may blow on the embers in hope of restarting the fire. A wheeze is a weak breath, a last ditch effort. It is a line from “The Lion in Winter” said by Katherine Hepburn.

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2473

It’s not about “demands” it’s about “contradictory demands”.

If 18 year old students, and their parents, had any idea what a good education looks like, then their demands for “satisfaction” may have some legitimacy. However, the fact is that most of what makes students happy are things that are not compatible with a good education. Yet there is a constant demand that students be kept happy. “Good teachers” are ones with high students evaluations. However, effective teaching required standards, but maintaining standards generally results in lower teaching evaluations.

The powers be sometimes realize this, and then search for other ways to evaluate teaching. Most people who think about it will understand that the only way to measure whether a college is providing a good education, be it a general education or a more focused education, is to look at the outcome, some years in the future. To measure the effectiveness of an education, you need to see how good the people who get that education are at their jobs.

Unfortunately, the people who take it on themselves to do this work of estimating success work for for media outlets which are strongly committed to the sort of extreme capitalism that is espoused by those who have extensive capital, and see their own capital as proof of their own success in life.

Because the outlets who are proposing ways to measure success in education are hyper-capitalist outlets, the only and exclusive metric by which they propose to measure success is in capital that has been accrued. Because they believe that success can only be measured in how much money a person is being paid, therefore, the only way that they can conceive of to measure the success of a college is by the income of the graduates of the college

Yet, this is a clear and obvious fallacy. The best teacher will make less than a barely mediocre engineer, and the best trained lawyer who works as a public defender will make less than a personal injury lawyer lawyer who just made it past the bar. So colleges with low-paying majors or with graduates who prefer to lend their skills based on their ideals rather than the potential income will be considered as providing a “worse” education.

Furthermore, low to medium income majors are the among the majors that are in highest demand.

So the first contradictory demands are the demand that colleges entertain their students, and make life comfortable for their students, versus the demand that colleges provide rigorous education with high standards.

The second set of contradictory demands are the demand that colleges “prove” their success having graduates with high income, which can be done by prioritizing the highest paying majors , while at the same time, there is the demand that colleges prioritize the most popular majors, which are not the highest paying ones.

Since a family income is a strong factor in determining the income of a child of that family, that means that another way that a college can increase the average income of their graduates (and thus demonstrate “success”), however, this runs up against the demand that colleges do more to enroll students from low income families.

Three year degrees are a good idea, but it requires that students take on course loads that most American students are unwilling to do. My undergraduate was a three year degree, but I had more credit hours than most college students in the USA, and I didn’t have anything like “electives”. I was taking and average of 24 credits a semester, and a credit hour requires the same amount of hours in class or lab as it does here.

Finally, “fully online bachelors degrees” failed as a concept, except for people and communities in which an in-person education is not realistic.

I really am sort of surprised that there are people who still think of fully online degrees" as something that will expand, considering the response to online education during the pandemic. Fully online education is only really attractive to students who live far away from any brick and mortar college, particularly students who cannot leave their home for four years.

Fully online courses are not really being provided as an alternative to brick and mortar classes. They are being provided as an alternative to no classes.

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2474

Not to mention that it isn’t simply that there is an oversupply of college seats, it’s that there is net oversupply but a very uneven demand for different sorts of seats.

I will note that a surprisingly large chunk of the current oversupply is the result of changed immigration policy. I don’t know if it’s an intentional side effect, but longer waits for and increased denial rates of visas (not just student visas) has hit higher ed hard.

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2475

True, but I think there are efforts to make better evaluations of schools.

Washington Monthly shares data about social mobility and schools’ Pell graduation rates compared with the total population’s grad rates and how they compare with expected grad rates based on the characteristics of students. But that only tells people if folks are graduating, not whether they learned anything substantive in terms of the quality of education.

But then there are things like the National Survey of Student Engagement that surveys on things relating to rigor of assignments, type of faculty interactions, etc.

There’s also the Collegiate Learning Assessment where incoming freshmen and departing seniors take an assessment related to their critical thinking, problem solving, and writing skills to see how they’ve changed over the course of a student’s attendance.

Of course, getting the CLA or NSSE data for a particular school is nigh on impossible, as some schools only participate if their resulting data are kept from the public. But there’s data available if push came to shove (like if the feds’ required such data from any organization that had students receive Pell grants or federal loans).

The Wall Street Journal’s rankings obviously place a lot of importance on ROI, but (a very small) 4% is based on the quality and frequency of learning opportunities, and another 4% on whether students feel the college has developed character strengths that will help them to make meaning contributions to society (plus more on the quality of learning facilities). I believe those measures were taken from surveys sent to verified students or recent alums. So though I might strongly disagree with the weight of those factors, there’s obviously additional information that can be sourced.

So then it just becomes a matter of finding some way to get all of this data in one place for people to make a better assessment about the quality of instruction at a school that isn’t dependent on student evals that reward a less rigorous education.

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2476

I think that the best way to figure things like “effectiveness” need to look at particular programs/majors, and use metrics like how long did it take to find a job, job satisfaction, and reputation of the program among a wide array of employers.

Additionally, the question of “are you working in a job related to your major?” can be helpful, but it can be tricky, since many skills are transferable. For example, there is a long list of different jobs for which a BA in English is useful, which are not immediately obvious.

One question that is almost useless, though, is “how much money are you making?”, even for programs that train people who have the highest income.

If more media outlets were posting rankings of programs using these metrics, rather than ranking colleges based on income, I think that many college that are now struggling would be getting a second wind. Instead, the same list of colleges for the wealthy are ranked the highest, and the number of applications to these colleges continue to mount.

The colleges with really good programs for jobs that don’t make a lot of money are ranked extremely low in this rankings, and so people looking for careers in these majors will never hear about some of the best colleges for, say, teaching, because the college where the program is is not in the “The Top 25 Colleges For ROI”, or “The Top 50 Colleges With The Most Successful Graduates”.

Many of these highly effective colleges with excellent programs will end up on this list here.

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2477

Nice news for a change
While Clark wasn’t at risk for closing exactly, they had major enrollment dip last 2 years and are back up this year!

https://www.masslive.com/education/2026/05/enrollment-woes-led-to-layoffs-at-a-central-mass-university-now-enrollment-is-climbing.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawRpy5xleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFHTGgzTUJlbVQ2NkMyVDlqc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHk8ObYmkVcJPdpp2agfixnsZm3gV-c35-2tBjG6VYEntvUMrWYlgdlfb7ypV_aem_hkAQKcrzHlnSDm4BImdcug&brid=YWdncwFAOz4ITn2iGn-xhHYxWbWv

”As of May 6, 629 undergraduate students have committed to attend Clark. While some attrition — known as melt — occurs over the summer as students change their plans, the university is excited to be bucking its previous enrollment declines.

At this point last year, 467 students had committed to Clark. That compares with 493 in 2024, 721 in 2023 and 773 in 2022. The university enrolled its largest incoming class four years ago — 705 students — during a post-pandemic admissions surge.”

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2478

I wonder what their incentive spend is to get them vs prior years?

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2479

not sure, but IME they were fairly generous (not SUPER so) last year (my 25 applied and got merit) so hopefully they didn’t have to go overbaord? They may have increased # accepted too…I know American (which to me would have some overlap - at least it does in my community) had a much higher admit rate last year than in the prior 2-3…can possibly boost some, especially for a small school - those kids getting into a “reach’ for them will be excited

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2480

They substantially increased merit for my ‘26 compared to my’23. From what I’ve seen online lots of others got this higher merit offer. They also released decisions a lot earlier this year. I’m sure the $ has something to do with that bump in enrollments.

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2481

My EA kid found out in December last year (with ED kids) so maybe not different than last year (though not all EA kids found out in december last year…)

2482

This is going to be what takes down even more schools - not saying Clark. But many have to continually increase and the costs far outweigh the revenues.

It’s not a good sign but I figured as much - having to pay more - to get that kind of increase.

On the CC, many love Clark - but I don’t think it’s a well known name - outside of a very tight region.

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2483

We should have a thread re: how important is it that a college isn’t well known outside its region.

I’m not starting it- because I don’t believe it’s as important as some others do. Clark, Beloit, Lawrence, Wittenberg, Kalamazoo, Earlham, Rhodes… fine institutions where depending on a kid’s interests and motivation, he/she can get a rigorous, high quality education.

But for the folks worried that their kid has fallen in love with a hidden gem…. I’m sure getting a range of opinions will be helpful. Not every kid is going to thrive at a flagship U– which for many of the kids who seek out the Skidmore/Denison type campus is their obvious option.

I think there’s also a lot of pushback on CC that Binghamton (for example) is not well known outside of NY/NJ. Which I personally think is crazy– people who hire, people who run graduate school admissions know that Binghamton is essentially the flagship U of the state of NY, except in a couple of Comp Sci and scientific disciplines where that honor goes to Stonybrook (another U which on CC it’s claimed “nobody has heard of it”).

But if folks are worried about their kid who wants to head off to “obscure U” maybe it will help parse the truly obscure from the “your dry cleaner hasn’t heard of it but it has a fine reputation otherwise”.

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2484

Never got to visit due to Covid but my kid really liked Beloit. It seems to be a school that people have heard of here on the east coast, though most don’t think of it unless it’s mentioned.

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2485

When a local or regional college or university, of any size, decides to go national it can be a risky venture and may take decades. Northeastern transformed from a regional school to a national and international school starting in the 1990’s. It has succeeded but many locals still think of it as a safety school. The Northeastern of today is better known outside the Boston area than inside. Old opinions die hard.

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2486

sorry - meant to respond to @blossom Aspiring sports journalists know about Beloit because Joe Davis went there (even though it’s not a sports broadcasting school). People gravitate to names.

My point about the regionalization was more - it’s harder to raise $$ - so as schools outspend to keep some revenues flowing in, it will be harder to stay afloat….not talking today but 20 or 50 years from now.

We see Earlham since it was mentioned, significantly cutting jobs and programs. We know about Clark. Beloit had over 1400 students in 2017, had several years under 1000 and now is right at 1K and their revenues have shrunk drastically.

I do think that these regional schools would have more difficulty raising enough $$ if needed to stay afloat - again, not tomorrow, but long term planning because you need enough revenue to cover your costs.

Not calling on specific names - but these kind of names.

These colleges have to prepare to endure for the long term - but all these continual cuts will continue to drive down student interest - so the only way to get them in is to buy them in.

2487

This! Most of the NESCAC schools have been working on this for the last 20 years or so. It’s almost an imperative for schools in areas where the younger population is shrinking quickly as they cannot depend on their region to supply them with enough students.

I worry a bit about those who have to discount more heavily, but at the same time, most schools carry a similar pricetag while offering vastly different proframs, services, facilities, and amenities. This can be a way of having a more appropriate price point within industry norms.

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