The great US College contraction due to prices being too high relative to value is now finally upon us.
One (crappy) College closing per week now.
Gift link below:
2 Likes
I would expect some economies of scale are required to run a college. Though remote-learning cuts that down a lot.
And, noted:
Mergers are also picking up, though they almost always end with the struggling partner fading away. Woodbury University is being merged into the University of Redlands, and St. Augustine College in Chicago into Lewis University. The Pennsylvania College of Health Sciences was absorbed by St. Joseph’s University in January. Salus University will become part of Drexel University in June and stop running as a separate institution next year. Bluffton University in Ohio will be integrated into the University of Findlay, also next year.
And:
“I started panicking. I cried. I cried for hours that day,” said Hicks, who lost all of the 94 credits she had earned and owed $30,000 in student loans, though they would later be forgiven after more than a year of red tape.
When someone ends up with 0 credits because their school shut down, fucking sue that school.
1 Like
that should not happen. unless the school you took out loans to attend is unaccredited and sketchy, in which case buyer beware.
1 Like
My college (third largest in the state) is down to around 55% its attendance of when I was there, and they just shut down their College of Psychology, leaving a lot of grad students scrambling to find somewhere that would accept them partway through their grad program. It’s a mess.
I think a lot of their problem is, being the third-largest in the state, they’re nearly as expensive as #1 and #2 but don’t have nearly the same prestige in almost any subject. Maybe teaching, they’re on par? But not better.
So people either go to CC (which I’ve anecdotally seen a lot more of Gen Z doing) or just go to the big, impressive school that also has fun things to do.
1 Like
On the affordable side, UCSD, 3rd largest UC school, is looking to expand to be the size of UCLA and Berkeley. That should help.
1 Like
liberal arts, the best way to find out you wasted $100k trying to copy rich people without learning anything that would help you get a job
2 Likes
I agree. If a government allows a college to function by supplying them with subsidized loan money, it should make sure the courses are at a high enough level that some other college will be willing to take its students - with most if not all their credits - if the college shuts down. If this is not happening today it should be happening. Maybe there should always be some private-public guarantee system where a private college always has to find a partner public college that says “Yes, I will take your students with their credits in the hopefully unlikely case you shut down.” And then maybe pay or put some money in escrow for that service. Hmmm… how about college shutdown insurance?
Maybe it’s okay if students have to redo half a year - there should be some skin in the game so people don’t pick obviously failing colleges - but more than that just seems like a waste of valuable time and resources.
the guarantee fund. great. the public will love it!
1 Like
Pomona College professor has a modest proposal to improve college finances.
In 1990, Pomona had 1,487 students, 180 tenured and tenure-track professors, and 56 administrators …
As of 2022, … the number of students had increased 17 percent, to 1,740, while the number of professors had fallen to 175. The number of administrators had increased to 310
Maybe it’s time to redefine the mission of the college to “Pomona College is dedicated to sustaining and advancing the careers of administrators of exceptional promise.”
The college has an endowment of $2.8 billion, which might generate $140 million of annual withdrawals. That’s easily enough to support the administrators. Financial problems solved.
Needless to say, the comments section in the WaPo were strongly supportive, at least in theory.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/23/save-colleges-chatbots-administrators-satire/
4 Likes
Why not hire students as junior administrators? Whatever those admins are doing anyway. We could have a new take on the work-study scholarships… work as admin & study.
1 Like
The WP comments BTL on that piece are gold.
Agree with the satirical skew 
Everything will be for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
I.e. if you somehow managed to get this far without realizing this is satire, I’ll throw in a reference to Candide to make it really obvious. Though if you couldn’t pick up on the satire by that point, you probably think Voltaire is a brand of hair dryer.
Here is a gift link to a US student loan 5 question survey.
I only got 3 out of 5 correct.
Yes, I understood it was satire. If you missed “modest proposal” in my first line you probably think Johnathan Swift was a track star.
1 Like
I wasn’t commenting on you – your modest proposal reference was clear – I just found that last line of the article odd. I mean, the satire isn’t subtle, and a reference to Candide isn’t going to make it any clearer to 99.9% of folks who somehow got to the end thinking it was serious.
Sorry, I shouldn’t have been so thin skinned.
1 Like
I don’t think it’s there so that readers will understand that it’s satire. (As you said, it’s already pretty obvious.) I think it’s just a bit of silliness.
Student loan aid should be packaged with more restrictions on how much debt you can take on.
I think people going for STEM and maintaining a good GPA should be able to borrow more than people going for liberal arts or not maintaining a good GPA. It seems strange that currently there’s no such limitation.
4 Likes
Make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy and I think this is exactly what would happen.
2 Likes
I think we already tried having them dischargeable and it didn’t work.
The problem with doing that is that it’s very easy to game. Most people have no assets when they graduate and are less likely to buy a house in the near future, so bankruptcy is much easier at that point in life than any other time.
The creditors for student loans are the government and big impersonal corporations. People are much more willing to game things handled by the government and big corporations than people and small businesses.
I don’t really see how that’s related to my original comment; you should be able to take on more debt for a STEM degree and good GPA. And less if it’s not both of those.
Alternatively, there should be something based on the current average salary for graduates with that degree.