We will miss the quirkiness and innovation of small colleges after they are gone
You probably don’t even know that Wells College is closing. The tiny institution in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York caught a lot of people by surprise in announcing its closure in April. In the larger scheme of things nationally, though, the ripples didn’t spread much beyond adjoining Cayuga Lake.
But what if you went to Wells and have to explain that your degree is from a college that no longer exists? What if you worked at the college and had planned your future around it? What if you live in Aurora, New York (population: 641), and the largest local creator of jobs and revenue doesn’t exist anymore? This is the trauma that ensues when a college closes.
Colleges were closing this spring at the rate of one per week. Add them all up and all the local traumas begin to look like a national tragedy. Goodbye Cazenovia College, Alderson Broaddus University, Goddard College, Fontbonne University, Lincoln Christian University, the College of Saint Rose. And many others.
And it is all but certain to get worse.
Small colleges live and die on enrollment and the associated tuition revenue. If they fall just a dozen or so students short of the projected enrollment, it can mean program cuts, layoffs, or even more drastic options. The odds have increasingly been stacked against small colleges in recent years. Colleges are giving larger and larger discounts off tuition, but small colleges have to give larger discounts (55%) compared to the average for all colleges (48.6%).
It is a game these small colleges were willing to play, however. Armed with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) from potential students, their staff members could calculate financial aid offers that would entice a new class of students to enroll. But the botched rollout of the supposedly “simplified” FAFSA took away the one tool that allowed these colleges to compete.
Staying the Course, ‘til now
Think of what colleges have been through in recent years. Many breathed a sigh of relief after they managed to hang on through the Great Recession and then the COVID-19 pandemic. But the staggering failures by the Department of Education to efficiently redesign the FAFSA is the black swan event they never saw coming. Just days before the fall semester is set to begin, many colleges still don’t have a good read on how much their prospective students can afford to pay. By the time colleges were able to make financial aid offers, many of those prospective students had already committed elsewhere, unable to wait any longer to see if a college was affordable. Or, many students could decide not to go to colleges this fall at all.
The US Department of Education was supposed to be a resource for these colleges, but it’s incompetence in rolling out the FAFSA may kill the very colleges it was meant to support.
“I think starting in October and into the early part of next year, say March or April, the closures are going to increase to an average of two or three a week,” said Gary Stocker, who started a website, collegeviability.com, to track the financial fortunes of colleges. “Deposits are down 10 percent. Do the math. It isn’t good.”
More than One-Third of US Colleges have Fewer than 1,000 Students
These colleges generally don’t have large endowments or scholarship funds, so every dollar they are forgoing is a dollar that could have been spent on technology, faculty raises, modernizing residence halls, or other ways of improving the college experience.
It already wasn’t easy for private colleges in the US. “With pandemic relief dollars exhausted, institutions lacked a financial buffer to overcome rising expenses and demand pressures,” read a brief from Standard & Poor’s summarizing the private college sector. “Deeper tuition discounting further strained net revenue growth as institutions competed for students. As a result, median operating margins became negative for the first time in at least 10 years.”
In other words, the average private college is losing money.
While small colleges, in most cases, lack wide name ID and prestige, they are a surprisingly large part of the higher education picture. In fall 2021, colleges with fewer than 1,000 students made up a staggering 36 percent of all colleges, although these small colleges collectively enrolled less than 3 percent of all undergraduates. They could all close and it would have little impact on American higher education, right? Not so fast.
On average, these colleges educate more low-income students, and more first-generation students than the larger colleges with which they compete. Also, small colleges are a source of jobs and pride. Drive into a town such as Lindsborg, Kansas, or Alma, Michigan, or Greenville, Pennsylvania, and you will know immediately that you are in a college town. These are towns that would be much smaller and less vibrant if not for the influx of young people and energy every fall, and the faculty members and administrators who live there.
The Innovative Quirky Small Colleges
What’s more, these small colleges have been the source of many of the most innovative ideas in higher education.
For example, Hampshire College, in Massachusetts (enrollment: 505), lets every student plan their own curriculum. It has produced a disproportionate number of leading thinkers, including documentarian Ken Burns, writer Jon Krakauer, actors Lupita Nuyong’o and Liev Shreiber, theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, and Jose Fuentes, the co-founder of Duolingo. Bennington College, in Vermont (enrollment: 733), has theaters that seat more than its enrollment, and warehouse-size art studios, so students can dream big. And they have: graduates include Tony winner Carol Channing, Oscar winner Alan Arkin, Pulitzer Prize winner Donna Tartt, and author Bret Easton Ellis, who published his first novel, Less Than Zero, while still an undergraduate there.
Goddard College, in Vermont, was founded with the idea that there was no separation between an education and life itself, so students helped run the college, teach its classes, and build its buildings. Enrollment slipped from a high of 2,000 or so in the 1970s, when the college was at the peak of its considerable influence, to just 220 this past year, before the college closed in May. Its notable alumni include playwright David Mamet, actor William H. Macy, cultural critic Mumia Abu-Jamal, and jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp.
Would all of these people have been successful even without going to these colleges? It’s hard to know. But would many of them say the intimacy of these colleges and the different ways they approached education inspired them in a way that larger colleges could not? Undoubtedly, the answer is yes.
Serving College Students that No-one Else Does
Many other small colleges serve groups of students that otherwise might not go to college, including tribal colleges and historically black colleges. Most women’s colleges were very small, and served a population that could not attend other institutions. Even after women gained grudging admission at many colleges, women’s colleges continued to serve students who felt like second-class citizens on larger campuses. Among those colleges was Wells, which remained a women’s-only college for 136 years before going coed in 2005. It produced some notable alumna, including Pleasant Rowland, who created the American Girl brand, Faith Whittlesey, the former US ambassador to Switzerland, and first lady Frances Cleveland.
That is not to say that all small colleges are distinctive. In fact, many of them have been withering for years, unwilling or unable to change their business plans or seek new populations of students despite years of losses and little hope for a turnaround. A large number of these colleges are liberal arts colleges, but the share of students who are majoring in liberal arts disciplines has been declining for years.
In the early 2000s, when I was a reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education, I wrote about the small colleges that were closing around the country, including Bradford College in Haverhill, Mass., Trinity College in Burlington, Vt., and Mount Senario College in Ladysmith, Wis. It seemed at the time that we were at the beginning of a flood of college closures. But the headwinds abated, and colleges hung on.
Some changed their missions completely and thrived. New Hampshire College had about 8,000 students in 2001, when it changed its name to Southern New Hampshire University. Now the online behemoth has more than 130,000 students. Unity Environmental University, in Maine, has shifted almost all of its classes online, and it is thriving.
But for every success story, there are many, many more failure stories. Small colleges with inattentive board members who believe success is just around the corner, leaders who believe one substantial gift will change the college’s direction forever, or colleges chasing new program offerings that finally get established just as the labor market shifts.
Trying Anything to Survive
Some small colleges have tried other strategies, such as joining Division I in athletics, to gain more visibility. Such strategies rarely pay off — athletics are expensive to support and it is hard for a small college to succeed on the playing field against much larger institutions. Look at, for example, two recent converts to NCAA Division 1: Lindenwood University and Stonehill College. At Lindenwood, the women’s basketball team finished 2–24 in its first season at Division I. At Stonehill, the men’s ice hockey team lost its first 29 games before finding a win over — who else? — Lindenwood. It would finish the season 2–34. You get the picture. The jump to Division 1 was meant to bring about greater visibility, but constant losing is simply dispiriting, not uplifting.
For many of these small colleges, the only thing keeping the lights on are the tuition checks. They help meet payroll, pay the vendors who run the dining halls, and make payments on bond issues. Many of these colleges issued bonds to refurbish old buildings or build new ones. The bonds are now major liabilities for the colleges, and the bonds have owners who might be losing faith in higher education.
Overall, full-time enrollment was down 0.8 percent in the latest year at the 300-plus private colleges rated by the bond-rating agency Standard & Poor’s. The bond ratings for 27 private colleges were downgraded in the year ending June 1, compared to just five that were upgraded. Among the portfolio, 14 percent of colleges had a negative outlook going forward.
Now colleges are trying anything to increase revenue and stay afloat. The president of Ferrum College went knocking on doors of homes in nearby Roanoke, Va., recently, hoping to find some students for her beleaguered college. The college has seen student acceptances drop, almost directly in relation to the FAFSA debacle. It was in line to have 450 new freshmen this fall, but that number has dropped to less than 350. Students could not commit because of uncertainty about financial aid.
In 2021, Congress ordered the Department of Education to redesign the FAFSA to make it shorter and less intrusive into applicants’ financial affairs. The idea was that if it was less intimidating, more people would fill it out. But the rollout was plagued by technical delays. Rather than relenting and allowing parents and students to use the old form while officials untangled the issues with the new one, the department plunged forward. When it was finally introduced, many people could not access it because the website was almost always down. When they did fill out the form successfully, parents could not access it again for months, whether to make changes or add new information. The bungling continues: just this week, the Education Department said colleges will not be able to make corrections to student aid records in bulk, standard practice in previous years, again delaying students from knowing their final financial aid awards.
Overall, the share of students who have filled out the FAFSA is down 11.6 percent compared to last year. Well-known colleges with large numbers of students clamoring to get in are not being hurt by the FAFSA issues. They have enough students who can afford to pay the full sticker price, or close to it, and applicants are not basing their decisions on the size of the financial aid package.
Small colleges have lived by the information they glean from the FAFSA. Now they may be dying by it. Some colleges are reporting that deposits are down 20–30 percent compared to last year. Among other colleges, the FAFSA uncertainty is hurting Mount St. Mary’s College, in Los Angeles, where deposits were running short of expectations earlier this summer. The financial aid offers are especially important at Mount St. Mary’s because 67 percent of admitted students qualify for Pell Grants, federal financial aid for the lowest-income college students. Another example is Coker University, in South Carolina, where deposits are also running behind. Almost half of its students qualify for Pell Grants, and two thirds take out federal loans.
And there are many more colleges teetering on the brink. We just won’t know it until they pull the plug.
You might say, rightfully so, that scratching for tuition dollars to keep the mission and vision alive for just one more year is a hell of a way to run a business that is supposed to deal in impermanence. But that is the reality for many colleges in this country. Not every college is offering a high quality education, and not every college can or should survive. But they did not deserve bureaucratic malfeasance of the highest order.
These stories about colleges closing that we will undoubtedly see in the coming months may seem very far away and incidental. But many lives will be hurt, immediately and in the reverberations that follow. Despite the millions of students that small colleges have collectively graduated and the countless lives they have improved, it will be especially sad that the demise of many will come at the end of a government noose.
