This Week In College Viability (TWICV) for January 15, 2024

It's January 15th, 2024, and it's This Week in College Viability. It's a really cold week across these United States, and the news from higher education is doing nothing to warm us up. Welcome, I'm Gary Stocker, and it's This Week in College Viability for January 15th, 2024. What are we going to be talking about A lot of community colleges in the news this week, mostly in New York State. We have another college closure, this one in Pennsylvania. More doom and gloom enrollment predictions, and that one— this one's not just for 2024, it's for many years beyond. And Vandy, Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, is allegedly boss and manager heavy. We'll talk about that. And then yet another short notice announcement for college faculty layoffs. This time at another public colleges. And as we do each and every week, we start with cutbacks and layoffs. And the first one is Youngstown State in Ohio, and this is from Vindy.com, Vindy.com. I don't see a reporter's name here. And what was fascinating about this, the plan calls for layoffs and new hires. And if I read this correctly, it's a 3.5-year review process I think it took 3.5 years to get to this point. I hope it's not 3.5 years out from now. And 13 faculty are proposed to be laid off or let go from Youngstown State University. Just part of our list. Christian colleges is the next cutbacks and layoff items. Christian colleges trying to eliminate tuition to draw students. Well, I'm probably going to get a sandwich at Chick-fil-A today, and I'm guessing if Chick-fil-A would eliminate the fees, the costs of chicken sandwiches, a lot more of us would buy them. I don't know how you run a business by eliminating your main revenue source. And maybe the Christian colleges in this story in Christianity Today— and Emily Bells is the reporter— from January 8th, maybe they, maybe they want to have their business model rely on gifts. And if so, Go be it. Go be it. Go for it. It's not a good business model. And as you follow college closures, as you follow bad financial news from colleges, it is obvious that most are Christian colleges that are in the deepest trouble and the ones that close most often. So good luck with them on that. It's not a good business decision, but they can do whatever they want. And CUNY, the College and Universities of New York, mass layoffs and class cuts just weeks before the semester. I'm gonna have some more on that here in a couple minutes. This is by Heidi Chu at thecity.nyc. Interesting suffix for the domain on that. And I did my weekly top and bottom report yesterday. That's where I look at the top 5 or 10 and bottom 5 or 10 colleges in each state or set of states. On their financial health and graduation rates and things like that. I do that on Sundays, and I did community colleges for the first time yesterday. I had to kind of customize the app that I use for that because this is part of a series, part of a series of trends that I'm seeing with community colleges. In this particular case, there are 9 of 30, I believe, community colleges in New York State that have accreditor issues. I'll tell you from the top and bottom report that I put out yesterday, and that's on YouTube. Go to College Viability top and bottom reports to search for those. Of the top 10 community colleges in the state of New York, top 10 New York, only one, only one had positive enrollment growth from 2014 to 2021. The rest of the top 10 enrollment colleges in New York for community colleges had a decrease in enrollment from 2014 to 2021. And I really hope IPEDS gets their 2022 data out soon. I need to add that to the app so we can get some more recent comparisons for that stuff. But the trend is obvious. The trend is down, down, down for enrollment across most colleges for sure. Page 2, I want to go into this a little bit more, and this story is from Kathleen Moore was on January 10th with the Times Union, timesunion.com. By the way, this link is behind a paywall, and like always, I will post the URLs, the links to all these stories in the show notes. And it looks like 9 of the 30— I thought it was 36, but 9 of the 30, Kathleen Moore reported, community colleges in New York are getting hate mail— my words, not theirs— hate mail from the Middle States Commission on higher education. All right, that happens. The focus though of the issues from the Middle States Commission is on enrollment, and here's why I thought that was interesting. Community colleges are heavily subsidized. I don't know what the details are in New York, I didn't look it up, but where I live in St. Louis, about 66% of the tuition is subsidized from a variety of public and small, small number of private sources. And so $100 in total tuition cost costs a student somewhere around $30 to $33 in out-of-pocket costs. And so the enrollment would have to be really down for those funds to be impacted by the student contribution. Now, I understand the college is walking away from the $77-some-odd of public revenue as well, but the numbers are obvious. And one of the things I shared in Yesterday's top-bottom report on the community colleges in New York, the trend is obvious. The citizens, the college-age students, or the college students in general in the state of New York are saying no to community colleges. Why is beyond the scope of my discussion. That's for somebody else to figure out. But clearly the enrollment numbers are down across the board when only one of the top 10 has had positive enrollment growth. In the last 10 years. And kind of a new topic, and this is on the same story at the Times Union by Kathleen Moore, and this is probably just bad reporting, but here's the description that Kathleen Moore put in her story. And when talking about the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, she wrote that Middle States is a 136-year-old organization. Okay, what she said next, that reviews colleges and universities to determine the validity of degrees and credits. Interesting, I've not heard accrediting organizations described that way. What is not referenced in Miss Moore's story, and really not much by the accrediting agencies themselves, is they don't do a very good job, if at all, focus on the financial health and viability of these colleges. And then the closing college The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and its college programs. That's a headline in Philly Voice and the local CBS affiliate. Michaela Althaus is the reporter from thephillyvoice.com, and the numbers are not good, as you might imagine, for Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Enrollment was just over 200 students. The endowment in 2021 was around $3 million, and about half the students graduate in 4 years. It was interesting to note that their admission yield, or the popularity indicator that I call it, was up 3 points, and that makes sense Art students are probably a committed group of students who, when accepted to a college, go there in larger percentages. But this is not enough students, not enough tuition revenue. The unfunded institutional grants discounts— unfunded discounts was up about $1 million over the last 7 or 8 years. Not a good indicator. Page 3: experts predicted dozens of colleges would close in 2023, and they were correct. And this is from Olivia Sanchez at Hechinger, and the subheading on that is even more colleges will likely close in the coming years as enrollment problems worsen. We've heard that before, we'll hear that again. Here's the number that Olivia Sanchez used in her report for Hechinger. For the first 10 months of 2023, 14 non-for-profit private colleges, about an average of about 9 per year since 2003, closed in that same period. About 16 for-profits closed. Um, I think it's per year. I'll spare you the numbers because the podcast doesn't do numbers well generally, but Ms. Sanchez's article suggests or cites distressing predictions of decreased enrollment not just for 2023, but decreased enrollment across hundreds of colleges in the coming year. Now she cites a source of that. It's a higher education consulting firm And there's nothing new here. We've heard those kind of predictions before on the short term, even the long term. What's happened here is the source— and I'll again have the link in the show notes— the source has projected the actual number of colleges, not the names, but the actual number of colleges, and their range of percentages of decreases in enrollment. So a little bit more work on that. As far as I know, only the College Viability app, only my College Viability app, actually does this for individual colleges. The rest of the folks who cite status, who cite statistics, always do it in the macro sense. Nobody looks at it by the college, by college level. And Vanderbilt not getting good news this week. The headline from Maggie Kelly, who's the assistant editor from thecollegefix.com— this is a January 12th story— Vanderbilt, Vandy in Tennessee, has one administrator for every two students. While Vandy headlines this story about too many college administrators, the reporter also adds Northwestern University to her story. Let me quote, and this is again from Maggie Kelly in thecollegefix.com: Vanderbilt's Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion staff website lists 4 identity centers, and I won't read those off here, and here's the important part, 23 That's 2, 3, almost 2 dozen staff positions. That's a lot. Now, I don't care what Vanderbilt spends its money on. That's their decision. If their business and revenue model supports this, so be it. Concerns though about these ratios of too many administrators per students and 1 administrator per 2 students is just stunning. But concerns about these ratios impacting the cost of a Vandy education are legitimate for sure. But you know what I'm going to say next. Students, go somewhere else if you don't like Vandy and its tuition costs. If you don't like Vandy and what they stand for, go somewhere else. Yes, it's recognized as a fine college. I'm sure it is in many respects. Will that continue is a fair question to ask. With this kind of bad headlines. There are hundreds, hundreds of other colleges for whom a diploma will provide graduates with many career opportunities above and beyond what Vandy can do. As a sidebar to this, as, as you might imagine, there was a comment section with this story, and the comments about DEI spending were both numerous and entertaining in the story comment sections. Page 4: Queens College. This is in New York again. We're living in New York this week. Queens College lays off 26 faculty 2 weeks before spring semester. And this is a story from the Queens Ledger on January 11th. It was filed by Charlie Finnerty and Cecilia Bernhardt. And I kept this story off of the cutbacks and layoffs list because it is yet another example of a college, this time a public one, making significant changes to its faculty, to its faculty staffing levels, on pretty short notice. In this case, about 2 weeks. So it was last Wednesday, it was announced that 26— and what they called was, what they called them was full-time substitute faculty. Don't know what that is, full-time substitute faculty— were not reappointed. And the citations from the story says the mayor cut $23 million. I guess a city mayor of Queens. The city mayor cut $23 million from its budget last fall. And of course, as we almost always see, the comments from faculty were tough, and I'll talk about one of those here in a second. But the communications from Queens College leadership is nothing more than a mangled mess of words and titles Just so sad, so sad that we can't speak clearly when we have to give people bad news. And a faculty who was, comment from a faculty who was cut, and I'll read this verbatim. No other CUNY, College and Universities of New York campus, as far as I know, has made a decision like this that is so completely lacking in humanity and with no transparency and without even consulting the chairs who are left to do the dirty work of firing these people. We see these comments all the time. They're going to continue. And I, I, I would be upset too. You would be upset too if you had short notice that your job was being terminated. Yet it happens day after day, week after week, month after month. It's no fun on the micro level, but yet we expect it to happen every day in businesses across the country, across the world. And this is certainly no fun for the laid-off faculty, but this again is a local story. This happens to be in Queens, New York. This local story is just clearly part of a national trend that's not going to end anytime soon. Well, let's wrap this up. I don't think I had any jeezus today. We had a heavy one a couple weeks ago. Just another This Week in College Viability podcast in a rather slow college news week. And as more colleges start up their traditional spring terms and see scary declining enrollment numbers, expect the cutbacks and layoffs and closure announcements to pick up in the coming weeks. This is Gary Stocker with This Week in College Viability. Let's do it again next Monday, hopefully when the temperatures across the country will all be a balmy 75 degrees. We'll talk to you then.