This Week In College Viability (TWICV) for Nov 10 2025

It is Monday, November 10, 2025. Hi everybody, Gary Stocker back in front of the blue Yeti microphone with another episode, yet another episode of This Week in College Viability News and Commentary. And of course, this is the podcast that talks about the financial health and viability of public and private colleges with data and with details and perspectives offered nowhere else. So don't be a hog. Make sure to forward the podcast link to your higher education friends, your family, your neighbors, your relatives, and let them hear a perspective on this whole challenged industry from someone who follows it day in and day out. On today's podcast, a college closure, in Illinois. The question we ask is how many more colleges are having that closing discussion and not able to share it or not willing to share that with their students, faculty, staff, communities. Inside Higher Education noted 14 colleges with cutbacks and layoffs in October. I had many more than that, but thanks to Inside Higher Ed for confirming the work that I do every Monday. And stunning development, sarcasm alert, in Nebraska, faculty oppose academic program cuts. Yes, that's true. Faculty oppose academic program cuts. Accreditors, accreditors move to control innovation. We'll have more on that and of course much, much, much more. But we start off with the college closer, Trinity Christian College in Northern Illinois. The suburban college to close at the end of the academic year due to financial challenges. This is from Randy Guylenol and Izzy Struband on NBC 5 Chicago on November 4th. The class of 2026 will be the last. And from another story from WGAD Radio, also in Chicago, a student, and I won't name her, a student said, I cried immediately. I just transferred here. So I was really excited to come here. And we know from experience that that has happened so many times in the past. And it still begs the question, I'll ask it again, when did this college, when did Trinity Christian College know they weren't going to make it? Could they have given this young lady a heads up? How many other students will be impacted in what is really a life-altering event? At other colleges, and we know those discussions are taking place.

Moms and dads and students, community leaders, check the financial health of colleges.

Use my apps, use your own resources. It should be done yesterday. There are, as I've said many times, there are many, many, many more colleges, mostly private, mostly non-urban that cannot and will not survive this higher education consolidation period. Josh Moody in Inside Higher Education says October brought deep cuts at multiple campuses.

Colleges shed hundreds of jobs, 14 colleges in Josh's story.

And I guess it's a strange dichotomy that so many colleges are both claiming increasing enrollment. I've talked about that in previous weeks, previous months.

They're claiming increasing enrollment while so many of those same colleges— I guess so many of those same colleges are announcing layoffs and program cutbacks. And just like I shared in an interview with the St.

Louis Post-Dispatch a few weeks ago, they had a story about Washington University here in St.

Louis.

It's possible It's possible that colleges like the 14 in Josh's story and others are taking this financial crisis as an opportunity to cut back on staffing. That should have been done. Those cutbacks should have been done a long, long time ago.

Page 2, Sue Mukherjee on a Substack post. Headline reads, How Title IV Compliance Should Serve as Higher Education's New Strategic Planning. And as always, I'll have the link in the show notes. She writes, Ms. Mukherjee writes, higher education faces legitimate accountability pressure. Decades of criticism about rising costs, questionable value, and student debt crisis has created a political will for quantification, for measuring, for numbers, for data. Has created a political will for quantification. Title IV, the financial value transparency, focuses a simple question with complex implications: do graduates earn enough to repay their student loans?

Now, she notes, Ms. Bakshi notes, that many institutions are responding with mere what she calls compliance theater. They're hiring external consultants without building any lasting internal capacity. She says this, this dependency is expensive and perpetuates strategic blindness because workforce data remains hopelessly siloed across financial aid, academic affairs, career services, and probably more. She notes that this is a missed opportunity to invest in permanent workforce intelligence infrastructure. And she notes that using organizations like Burning Glass or Lightcast to integrate what companies are looking for with programs and courses offered is, is an opportunity. And she suggests many colleges were not doing that. And, and of course, compliance theater. Compliance theater is an interesting description. It's an entertaining description Keep in mind again that in theory and in practice, access to Title IV funds, federal Title IV funds, is at risk for these colleges if they don't meet the threshold. I'll talk about that in a second. And based on higher education history, it's reasonable to assume, reasonable to assume that colleges are hoping this goes away, this, this, this need for accountability goes away. And they can continue on with their— in too many cases— with their underperforming, underperforming business model. So I asked my friend Gemini AI to give some examples of income and student debt combinations that would meet, and then some that would not meet, the ratio. And that ratio number for documenting a college's accountability is 0.08. 0.08. 8/100 for those of you that paid attention to math class. So here's some examples. With an annual income of $50,000 and student debt of $30,000, the ratio would be 0.079. Just under, just under, and would meet the threshold. And if you want a math figure, take debt times 1.66. Round it up if you want, 1.7. Debt times 1.66 to equal the income needed to meet that 0.08 standard. Moving on, income of $40,000 and debt of $60,000 comes down to 0.199, which is above the threshold, would not meet it. A low income, low debt, $35,000 in annual income, $10,000 in student debt would be 0. 0.038, that is below the threshold, that's good.

And then low income and high debt, $30,000 income, $80,000 in student debt is 0.355, a disturbingly high number.

And if that is your college's majors ratio, you shouldn't be in that business because you're taking money from students who have no realistic hope of paying it back anytime soon.

Paige, 3, stop the presses. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln committee opposes most academic program cuts.

Yes, I'm gonna pause to let that sink in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know sarcasm alert should be the first thing I said. The committee recommended leaders allow more time to consider alternatives to reductions as university looks to save over $27 million.

Ben Unglesby had this story on November 5th in Higher Education Dive.

Here's what he wrote. An academic advisory group at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has opposed most of the program cuts recommended by the institution's chancellor and is calling for more time before considering major budget cuts. A majority of the academic planning committee voted against eliminating 4 of 6 programs. The 21— yeah, that's right, 21, almost 2 dozen— 21-person committee composed of 10 faculty members as well as others officially issued its recommendation to the chancellor on November— excuse me, on October 24th. Sarcasm alert: in other news, the sun continues to rise each morning and set Each evening, faculty oppose academic cuts, all the same thing. This faculty stuff is so predictable. So, so sadly predictable. Maintaining their status and their quo, maintaining their status and their quo in the face of daunting negative data. It will change. It will change when the economics become so obvious that there is no reasonable recourse, but quit trying to be everything to everybody. In the face of intense financial pressures. And then Preston Cooper, I can't remember where he's from, he testified on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on November 6th, I guess. And his summary of that says, pulling back the curtain on college prices. Well, this has come out before. It's not controversial to say that college costs too much. Worse, Mr. Cooper writes, the high prices that colleges and universities charge are not transparent. To students, to the public. Nothing new there. Opaque pricing makes it difficult for families to plan, and tackling price opacity or vagueness makes higher education challenging.

But if you tackle it and fix it, there's some opportunities. I'll talk about that in a second. And he mentions that the federal government has some options to improve price transparency. So, so none of this is new. Colleges, even though, even though the government has tried to increase scholarship available funds, colleges are winning the battle because they're raising tuition faster than scholarships and taxpayers and students and their families can keep up. So none of this, none of this is new. It is an important topic. It is an important topic that needs to be presented front and center to legislators. But let's think about this for a second. If financial transparency in some form or fashion becomes mandated by law, and for example, loans have to be listed and described as a liability on financial aid awards, loans have to be described as a liability, it's reasonable, it's likely that many more students and their families, when they see the obvious upfront negative aspects of a proposed financial aid package, they'll pass. They'll say, no, I can't afford it. I don't want that debt. I can't afford that debt. And all this will be, all this will be is yet another nail, yet another nail in the age-old business and financial model of higher education in our country. Sarah Weissman, on October 30th, at Inside Higher Education, had this headline: "Accreditors launch efforts to endorse short-term credential providers." Let me read from the first paragraph in her story, Sarah Weissman's story in Inside Higher Education.

Higher Learning Commission President Barbara Gelman Danley said in the announcement that HLC's goal is to expand the nation's pool of valuable HLC-endorsed, my emphasis, HLC-endorsed providers, thereby increasing pathways for students to gain the qualifications they need to get ahead and succeed. I should have put some of that in this dribble, in the college dribble section. Really?

Really?

That takes some credential-providing cojones to make that statement. It takes some, some guts. So, so, so let me make sure I've got this right. The regular accreditors—HLC, Middle States, CACSOC, and the others—are going to allow short-term credential providers the opportunity to be accredited? The opportunity to be accredited? Is that not the same model we have now? The accreditor, HLC, and the others are paid by the accreditee. And what, and what happens when a short-term credential provider, whatever they look like, sound like, whether it's an existing college or, or an upstart business or new start business, what happens when a short-term credential provider runs into quality or financial troubles? Will these same accreditors be slow to cite them just like they are now? How many students will be negatively impacted by short-term credential providers while these accreditors make sure their short-term credential provider checks clear? And then, well, all right, you said, well, Stocker, what's the solution? I believe we need an environment, a setting where consumers, students and families, pay to see if a college— they fund a system process independent of colleges, independent of creditors, to see if a college is providing a high-quality education and is financially secure enough to continue. So effectively a private organization who makes their money by selling quality data, financial health data, on these colleges.

Page 4.

Ricardo Aziz had an article on November 6th on the Merger Watch column at Higher Education Dive, and he notes how college leaders can own the narrative about a major restructuring. The subheading reads, officials can either actively or diligently manage the narrative about a closure or merger, or others will craft it for them. And effectively, this article is career guidance. It is career guidance for college leaders who have been a part of merger and activity— merger and acquisition activity somewhere. And here is the final paragraph from Dr. Aziz, from Dr. Ricardo Aziz: The burden of leading major restructuring is one that most higher education leaders do not necessarily seek. Because it can be dangerous to their career.

But sought or not, these initiatives are increasingly needed and will increasingly occur. Leaders should remember that their best approach to ensuring career continuity is to present a clear and positive narrative about the merger or acquisition or closure event so that others do not build that narrative for them. And, and this is again yet another, yet another reinforcement that closures will continue, mergers will both continue and grow in number. And Dr. Aziz is encouraging college leaders to accept this reality even in the face, even the face of short-term impacts, potentially short-term negative impacts on their career. And I'll remind you that Dr. Aziz just came out with a book in October, I believe, Leading Existential Change in Higher Ed: Mergers, Closures, and Other Major Institutional Restructuring. It is from Johns Hopkins Press. For those of you looking at scenarios where mergers, acquisitions, even closures are in your future, I highly recommend the book. And let's do a wrap. And the wrap is public college completion is heading in the wrong direction. And this is a story from the editorial board in the Boston Globe on November 4th. And they say in the subheading, "Getting students enrolled isn't enough." And I don't know if the editors at the Globe, the editorial board of the Globe, got that from me or not, but I say it all the time because colleges are just focused on enrollment. And the story leads, for 2 years, Massachusetts has been increasing the financial aid available for students who attend public colleges. Most notably by making community college free. Estimated enrollment figures released by the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education show students are now flocking—

is the word they use—

now flocking to community colleges, reversing a decade-long decline in enrollment. New paragraph. The Globe editorial board then continues, but getting students in the door needs to be paired with getting them out successfully.

Of course, of course students are going to college at a higher rate. Public colleges in Massachusetts, they have— the students have no financial skin in the game.

If it's free, we all get more of it. That's just a basic economic fact.

It's get them enrolled, damn the negatives on completion. So if students have no financial skin in the game, when it gets tough, when it's inconvenient, it's clear that they are bailing on that free college education. In many cases, it's a paid college education, and they've got the debt they have to deal with, and no one should be surprised at that. So the Department of Education data in Massachusetts, I presume, show that as of 2024, only 35% of Massachusetts community college graduates— let me add the caveat here— after 6 years, those starting in 2018, in 2024, after 6 years, only 35% and change graduated. And the most successful of these, Greenfield Community College, their graduation rate was 48% of students earning a degree. 6 years later, not even half. 6 years, 6 years, not even half, 48%, at the best example. Completed their community college education. And, and yes, I understand there are countless higher education professionals working to develop better systems, better processes to get students through to graduation. I see those articles all the time. I see those podcasts all the time. And they're working to get students through to graduation at community colleges and at four-year colleges. And while there will certainly be successes, there are still too many traditional and non-traditional college students without the academic preparation or financial wherewithal to successfully complete a college education. Yet colleges continue to focus on what? Access, they call it. I call it enrollment. They call it access. Get students in the door, get them enrolled, and outside of free offerings, collect tuition and fees and live with the fact that more than half won't complete their degree requirements. The debt they incur, again, for those colleges that don't offer free, the debt they incur for an incomplete college education, in my mind, is quietly viewed as as a higher education battle damage. It is a self-serving loop. It's self-perpetuating. It's an education incestuous loop. It's a you scratch my back cartel. No other way to look at it. And, and again, solution, stalker, what would you do?

What's already happening?

You don't need me to tell you this. Close or consolidate those colleges that show sub— below 50% 2- and 4-year graduation rates and a clear financial inability to provide a quality college education. Again, it's going to happen. You don't need me to call for it. Too many colleges, not enough students. Market dynamics all but guarantee that closures and other forms of consolidation will occur. And that will make higher education stronger because there will be fewer colleges who need to entice unprepared students to enroll in a college education they are unprepared in so many ways to complete. And on that note, we're going to call that a wrap for this podcast episode of This Week in College Viability. As always, I'm so pleased that you make the time to listen to the podcast. Make sure to care to share the MP3 link with those others in your world. And for Gary Stocker, who's me at College Viability, thanks. We'll be back next week.