This Week In College Viability (TWICV) for December 11, 2023

It's December 11th, 2023, and it's This Week in College Viability. It's 2 weeks before Christmas, and there's no change in the bad news coming out of higher education. The news continues to be less than merry and bright for many, many, too many colleges in our country. Hi, it's Gary Stocker. The December 11th podcast includes much more on the College of St. Rose up in Albany, New York, and here's why. It is the triad, the triad of closures. The first part of that triad is the sudden closure. It happened, sudden closure announcement. The second is students and faculty and the community protest, always happens. And the third part of this triad is the college rationalizes, makes excuses for their short notice decision to close. And of course we have the cutbacks and layoffs list that will be next. The Chronicle has an interesting anecdotal story, and this is by senior writer Becky Supiano and Megan Zahnheiss. I'll share that story. Fitch, the rating service, says bad things about higher ed, but Moody's says good things. But boy, the Moody's comments are highly qualified. And I've got much, much more to both entertain and inform you about higher education in December 2023. Let's jump to the cutbacks and layoffs list. Missouri's Park University undergoing changes amid sharp enrollment drop. The private college in Missouri is laying off faculty, cutting programs, and closing campuses. After a sharp drop in enrollment that we've seen across, across the country. And it's based in Kansas City, and Park University indicated they're going to cut 16 positions, mostly in low enrollment areas. And the source in this is the Kansas City Beacon. Beacon, excuse me, will also add— the college will also eliminate 3 graduate programs and about a dozen total majors, certificates, concentrations, and minors. And as is almost always the case, students already enrolled in these programs will get to finish. And again, the link to that story will be in the show notes. And let's go to St. Martin's. And this is a story from the Olympian in Washington State by Ralph Boone. And the headline reads, facing a $6.2 million budget shortfall, St. Martin's rolls back raises, period. Faculty aren't happy, period. And the only comment I have on this one— and the details again will be in the link I provide— is the school has hired a new provost and had 3 interim chief financial officers, he said. The late Paul Howery might have a rest of the story on this one. I'm sure there's more details. And then finally, in our cutbacks and layoffs list, Christian Brothers University in Memphis announces multiple faculty cuts, eliminates about a dozen programs. And this comes from Jacob Wilt in the Milton— excuse me, the Memphis Commercial Appeal on December 9th. Christian Brothers is eliminating 28 faculty positions and multiple programs will be cut from CBU's catalog. You can read the story, but it's an interesting mix and I'm not going to read the list to you. It's a mix of both STEM courses and liberal arts college, liberal arts courses. So they have done a decent job of trying to at least manage the types of cuts that they do, but they're all based on enrollment. And so some of those STEM courses probably aren't doing well. And now let's take the journey and we're going to spend some time on the College of St. Rose in Albany, New York. And I've got 3 stories that I'm going to reference. And the first, I think a couple of these might be from Alcino Donadel from University Business, and this is on December 4th. And the headline reads, the College of St. Rose closes. We know that sparking uproar from the community, always going to be the case. And here's the quote from Alcino Donadel. Local news stations broke the news of the closing the day of the board's decision, beating official college correspondence from the College of St. Rose. Ouch. Students, the story goes on, frustrated with the abrupt notice, all right, and lack of transparency, took to St. Rose's official public announcement to voice their concern. It's going to happen. They booed board chair Jeffrey Stone a few minutes into a speech. And when the president of the college, President White, defended the college by reaffirming their notice, a student shouted hours after. WRGB, one of the local radio stations, I think, reports. Now, this is a rookie mistake. If you're going to have bad news, you're going to have the announcement ready to go before the bad news is decided on. So, you know, a well-run organization would have had some kind of communication either through communications professional, a crisis management professional, and they would have had a "we're staying open" news release ready, and they were going to have had a "we're closing" news release ready. If the folks had— St. Rose had that, they didn't do a good job of releasing it. And again, let's go to the data, because I think I shared this a week or so ago. The College of St. Rose, from 2014 to 2021, the last reported data to the National Center for Education Statistics, reports an FTE fall enrollment down over 1,000 students. Their 4-year graduation rates, not awful. They were around 46% in 2021 for 4 years and not quite 60% for 6 years. And the thresholds we have at College Viability are a minimum 50% graduation rate at 4 years and 70% at 6 years. And the tuition and fee revenue is down a little over $23 million. This is over 8 years. You can do the math to calculate the average loss of tuition fees. So they were hemorrhaging money. And I can jump across and look at my little graphic that I have here. And the College of St. Rose's unfunded institutional grants— call that merit aid, call that scholarships, that's a fancy way to do it— was up almost $13 million. So effectively, the good folks at the College of St. Rose were giving away the store to get students to enroll. And they're not the only ones doing it. And their actual numbers have gone up from 30 million in 2014 to a little over 43 million in 2021. And the endowment was not even modest. It was not quite $39 million in 2021. And again, if you've listened to these podcasts before, the bare minimum threshold we have at College Viability is $50 million. All right, so we're upset that it's closing. And so James De La Fuente from NBC— I'm sorry, from ABC TV in Albany, News 10— had the story that read, "St. Rose students protest college closures, demand answers." Right? And there are consistent themes with these student reactions from college closing stories. First is the despair, and the justifiable despair associated with scrambling to find another college, and that's almost always, if not always, quickly followed by anger. And the second theme almost always revolves around the alleged lack of transparency, probably actual lack of transparency from college leaders. So Angela Ledford, who is a professor of polytheory, and this is from James DeLaFuente and NBC, ABC TV 10 in Albany. Angela Ledford, professor of polytheory. I'm guessing that's political science theory, nice naming. She tells News 10 that after nearly 2 decades of teaching at Saint Rose, the students have the right to ask for more answers. Well, let's dissect that for a second. I don't know how her being there for 2 decades has anything to do with students having the right to ask for more answers. The students certainly have the right to ask for more answers. They're the paying customers. So I'm missing the logical— the logic that Angela Ledford is trying to tie there. Tied together there. And she goes on to say, this is Angela Ledford, a professor of polytheory, I think that there's been several administrations that have been marked by mismanagement and an ongoing lack of transparency. No question she's entitled to her opinion. She's probably right. And this is interesting because we don't always hear that. She also adds, at the end of the day, the Board of Trustees is responsible, said Professor Angela Ledford. And yeah, When you're in an industry that predominantly has hired academics, and this is from the board of trustees making these hires, when you're in an industry that predominantly hires academics without any semblance of organizational-wide business and business leadership experience, you're gonna get what you pay for. You're gonna get what you select. Relative rookies, don't throw anything at me, relative rookies, comparative rookies, trying to run a multimillion-dollar enterprise without the skills and experience to do so. And Professor Ledford, outside of her wandering comments, she's right. You got to look to the board of trustees. They're the ones that select the leader, and the leader selects everybody else on down. And board of trustees and others will support this comment. They're not engaged almost everywhere to the extent they need to be. Now let me qualify that. There are certainly board members really engaged in college, but in my experience, that is, that number is very few and they are far between. Most trustees aren't engaged enough, and as a result, you get leadership and decisions not based on that fiduciary responsibility that trustee members have. So the teach-out plan came up again at Saint Rose, and teach-out is when a college closes or stops offering a program, other colleges step in, and you've heard me call them ambulance chasers. That's kind of crude, but that's what they are. They offer students a way to continue their degree. And so at St. Rose, the college leaders had to know months at least in advance that the end was near. Yet in this case, and in many but not all other cases, these degree completion opportunities, these teach-out plans, are not available as the closure announcements are made. Now, they are certainly available in some cases, for sure, absolutely, and done very well. The college in Illinois, in Jacksonville, McMurray, a couple years ago closed, an excellent job in providing a teach-out plan for their students. And there are others have done that as well. But too many times, and I can only speculate why, colleges don't have that next step available Now, I understand that if a college lets the word out that the end is near, competitors will find a way to get that news out, and that's not good, I'll grant you that. But it's a reality nonetheless that these students, I can make the case, are owed a timely and planned and thoughtful teach-out process. And I can make a reasonable case that all of this we hear from colleges, we are all about the students, I'm paraphrasing, it's highly qualified. When things are financially bad, it's not all about the students, it's about the college. It's about the college's survival, the assets available to the college, and even on the side that's justifiable, final compensation for faculty and staff. So that's the second part of the triad. And the third part, and this is from Tom Eshin, CBS TV 6 in Albany on December 1st. His story headline reads, "Merger proposals fell through trying to save St. Rose, the county eyes potential future for the property." Okay, vultures are circling. So this is really a Hail Mary piece. And I almost always see this when a college closes. The old Bill Clinton line, I have never worked harder to find a tax cut, something like that many, many years ago that kind of comes to mind here. And so, you know, Saint Rose President Marsha White, she started in 2020. So I'm going to give her some slack. She's earned that. But the writing was already on the proverbial wall. The enrollment had effectively gone down at the College of Saint Rose almost every single year from 2014 through 2020 and beyond. Tuition and fees revenue dropped about $2 to $3 million each and every year since 2014. And as I mentioned earlier, the unfunded institutional grants— colleges like to call them merit aid and scholarships— were up about $12 million, giving the store away to get students to enroll. And county executive— I guess this is Albany County Executive Dan McCoy— says $5 million was asked of both the city of Albany and Albany County, with state leaders in New York State also confirming this week that similar inquiries were made to them. President White, President Marsha White of the College of Saint Rose, shared with Tom Besham, reporter from CBS TV6, and I quote, "I want to make it crystal clear that there was never a request for a bailout, and the request was not for immediate financial support. The request was for bridge funding," end quote. And for this podcast episode, this is my first geesh. President White, I give you credit for coming into a tough situation, but don't try and pull this over the public, over your faculty and staff and students and community. Of course, this was a request for a bailout. It's a tomato, tomato request. Bridge funding, is what she referenced, and bailout are the same thing, maybe with different time frames. And that's why I'm here. Colleges try and pull this stuff over, and they're not right, and they're not being upfront about doing that. So this was indeed a request for a bailout. I'll grant them it was a short-term bailout, but it was a bailout nonetheless. And finally, I'll add on this, there's no such thing as was referenced in this story as a last-ditch effort for merger. Mergers take months, if not years. And again, if your last dollar is circling the financial drain, you can't find somebody to throw your towel at the last second. It takes time. And too many colleges, and I've said this time and time again, as have others, are waiting way, way, way too long. If you're attending a college or thinking about a college for your college career that has any indication of financial trouble, and I can provide you with guidance on that, they should be looking for merger partners, for consolidation partners yesterday. And trust me, the next college closing story that comes out will include something like this, a post-closing announcement that rationalizes that the closure with all of the really hard work that was done to prevent it, and I don't doubt the really hard work was done late. It should have been done a long, long, long time ago, 3, 5, 7 years ago. And as I said, mergers and consolidations take time. Most colleges that need to close don't bring enough net value to the table for almost any other organization to want to be part of the mess, the financial mess, they've created. And we'll see more College of St. Rose stories. It's going to happen. And I'll talk about that as I wrap up the podcast. And so this is the next story. We're going to move away from St. Rose. Thanks for your patience on that. The headline reads, "College is a capitalist hellscape." And I'll come into context here in a second. And it's from the Chronicle of Higher Education. And writers Becky Supiano and Megan Zahnheiss did this. And it's a newsletter, so I won't have a link for it. They interviewed as part of the Chronicle's public perception project, and that perception word is important, a student. And I don't see that from the University of Akron. And the student is Madison Rowell, R-O-W-E-L-L, 21. And she is quoted as saying, and I'm taking just bits and pieces from this newsletter story, in high school, all the teachers and counselors push you to start applying to college. All right. You can say no, you can say yes, but that's Madison Rowell's role story. And she thought, Madison Rowell thought, I really liked the idea of media and communications. I decided that I wanted a career in film. All right. I'm going to give a quick editorial. Is it a career in film or is it a skill in film? I have a skeleton film. I do my own YouTube videos, and I really like the idea. That's fine. This is America. We can make whatever decisions that we want. Some research, some future financial earnings should be part of that as well. But anyway, I digress. And so Madison Roll continues, at this point, most of my friends who decided to go to college have dropped out. Anecdotal observation. I have no idea what the data is behind that. A lot of them make pretty good wages. I have no idea what pretty good wages are. And she asks rhetorically, could it be a— could it be better if they had a degree? Probably, she asks and answers, but college is so expensive. She continues, I don't think it's worth it, especially when there are so many valuable career programs that get you into good paying jobs. Again, I have no idea how she defines that. Madison continued, I definitely considered dropping out, especially during my junior year. And she continues again, the quality of my education did not feel like it was where it was supposed to be. Now, this goes back to the perception that I talked about a minute ago. In this case, Madison rolls perception is reality. Each of our perceptions is reality. She didn't think the quality of her education was what it was supposed to be, right or wrong. That's her perception. Madison Roll says, all of my friends agree that college is a capitalist tailskate. Now, heaven knows where she came up with that phrase. They keep raising tuition, she says. They keep raising fees and anything they can to milk money— there's an emotional word— to milk money out of students. But they haven't been putting that money towards anything that makes a difference for our experience. I know this is an anecdotal story. It's a single story. And I know there are many, many, many positive stories about colleges and college students, but Madison Rowell's perception is her reality. And how many others, with or without reading her experience, are having the same one? Their perception is similar to what Madison Rowell's perception is. It's an important consideration as we evaluate that, that economic balance of supply and demand in colleges. If the demand for colleges continues to decrease based on these kinds of perceptions, that's not a good thing. And on where we go to Fitch and Fitch Ratings. I think this was reported last week. Fitch Ratings issues a deteriorating outlook for higher ed in 2024. And this is from Natalie Schwartz in Higher Ed Dive. Interestingly, a few days later, Moody's, another rating agency, offered a qualified endorsement of higher education in 2024. 2024, but the qualifications are almost inevitable. If enrollment goes down and pressure on tuition discount rates continues— I'm paraphrasing here— Moody's says all bets are off on their endorsement of 2024 being a good year for higher education. I think they're trying to play both sides of the track there, but so be it. They're a strong organization, they can do whatever they want. I don't— well, I've been to Alabama because we've done many stories on, uh, Birmingham Southern College. But this is another story. Alabama's higher education enrollment still below pre-pandemic heights, pre-pandemic peaks, says state commission. And this is from Alabama Today, Gemma Stevenson. And she's a guest contributor from something called the Alabama Reflector. And again, I'll include the link for you. The Alabama Commission on Higher Education, ACHE, quotes this. I'll read the quote. Some schools last week challenged ACHA's numbers because they said the enrollment was down. The schools cited their own enrollment figures, and this is again a quote from the story from Gemma Stevenson. The school cited their own enrollment figures, which include part-time students, saying they showed a more significant recovery from the pandemic. Erin Thompson, who is an assistant vice president for advancement and branding— we all need one of those— for Alabama A&M, wrote in an email that the The school had enrolled 6,600-some-odd students in the current semester, the highest in school history. And ACHE, the Alabama Commission on Higher Education, said the school had seen a 16% decrease, decline since 2019. Now, Jim Purcell, who's the executive director of ACHE, said that the FTE They're arguing that the FTE is not a valid calculation. And Purcell said that the FTE enrollment may stay the same even as enrollment goes, and FTE is a calculation based on total credit hours. And he's right. The second part is right, not the first part. And the way you calculate full-time equivalent enrollment, and this is, this is the measurement I use in the College Viability App, you take the total cumulative hours of college credit at a college and divide it by 15. Which is effectively a full-time student per semester. And that's how you get full-time equivalents. I'm worried that Mr. Purcell and Erin Thompson from Alabama A&M might have skipped a few math classes. Here's why. The FTE enrollment is a standardized reflection. It's not one biased by a higher percentage of part-time students. The total enrollment numbers are the raw number of students enrolled, whether they took a single class or 5 classes and 15 credits. And there's nothing wrong with that, students certainly can take however many classes they want. But when you do the math, it's FTE enrollment that standardizes that across colleges. And so that's the one I'm always going to use, even though I include total enrollment as a comparison. The FTE is a standardized comparison of enrollment. And a tuition dollar is a tuition dollar, whether it's from a full-time or part-time student. Maybe we'll have some math classes as part of our services we provide here at College Viability. Raleigh, North Carolina, WCNC. St. Augustine University president fired after school loses accreditation. All right, there's a lot going on here. I just have a couple bullet points. They are missing audits in the last couple years. This is from the Federal Audit Clearinghouse. And they have a 4-year graduation rate, a 4-year graduation rate of 22%. 1 in 5 graduate after 4 years from St. Augustine's. Now they had 5 presidents in 5 years, and there's a qualification on that. One of them passed away from COVID shortly after taking office. So they had 4 presidents in 5 years. I'm not sure that makes a difference. The issue isn't that they fired their president. Maybe he or she, I think it was a female, was responsible for the miserable graduation rates and the lack of ability to provide financial results. I don't know. But it is what it is. And an opinion piece. And this is by Justin St. George in the Fresno Bee on December 6th. and he's not part of Fresno Bee. He wrote an opinion piece, and it reads, Fresno Pacific University graduate— the Fresno Pacific graduate fears the university is headed toward bankruptcy. Again, I'll have the link for you. The student enrollment at Fresno Pacific has dropped about 27%, and this is from the story, since 2020. The endowment is less than $20 million. Tuition fees has gone up, which you don't often see, and the total expenses increased about half what the tuition fees did. So They're doing all right. And they have decent graduation rates at 50% and 68%, respectively, in 4 and 6 years. And I'm going to have Justin St. George on a special This Week in College Viability podcast, I think it's next week sometime, just to talk about this because there's other things going on. So even in a college where their financials aren't alarming like many are, there are concerns. And I talked to Justin St. George. He has legitimate concerns. So I'll be sharing those next week. So the market is not just finances because, well, there are justifiable fears at Fresno Pacific. They're not the worst that I've seen. And just down the road, just down I-70 from me here in St. Louis, Stephens College promises a program. Stephens College Promise Program offers free tuition to qualifying students. And this is from Michelle Rene Quinn at KOMU 8. Reported this on December 5th, and we've seen this kind of story before. And what Stevens College is doing is they're counting on Pell Grants— Pell Grant dollars dropping to the bottom line. So the free offer is free tuition from the student's pocketbook, but the college almost certainly is accepting Pell Grants and will accept that Pell Grant as tuition payment. Now, there was Another note to this: remainder of the students paying most of the costs are coming from those families with incomes greater than $75,000. So the higher income families are subsidizing the lower income families. Make a business decision, either way is fine. But it's not free tuition. Stevens College is still accepting revenue, tuition revenue, from Pell Grants, from public funds. If we're going to be technical here, it's a loss leader. Just like you go into Walmart and get something cheap, so you go deeper into the store to buy something else. And the loss leader is subsidized tuition, and the subsidy is coming from Pell Grants. Others have done it, but guys, Michelle Renee Quinn asked these folks more detailed questions. It's not really free. If you want to have free, ask the good folks at Stevens College if the college will collect any revenue from the Stevens Promise program for these subsidized students, and boy, I hope they say yes. They'll collect the Pell Grants. And I don't disagree for a second. I don't disagree for one single second that there is value in offering a college education to those students who can't afford it. I do take issue with the superficial and misleading explanation by the college and even the underreporting by the local TV station. It's December 11th. Two weeks from today is Christmas. And in this holiday season, it's important to think about the colleges that have not survived and will not survive in the coming year and years. I would argue though that it's more important to think about the faculty and staff, students and families that will be negatively impacted by college closures this year in 2023. And inevitably the college closures in 2024. These closures will continue. I wish I could tell you how many. My gut tells me it will be more in 2024 than in 2023. I look at the finances all the time. I read the stories all the time. It's going to continue. And as I've shared before, a college degree is a really good thing to have. If you can go, go get the degree. But here's my qualification. There are many colleges who are financially sound, many colleges who are financially sound and can provide you with a quality college education. There are also too many colleges not so well off, and their finances and even their viability is in question. And they may or may not close, but here's the more important question: are these financially challenged colleges providing the same type of quality college education as their competitors, their financially healthy competitors, when these financially challenged ones are watching their last dollars circle the financial drain. Let's do this again on December 18th. This is Gary Stocker with This Week in College Viability. Best of the season to all.