Posted on 03/04/2015 7:22:32 AM PST by SeekAndFind
A women's liberal arts college in Virginia announced Tuesday that the spring 2015 semester would be its last — even though the school still has a $94 million endowment.
Sweet Briar College — located near Lynchburg, Virginia — will close "as a result of insurmountable financial challenges," the school said in a statement.
Sweet Briar administrators cited several trends that informed the decision to close, including the declining number of female students interested in all-women colleges and the dwindling number of students overall interested in small, rural liberal arts colleges.
Last year, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that small, private US colleges were in a "death spiral" in light of dropping enrollment rates. This decline comes amid competition from cheaper online colleges and community colleges, which are enticing to students in a job market that's weaker than it once was.
Several colleges similar to Sweet Briar have recently made changes to survive financially, according to Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed. But each choice has come with its own trade-offs.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
so what happens to the $94m bucks?
If they’d used it to reduce tuition to, say, nothing, they might have students.
The solution will be an absolute TIDAL WAVE of foreign student visas.
Their mistake was to try and teach engineering to women. The school had a highly respectable MRS program. It’s too bad they tried to distance themselves from it.
According to the article, they will use it to help the students find new colleges and the faculty find new jobs.
That's what I'd like to know. Certainly I hope they don't give it all away as exit bonuses to administrators and profs.
You'd think that they owe a certain obligation to current students who now have to find another location to finish their degrees and to the families that provided the endowment in the first place.
Nah, just change their base to the soon to minted Citizens from Mexico.
I suggest perhaps Spanish Language based classes like:
How to Apply for you EITC 101
Basic Foodstamps 101
Public Housing Opportunities 103
DACA 2013
The Obama Phone Craze
Chain Migration 201
Intro. to Saul Alinsky
How to become a Communist
Well, an Mrs. degree only has value if men and women want to get married. More and more they don't. Or, they get married so late that by the time they do the woman is an independent earner. And if she does just want a man, eHarmony is cheaper, faster, and she doesn't have to leave the city.
L_wy_rs
I'd like to buy a vowel please
This is a promising development.
These colleges need competition and it sounds like that’s just what they are getting.
They won’t lay off their superfluous admin staff and downsize their other spending ... they’d rather close.
$94 million ain't what it used to be.
The traffic in Va. has become so nightmarish that being stuck in some remote place with some sort of an ordeal on 81, 95, or 64 just to get home is probably out of the question to many students, particularly those living in Northern Va.
The Alumni are having hissy fits: a friend of mine’s sister is a Sweet Briar grad.
When I pointed out that higher education is severely overbuilt, and the bubble is popping, her comment was “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say it at all”.
I wasn’t aware that pointing out the economic realities of small, rural, private colleges was anything but factual.
But then, hey, Liberal Arts grads. . .
Data is anti-wymin
When they stop charging $50,000 for $5,000 worth of general information education they might stay in business. 4 years of extended high school is basically worthless. Liberal arts type “education” scould be scrapped and only courses which lead to professional type knowledge necessary for a career should be continued. Mgmt, law, medicine,aviation technology, economics,physics, political science, O.K.....womans studies, basket weaving,most social sciences, not so much...
Actually, as I recall, Data was fully functional and programmed with a large number of pleasuring techniques. . . . (grin)
Too bad Sweet Briar doesn’t change its focus to a technical women’s college, offering certificates/licensing towards plumbing, carpentry, electricians, etc.
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