[C19fan]

A lot of these small liberal colleges are going to bite the bust. Not worth going into $200 K into debt to attend one of these places. There are places with cache attached to the name but places that are not high status like Sweet Briar are going to disappear.

[JimRed]

A women’s college is no place to earn that much sought after MRS degree! < /sarc >

[cuban leaf]

Yesterday on NPR there was a story about this:

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

Free MIT education. They said in the article it will kill some of the smaller universities. The times are a changin’. Brick and mortar universities are SOOOOOOO 20th century.

[Cowboy Bob]

Wow! Sweet Bush is closing. Very sad. Spent a lot of time there (as well as Hollins College, Mary Baldwin, Southern Seminary, and Randolph Macon Woman’s College) back in the day.

[Paladin2]

Peak tuition .

[DJ MacWoW]

Less Than 1.8K To Go
And The FReepathon Is Over

Please Donate!

[married21]

There are scads of small liberal arts colleges that turn out teachers, business majors and nurses, basically. They need to merge or something.

Or, they need to stop trying to compete with colleges that offer resort-league fitness centers and “cool” dorms and do a cut-rate, simple, plain-Jane educational plan with a cheap price.

Also, every girls college needs a corresponding boys college.

[Adder]

I’m surprised they do not try to become a straight on line college.

Within 20years, I am betting the vast majority of college ed will be on line only.

[Cry if I Wanna]

Small liberal arts colleges, with acres of sprawling lawns and dozens of old, high maintenance buildings with ivy covered walls are... OBSOLETE!! Many are being killed off by the quickly growing rise in online classes. The Internet has struck once again.

[Vigilanteman]

An $84 million endowment, officials said, was not enough to offset ebbing demand for their school in a tumultuous market.

Do the math. That works out to $120,000 per student. There are plenty of colleges delivering great educations for $15K per year or less, or about half the endowment per student ratio for four years.

This is a great list of where to start looking.

[IronJack]

I believe a small college could survive and even thrive if it dispensed with the fooforah and focused on high academic excellence. I know they all say they do, but with junk like Womens' Studies, Urban Planning, European Literature, and other useless options cluttering the curriculum, the useful stuff gets lost in the overhead.

Offer half a dozen relevant majors: hard sciences and/or engineering. Make them tough. Make them rigorous. Make the graduates highly prized and superb at what they're taught. Let the liberal arts wastelands pick up the slackers; appeal to the student who wants a real education and a real intellectual challenge.

You'd make it.

[CatherineofAragon]

My niece graduated from Sweet Briar last year. This news has shocked our area. No one knew they were having financial problems. Another local college, Randolph-Macon, had well-known money issues a few years ago. They went co-ed, which seemed to rectify the problem.

I can’t help but wonder what will come out later.

Regardless, now there will be 3200 acres of land and 115 year old buildings left deserted. They’ll probably be turned into welfare apartments.