Posted on 03/04/2015 6:59:59 AM PST by C19fan
For more than a century, Sweet Briar College has offered women a liberal arts education in a pastoral setting near Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Equestrian programs, a tight-knit residential community and, lately, an engineering science degree, have been its hallmarks.
On Tuesday, the college’s leadership abruptly announced its closure to stunned and tearful audiences of faculty and students. Officials cited “insurmountable financial challenges,” saying the 700-student college, founded in 1901, would shut down permanently in August. An $84 million endowment, officials said, was not enough to offset ebbing demand for their school in a tumultuous market.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
A women’s college is no place to earn that much sought after MRS degree! < /sarc >
Yesterday on NPR there was a story about this:
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.
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.
Peak tuition .
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.
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.
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.
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.
There was a women’s college in Fredrick, MD as well. I forgot the name, but it was commonly referred to as the “Navy school of wives”.
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.
Not to get personal but are you a man, and were you searching for students from these women’s colleges??? Sounds like you made the rounds.........
MIT OpenCourseWare has been around for a decade.
There is also coursera.org.
But, yes, this is hopefully the future - even to public primary and secondary education.
Yep, I’ve been sending people to Kahnacademy.org and mit for a very long time.
But it looks like they may be starting to hit critical mass.
With coursera, you can earn a certificate of completion - about $50 per course or so.
And recently they have even offered a series of courses to show competence in a field - kind of like a degree.
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.
Yep. Someone should buy it and turn it into a business/IT school. Nothing but computer code and accounting.
I also have a niece who graduated from Sweet Briar and it is a real shame to see this school close down.
Back then, W&L and VMI were all male. We were surrounded by 5 all female schools. Life was good...
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