More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing, new projection shows
Jon Marcus for The Hechinger Report
More than a dozen newborn lambs cavorted around a fenced-in yard beneath the scrutiny of their mothers and a few watchful students taking turns attending to them.
The lambs’ successful births have been a needed bright spot at tiny Sterling College, which uses a 130-acre farm to teach agriculture and other disciplines in a part of northeastern Vermont so isolated it’s rare to see a passing car, and there’s no cell service.
LillyAnne Keeley, a senior, likes that remoteness. “We have a beautiful view,” said Keeley, in the barn where she’s come for her turn checking on the lambs. “There are beautiful sunsets here. I kind of take it for granted every day.”
She and her classmates have started taking such experiences less for granted now, since Sterling has announced that it will close at the end of this semester.
They’re not the last students who will suffer such disruption, notes The Hechinger Report. A new estimate projects that 442 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities, with a combined 670,000 students, are at risk of closing or merging within the next 10 years.
More than 120 institutions are at the very highest risk, according to the forecast by Huron Consulting Group, which analyzed enrollment trends, tuition revenue, assets, debt, cash on hand and other measures. Many are, like Sterling, small and rural.
“Now that this might be gone, I just really worry about some students out there that are going to have less and less choices,” Keeley said.
It’s a crisis whose magnitude has been shrouded by political and culture-war attacks on higher education and is propelled by the simple law of supply and demand after a long decline in the number of Americans who are going to college.
“We have too many seats. We have too many classrooms,” said Peter Stokes, a managing director at Huron. “So over the coming five to 10 years, this shakeout is going to take place.”
Sterling — the seventh private college in Vermont to close since 2016 — offers a rare glimpse into the human impact of this trend. That’s because it gave students a final semester to stay and complete their degrees or transfer, rather than locking the doors with hardly any notice, as many other colleges have done.
Fewer than half of students at colleges that close continue their educations, according to the most comprehensive study of the issue, produced by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, or SHEEO. Of those who do, many lose credits they’ve already earned and paid for, and fewer than half eventually earn degrees.
Twenty-year-old Izzy Johnson has already been buffeted by this. The college he originally wanted to attend closed the month before he graduated from high school. So he enrolled in the fall at Sterling — only to learn that it would also close.
“Having to pick up everything and find a new place to settle down is really miserable,” said Johnson, who is weighing where to go next.
Started in 1958 as a prep school for boys, the remote rural college was never very large. Its enrollment peaked at 120 and fell to about 40 students this year, spread around a few white clapboard buildings indistinguishable from the houses of the surrounding farm town of about 1,300 people.
Those numbers weren’t sustainable, even at a work college whose students pitch in on the farm and in the dorms and kitchen, said the president, Scott Thomas. Though financial documents show Sterling had been breaking even, margins were thin.Â