Dive Brief:
- More small colleges are struggling to stay open in the current market — especially those with small endowments in suburban or rural areas that have seen declines in the college-going population.
- The Associated Press reports Dowling College, 60 miles east of New York City, is one of these schools where even though tuition has nearly doubled in the last decade, budget deficits put it at risk of closing and faculty and students are jumping ship in droves.
- While some schools like it are thriving, many are struggling to weather tough financial times without the philanthropic base or asset liquidity that larger schools often have, and Dowling is fighting to stay alive by negotiating a potential affiliation with another academic institution.
Dive Insight:
Moody’s Investors Service upgraded the outlook for the higher education sector, overall, in 2015, increasing it from negative to stable for the first time in two years. But with its change came a caveat: that regional public universities and small private colleges will continue to struggle. Moody’s expects the number of closures and mergers in higher ed to triple and double, respectively, by 2017. In the decade from 2004 to 2014, about five four-year nonprofit public or private colleges closed each year and two to three of them merged.
Arkansas, long a bastion for independent public colleges, is looking at two potential mergers of community colleges into the state system. And in Georgia, which has embraced mergers since Chancellor Hank Huckaby took over in 2011, nearly a dozen schools have decided a path forward together is better than no future at all.