June 28, 2007

 

More colleges closing their doors

By Virgil Hervey

As Antioch College students, faculty, and alumni face the prospect of their school’s closure at the end of the next academic year, they might be prompted to wonder just how unusual an occurrence this is and what can be learned from those who have gone through it.

Two weeks ago, the Antioch University Board of Trustees announced that the college would suspend operations in July 2008. The board said it hopes to reopen in 2012 with a “state of the art” campus.

Some Antioch University administrators have identified Vermont’s Goddard College as an example of a college that closed its doors and then reopened. However, while Goddard did close its residential college in June 2002, after 64 years of operation and 20 years of financial struggle, the residential college has remained closed, having cut loose its 120 students and 12 faculty members, according to an Aug. 1, 2003 edition of Vermont Business Magazine. There are no plans to reopen.

One that didn’t close
Tiny Shimer College flourishes today in Chicago on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology. But in the early 70s the college suffered from the same problems that Antioch College now faces, declining enrollment and financial -instability.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving in 1973, the Shimer Board of Trustees notified its 230 students and 35 faculty members that the school was filing for bankruptcy and would be closing on Dec. 31, according to an Oct. 31, 1975 article in the Chicago Tribune.

The day after the announcement the students and faculty met and vowed not to let the school die. They hired an attorney, sued to hold-up the bankruptcy and stop the board from closing the school, and took over its operation, according to the Tribune article. Students each paid $200 in advance on their next year’s tuition, and professors worked for reduced pay. The students, faculty, alumni, and 2,100 residents of Rockford, Ill., where the school was located, then set about raising enough money to keep Shimer going.

On Oct. 29, 1975, according to the -Trib-une, the school officially resumed normal financial operations. Three years later it accepted an invitation from the mayor of Waukegan, Ill., to move to that city, thus ridding itself of a larger, financially burdensome campus and becoming more accessible to a larger population. Last year, the college moved again, to the even larger population center of Chicago.

Local residents Mike and Thad Triplett attended Shimer in Rockford during the hard times while it was getting back on its feet, just prior to the move to Waukegan.

“When the Shimer trustees announced they were going to close the school, the students and faculty took over the operation of the school and fired the board,” Mike Triplett said. “Thirty years later, it’s still going.”

What continued at Goddard was a program, which had already begun, of intensive residencies for students who sought bachelor’s of arts, bachelor’s of fine arts, master’s of arts or master’s of fine arts degrees. The program required student attendance on either of two campuses for nine days out of every six months, and the remainder of the time students work independently.

In the article, former Goddard faculty member Dan Chodorkoff, who lost his teaching job after 29 years, stated, “The resident program was seen as inefficient, and the board and administration was hostile to the faculty, who had a contentious relationship for the previous 10 years. We had one vision of the college we felt was true to the college’s mission, the board had a different vision and wanted the college to go in a different direction.”

It is becoming more common for colleges to close, according to Rick Schneider, a graduate of Nasson College in Maine, which closed its doors in 1983 after 100 years of operation. Since then, Schneider has started “Closed College Consortium,” a Web site which tracks closings.

Declining enrollment in a school that is relying on tuition to pay the bills is the most common factor for schools on the verge of closing, according to Schneider. Usually, that problem is exacerbated by bad decisions by the schools’ governing board when trying to remedy the situation, he said.

For instance, in Nasson’s case, in the mid-60s the college started a separate innovative program that brought a small group of a different kind of student to the campus. The experiment failed after only three years, during which it caused a great deal of divisiveness at the school. None of the new students took up the school’s offer to remain on campus and take the more traditional course of study. Ironically, many of them transferred to Antioch. The borrowing to build new dorms, combined with the ensuing decline in enrollment, started a downward spiral from which Nasson never recovered, according to Schneider.

Another who is gaining expertise in the field of closing colleges is Ray Brown, director of institutional research at Westminster College in Missouri. He became interested in colleges that were closing a few years ago, when he worked for a consortium of small colleges in Kansas, he said in a recent interview. According to Brown, he has spent his professional life working with small colleges that are tuition dependent.

Brown started a list of colleges that have closed, changed their name, or merged, after he discovered that Schneider’s list was the only such effort on the Internet. He knew there were a lot more than appeared on the CCC list, he said. Brown’s list contains hundreds of names of colleges that have closed outright.

According to Brown, Tarkio College, a successful Presbyterian College in Missouri, had a history just prior to closing that is remarkably similar to Antioch’s.

“They borrowed money for new facilities and operated separate sites around the country, gambles that not only didn’t pay off in the way people hoped, but surprised well-meaning supporters when they realized how big a hole had been dug,” he said. “Philips University in Oklahoma has a similar story of accumulating debt for facilities with part of the institution thriving at a different location.”

Tarkio closed in 1992 after 100 years of operation.

Kristen Hollenbeck contacted Schneider through the CCC Web site. She was working in the Office of Alumni Affairs at Bradford College in Massachusetts in 2000, when that college announced that it would be going out of business just three years short of its 200th anniversary. Heeding his advice to “get organized now,” she is now the executive director of the Bradford Alumni Association, Inc., which has been going strong for seven years.

Bradford had been relying heavily on tuition-paying foreign students to pay the bills and help fund scholarships for American students. A downturn in the market for foreign students at the end of the 90’s saw a marked decrease in enrollment. The board decided to build a new dormitory to attract more students, but the new students never came and Bradford was in a hole, Hollenbeck said.

According to Hollenbeck, the alumni have raised a half-million dollars, hold 20 events a year, publish a newsletter, and maintain an annual scholarship fund for students who will carry on the Bradford name and live up to its motto, “I rise to serve.”

When asked how an established institution such as Bradford could go out of business Hollenbeck said, “When you have a 200-year-old college with an endowment of less than $25 million, you know you are in trouble. If you look at the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s list of colleges by endowment, I bet you can predict where they are going.”

According to a 2006 study by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), Antioch University ranked 565th out of 765 colleges and universities with an endowment of just over $36 million. More recently, that figure has been put at $30 million.

In many cases when schools get in trouble, they start borrowing against their endowments to meet operating expenses. According to Hollenbeck, 25 colleges in New England alone went out of business over the 10-ear period ending in 2005.

Schneider’s advice to the Antioch alumni, in case the school continues with its plans to close, is to do what the Bradford alumni did; get copies of the databases, the archives and historical records, the academic records for all those who ever attended, and the alumni and faculty records. And get started early.

Mary Jane Lavoie, who was the registrar at Bradford when the closing was announced, is someone who has been personally impacted by the problem three times.

“I’m probably the only person in the U.S. who can say that I was the registrar at three different colleges that closed!” she said in a recent interview.

Lavoie is now pursuing a doctoral degree in higher education administration.

“I expect to begin my dissertation a year from now, and I plan to focus on comparing and contrasting small private colleges that closed with small private colleges that struggled financially, but were able to turn themselves around,” she said. “When my Ph.D. is completed, I hope to become a consultant to help small financially struggling colleges avoid closure.”

For those who are willing to fight to save their alma mater, help may be on the way.

Contact: vhervey@ysnews.com

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