Comments on: Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week. What happens to the students?

By: Tena Hogan

Tena Hogan — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 19:30:29 +0000

No doubt this sentiment will sound callous, in the wake of these students grief & loss. But what happens to the community that has surrounded & built up around a college? And then too the vacant sprawling campus buildings, when so many people go without affordable housing, or unhoused entirely. It is a much larger systemic issue for us all…

By: John Reinemann

John Reinemann — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 17:00:13 +0000

In Wisconsin we have a state-designated entity that becomes the repository for transcripts of work done at shuttered colleges and universities. Some (very few) institutions’ records ended up at a different repository but there is also a state office who maintains a master list of where every college’s records are. That seems to me to be a step some other states may want to take. We’ll see more of this going forward, I am sure, although a certain number of potential closures will of course end up as mergers.

By: thomas lee

thomas lee — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 11:17:41 +0000

I must admit that having read this article as a retired college professor, my first reaction was to worry about the survival of colleges as institutions, along with their faculty. Now I am more concerned about the students who are being abandoned. There is certainly enough brain power in these institutions to foresee their financial future – adequate warnings need to be given to students, along with financial accommodations. Of course, this is all part of a broader crisis that I have seen coming for years – is the private college a sustainable model? I think not. It seems to me that one possibility, or perhaps necessity, is that colleges will need to move from a four year (expensive) residential requirement to a system that requires a one or two year campus residency with the rest becoming an online curriculum. Of course, that begs the question of maintaining faculty quality, given the vicious circle of fewer tenured positions available, leading to diminishing numbers of grad students. We are coming out of the “good old days” of college life to a very new and in many ways, a problematic future.