Last month, the Board of Directors of Sweet Briar College made the decision to close the school. The Board identified two major factors in its decision: the “insurmountable financial challenges and years of intractable admissions problems” (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 3, 2015); and the decision to close was made in spite of the fact that the college has an $84 million dollar endowment. The college will officially close August 25, 2015 leaving approximately 300 faculty and staff without jobs. Sweet Briar is a small liberal arts, all-woman’s college.
A closer look at the problems facing Sweet Briar reveals that students today are less inclined to attend a small, rural liberal arts college and more specifically, women are not choosing to attend same sex colleges. This is evidenced by the fact that the college currently has 523 students, yet their target was 800. In 2013, the college had a $23 million deficit in its budget. Some experts suggest that this is not out of the ordinary for similar colleges relative to its total assets. However, a perplexing issue was the loss of approximately $4 million of income in 2013 on its investments compared to the previous year (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 5, 2015).
Additionally, the college’s discount rate (the amount of money the college offers in scholarships and other financial aid to enroll students) is at 62%, up from 42% in 2009, which was simply not sustainable according to the Board. The current cost of attending Sweet Briar, which includes tuition, fees, and room and board, is $47,000, according to the college’s website (http://sbc.edu/catalog/college-fees-2014-15).
In an attempt to save the college, the members of the Board examined several options such as admitting men, merging with other similar colleges, and overhauling its current educational programs. The Board members even considered spending part of the college’s endowment; however, as with most gifts to colleges, they come with restrictions. Of the $84 million in the college endowment, $56 million came with restrictions by the donors for a specific use. Moreover, the Board concluded that admitting men, which some of the other all-female colleges had done to survive, would require large amounts of time and money, which Sweet Briar did not have.
On the heels of the Sweet Briar College closure comes a new book published on March 3, 2015 entitled The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere, by Kevin Carey (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 30, 2015). The premise of the book is that higher education as we know it today will cease to exist, except for a small handful of institutions of about 15 to 50. Today’s college will be replaced by free massive open on-line courses, or MOOCs, and the new wave of badging also known as micro-credentials.
Carey believes that a student will no long have to spend four to five or six years and thousands of dollars to receive a bachelor’s degree. Instead, a student can now take a MOOC on the internet at an accredited university free of charge and an organization will soon appear that will certify the learning that has been achieved in the course. Provided for free or at a very low cost, the certification or badges, as Carey suggests, will verify the equivalent education and training that one currently receives in a bachelor’s program. There you have it…., the end of higher education.
I would suggest that it is not quite that simple. A system such as higher education, which has been in place for approximately 1,500 years, will not come to a screeching halt that quickly. You have to keep in mind the students go to college not just to take courses and receive a degrees. Students also go to college to experience all of the extra-curricular activities such as sports, student government, student clubs, fraternities and sororities, living away from home, and a host of other out-of-classroom experiences. These experiences cannot be provided by the MOOCs.
Moreover, one of the major problems in higher education today is the high dropout rates and the low graduation rates among students. The national average for freshman to sophomore retention, also known as third semester rate, is 67.6% for all institutions of higher education, according to the American Colleges Testing Service (http://www.act.org/research/policymakers/pdf/retain_2014.pdf). One other important data point to consider is the completion or graduation rates. The national average for all institutions is 59% in six years, according to data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics. This means that colleges and universities graduate slightly over half of the students they admit during a period of six year (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cva.asp).
A study conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education analyzed the movement of a million users enrolled in MOOCs through sixteen courses offered by the university during a one year period. The researchers wanted to identify key transition points for users, such as when users entered and left courses, as well as when and how users participated in the courses. The study also considered how engagement and persistence varied based on various course characteristics.
The results of the study suggest that MOOCs have relatively few active users, that user “engagement” falls off dramatically, especially after the first two weeks of a course, and that few users persist to the end of the course. Specifically, on average, 4% of the users completed the courses and completions rates ranged from 2% to 14% depending on the course. No surprisingly, courses with lower workloads and fewer homework assignments had slightly higher course completion rates. Another interesting finding was that on average, only half of those who registered for the courses even watch the first lecture. The course with the largest enrollment had 110,000 students and the smallest had 13,000 students. Students came from countries such as the United States, India, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Russia, Spain, China, Germany, and Australia.
MOOCs are here to stay and I predict we will continue to see an increase in the use of MOOCs; however, they will not replace colleges and universities and certainly will not shut down our current system of higher education. MOOCs will certainly create more competition among colleges and universities, but this will not be the cure for the problems that exist in American higher education today.
Twenty-one colleges closed their doors in 2013, the most recent data available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_317.50.asp?current=yes). Will we see more colleges close in the coming years? I believe we will. Just last week Harrington College of Design announced it will close its doors in 2018 for the same reasons: enrollment and revenue declines (http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/harrington-college-of-design-will-close?cid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en). Harrington College is a small for-profit institution with an enrollment for 350 students.
Will we see the end of colleges and universities as we know them today? Not in my lifetime. However, college administrators must begin to make a paradigm shift to meet the demands of the new learner, today’s college student. Colleges must lower their costs, be more efficient and cost effective. They must do a better job of managing their endowments. A college cannot lose $4 million of income from investing its endowment and remain in business. Colleges cannot continue to do business as usual or they will not survive; case in point Sweet Briar College. Otherwise students will vote with their feet and we will see more colleges close its doors.
