Scholar looks at history of U.S. higher ed and finds that vulnerable colleges, most of them private, tend to close or merge when crisis pushes them “over the cliff.”
Tolstoy famously wrote that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
A new white paper suggests that the Tolstoy rule may not apply when it comes to at-risk small colleges: they’re all basically unhappy in the same way.
“Long-vulnerable” colleges tend to close or merge when a crisis pushes them “over the cliff,” writes Boston University political scientist Virginia Sapiro, who has studied the life cycles of colleges going back more than two centuries. Usually it’s debt that has become unsustainable to the institution or to its parent organization, such as a church or religious order.
Most colleges that fail are small, private and relatively nonselective, with “very particular or unusual missions” and graduation rates that are often as low as those at nonelite public universities, Sapiro said.
Practically speaking, high dependence on tuition — as high as 80 to 90 percent — is a good sign that an institution will not likely survive for long. “Tuition alone has never, that I know of, kept any college sustainable,” she said.