The issue of college closures has gotten a lot of attention in recent years, as evidenced by this recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece summarizing the growing field of researchers and organizations trying to identify colleges at risk of closure. I am one of those people, as I am working on a paper on this topic that I hope to release in the spring.
In doing my research for the paper, I stumbled upon a piece that I wrote for the Chronicle back in 2015 and completely forgot about. (The joys of writing short pieces and blog posts…sometimes I forget what I wrote about several years ago!) In that piece, titled “Where 3 Accountability Measures Meet, A Hazardous Intersection,” I used a brand-new data source from the U.S. Department of Education combined with two other existing measures to identify private nonprofit and for-profit colleges that may be at high risk of closing. The metrics were the following:
(1) Whether the college was on Heightened Cash Monitoring in the first-ever public data release in April 2015.