What the Looming Higher-Ed Shakeout Means for Small College Towns

Sweet Briar College, affectionately known in my college days as “Sweets”

Two years after alumni rallied to save Sweet Briar College, raised millions of dollars and installed a new president, the small, liberal arts college north of Lynchburg still is in peril. The college admitted only 81 freshmen into its fall class — well below the 200 officials previously had estimated the institution needed to remain financially viable.

President Meredith Woo said spending came in significantly under budget last year, and the college can afford smaller class sizes. But the college is surviving on donor dollars, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Perhaps Sweet Briar will be able to reinvent itself as a smaller, niche institution. While few have come as close to the edge of disaster as Sweet Briar, dozens of other small liberal arts colleges are facing similar dilemmas.

According to the Journal, more than one-third of colleges with fewer than 3,000 full-time students had operating deficits in fiscal 2016, up from 20% in fiscal 2013. Likewise, finance chiefs of private, nonprofit colleges are increasingly pessimistic — only 51% indicated in a poll that their institutions will be financially or sustainable over the next five years, down from 65% the previous year.

Restructuring is rampant. Aquinas College in Nashville, Tenn., is dropping business and nursing programs, and eliminating residential living, to focus on training Catholic school teachers. Margrove College in Detroit is discontinuing undergraduate programs to concentrate on its graduate students. Wheelock University  in Boston has put its president’s house and a residence hall up for sale and has entered merger talks with Boston University.

Virginia has two dozen small, private, non-profit colleges, many located in small cities and towns. In many cases, they form the backbone of the local economy. As if rural/small town Virginia didn’t have enough other economic worries, non-metro Virginia could be experiencing the erosion of one of the few economic pillars it has left.

A handful of these institutions look rock solid — Washington & Lee University, the University of Richmond, and Liberty University have large and growing endowments, and have no trouble recruiting students. I don’t know enough about the others to draw any conclusions about their fiscal health, but it would behoove those interested in the well being of their communities to take a close look and make sure their local college isn’t about to become the next St. Paul’s College (now defunct) or Sweet Briar.

For readers’ edification, here are the private, non-profit schools in Virginia:

Appalachian School of Law — Grundy
Averett University — Danville
Bluefield College — Bluefield
Bridgewater College — Bridgewater
Christendom College — Front Royal
Eastern Mennonite University — Harrisonburg
Emory and Henry College — Damascus
Ferrum College — Ferrum
Hampden-Sydney College — Farmville
Hampton University — Hampton
Hollins University — Roanoke
Liberty University — Lynchburg
Lynchburg College — Lynchburg
Mary Baldwin University — Staunton
Marymount University — Arlington
Randolph-Macon College — Ashland
Randolph College — Lynchburg
Regent University — Virginia Beach
Roanoke College — Salem
Shenandoah University — Winchester
Sweet Briar College — Amherst
Union Presbyterian Seminary — Richmond
University of Richmond — Richmond
Virginia Union University — Richmond
Virginia Wesleyan University — Virginia Beach
Washington & Lee University — Lexington