More Colleges Set To Close in 2025, Even as 'Ivy Plus' Schools Experience Application Boom (cnbc.com) 71
Many colleges are under financial pressure, and the cracks are starting to show. From a report: At least 20 colleges closed in 2024, and more are set to shut down after the current academic year, according to the latest tally by Implan, an economic software and analysis company. Altogether, more than 40 colleges have closed since 2020, according to a separate report by Best Colleges.
As the sticker price at some private colleges nears six figures a year, students have increasingly opted for less expensive public schools or alternatives to a four-year degree altogether, such as trade programs or apprenticeships. At the same time, the population of college-age students is also shrinking, a trend referred to as the "enrollment cliff."
As the sticker price at some private colleges nears six figures a year, students have increasingly opted for less expensive public schools or alternatives to a four-year degree altogether, such as trade programs or apprenticeships. At the same time, the population of college-age students is also shrinking, a trend referred to as the "enrollment cliff."
The rich get bitchier. (Score:3)
"Though opinions on which schools should be considered Ivy Plus vary, the group generally includes the eight private colleges that comprise the Ivy League — Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale — plus the University of Chicago, Duke, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford."
My word! More like Ivy Minus, eh, old bean. [snifts brandy]
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The problem is the "Ivy League" is just a sports conference. Few people are seriously going to argue that Brown or Cornell is more Prestigeous than Stanford or MIT, but Stanford and MIT weren't in that old East Coast sports conference to they can't be "Ivy League." All of the Ivy League members are generally regarded as nationally prestigious while there's endless arguments over the relative prestige the Duke and U.Chicago level schools.
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Literally all I know about Duke is the meme "Duke sucks". That's not great branding, no matter how stupid and uncontrollable it may be.
Re: The rich get bitchier. (Score:2, Funny)
I once read something about their Lacrosse team - as I recall some of the boys on the team were contributing to a young lady's college fund...
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Re:The rich get bitchier. (Score:4, Interesting)
Looks like the 2024 list of "omg these colleges closed" were all predatory, barely-accredited for-profit crap that never should have existed to begin with.
Nope. Lots of long-established, non-profit, brick and mortar schools [hechingerreport.org] like Birmingham-Southern, the College of St. Rose, Lincoln Christian, Goddard College, and on and on. Some have religious origins, some were founded by philanthropists, some are the results of the mergers of earlier colleges, but they all have one thing in common: they're small. They simply don't have the resources to compete in an age of declining demographics, especially with younger men choosing to abandon college altogether, and super-wealthy private schools (Harvard's endowment is now more than 50 billion) or state schools that are subsidized by taxation.
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Nobody is putting Duke at that level, just look at the admission rates.
I detest rating school by their acceptance rate (or "selectivity").
The way for a school to increase their "selectivity" score is to encourage unqualified people to apply, students who have no chance of being accepted. This wastes everybody's time (and money), but ratchets the school up in those all-important "Best Universities in the US" lists.
Stop doing this.
And if you want to know why schools are closing, just look at the population growth rate. Peak of the baby-boom, growth was 1.92% per year. Current, 0
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Those rankings also look at grades and test scores, so you can't go up in rankings *purely* by getting unqualified people to apply. Otherwise, you'd see colleges handing out free applications at homeless encampments.
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Those rankings also look at grades and test scores, so you can't go up in rankings *purely* by getting unqualified people to apply.
No, but it is one factor, and a factor relatively easy to game. And the schools know it.
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I detest rating school by their acceptance rate (or "selectivity").
Agreed. It's like rating a restaurant by counting how many people are too fat to fit through the front door.
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All of the Ivy League members are generally regarded as nationally prestigious while there's endless arguments over the relative prestige the Duke and U.Chicago level schools.
The preeminent principle is that people need to make themselves feel superior by finding someone to look down on. The Ivies look down on the non-Ivies, while Harvard and Yale look down on the other Ivies. Meanwhile, MIT and Stanford techies look down on all the Ivies.
Limits to inelastic demand discovered (Score:4, Insightful)
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" I mean, a lot of classes don't even have textbooks anymore."
I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. Very few of my college/graduate classes used textbooks, but that doesn't mean they weren't rigorous. STEM classes had problem sets and other materials prepared by the professor. Humanities classes mostly used primary sources.
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Re:Limits to inelastic demand discovered (Score:5, Informative)
The benefit of college has always been mostly intangible, and even more so in the information age. There's nothing you can't learn in college that isn't available to learn on your own on the internet. What you are really paying for is for an institution to certify what you've learned, and secondarily for the association with the other students learning with you (which at elite schools are more likely to be either social or intellectual elites).
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Disagree on the "intangible" statement since you literally end by mentioning the tangible, real world interactions with "social or intellectual elites". I mean, that IS worth money. Connections can be huge if you also have the skill and again, tangible certifications those connections accept, as you mentioned. From just a money perspective there's tons of data on placement rates out of college, their associated salary ranges and you just compare that info to tuition. It's a simple cost/benefit thing I'm sho
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Ivy-plus institutions like University of Chicago ("where fun goes to die"), MIT, or Stanford offer tremendous educational opportunities to students. But yes, they also open doors to new graduates that wouldn't necessarily be equally open to graduates of less prestigious schools who maybe got just as much out of their programs, but I wouldn't consider that a *lifetime* of unearned privilege.
Ivy league institutions are really interesting in that regard. They serve the socially and economically elite, plus
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Ivy-plus institutions like University of Chicago ("where fun goes to die"), MIT, or Stanford offer tremendous educational opportunities to students. But yes, they also open doors to new graduates that wouldn't necessarily be equally open to graduates of less prestigious schools who maybe got just as much out of their programs, but I wouldn't consider that a *lifetime* of unearned privilege.
I would. The doors that are opened at the beginning of your career lay the foundation for the rest of your career. Get a better job at the beginning, and you end up saving more every year from them on, and when you invest those savings, they grow. The end result is being able to buy a home sooner while prices are lower, which results in saving even more money compared with someone who bought in later, which means you can retire earlier and have more money to spend in retirement.
Small differences in the i
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Small differences in the income from your first job and in how you manage the money from that first job can literally mean the difference between being able to retire at 45 and 65.
Assuming your goal in life is to retire.
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Small differences in the income from your first job and in how you manage the money from that first job can literally mean the difference between being able to retire at 45 and 65.
Assuming your goal in life is to retire.
As opposed to what, dying on the job because you can't afford to do so? Most people do eventually plan to retire. :-)
Having enough money to retire doesn't mean you have to do so. It just means you can. It also means you can fight for your coworkers when your CEO is being an a**hole without worrying about getting fired. It means you can quit your job and work at a startup without worrying about the company going under. It means you can try a new career without worrying about money. It means you can tak
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They serve the socially and economically elite, plus an entirely separate classes of intellectually elite students.
No one goes to Harvard and Yale just to get an education. They appeal to personally ambitious students who want to become part of the socially and economically elite. Part of the point of legacy admissions is to maintain that selling point.
It works amazingly well to create an impenetrable network of influence. The 2020 presidential election was the first one since 1968 where neither national ticket included at least one person from Harvard and Yale. In the last 50 years there have been only two people appoi
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Elite schools provide more access to pioneers in your field of study. With a grain of salt, though. I've met many people who went to these schools that didn't take advantage of that opportunity. And even though the class sizes are typically larger at a state college, you can still get access to some great professors if you make an effort to stand out.
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Re: Limits to inelastic demand discovered (Score:2)
I went to one of those fancy schools, and here I am almost 20 years later still having to work so I can pay my bills with my own money. Ditto for the wife.
Were we just the two suckers too busy studying for exams the day they sent out the notice to collect our tickets to lifetime unearned privilege?
So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are about 6000 colleges in the US. 20 closing is nothing. All that means is 20 schools were so poorly run they couldn't manage to thrive in a business where they can almost print their own money.
In any large group of colleges, businesses, sports teams, game studios or anything else serving the public, if you have 6000 of them and 20 fail... so what? Life provides no guarantees of wealth and success to anyone.
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This would be more useful if they specified which ones were shutting down. I'm assuming they're not counting the regional state schools which have been merging together and then closing the regional campuses.
Sounds more like a "market correction" than anything else.
Re: So what? (Score:1)
How many of those 'close to failing' colleges will be kept operating when 'asylum seekers' start taking state and federal grant (not loan) money and start enrolling in them?
Student loans should be merit-based, and should focus on supporting students studying valuable/needed skills, it shouldn't be an open checkbook funding any degree a student desires irregardless of their academic ability.
Saddling a student with $100,000-150,000 in student loan debt so they can get a PHd in French Literature is bad for eve
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How many of those 'close to failing' colleges will be kept operating when 'asylum seekers' start taking state and federal grant (not loan) money and start enrolling in them?
Zero, because that's not a thing. It's super hard for US citizen students to get grants (way too easy to get loans, as you mention), and virtually impossible for international students to do so. Source: just sent two US kids to college, and work at a university so I actually get to see what really happens.
be careful, just because there's an orange guy out there that will say any version of the madlibs "migrants {get|do|cause} {thing}" doesn't make it even remotely true. It's literally just madlibs to fil
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Yep. A lot of people have lofty ideals about education for education's sake, but realistically liberal arts degrees are a luxury of the rich. We need a very small number of them to serve as teachers for the subjects, but for most people college is a matter of making yourself a potentially more valuable employee and contributing member of society. Obviously STEM is good, but outside of that we also need people with degrees in business, law, finance, etc.
If you want to study something obscure for self-enri
Re: So what? (Score:2)
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The alternative to our current system is a European system which, while students generally attend for free, you have to test your way in and you have very limited choice in what to study. Pursuit of happiness is the hallmark of liberty in the U.S., and if someone wants to, with consent and full awareness of what it means for their future life, invest six figures in studying the writings of dead French authors,
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A link in the article lists the schools and their reasons for closure:
https://www.bestcolleges.com/r... [bestcolleges.com]
On behalf of the average /. reader (myself included), I applaud you for reading the original article better than me!
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Sounds more like a "market correction" than anything else.
Good. We have had too many (profiteering) colleges pushing unnecessary degrees on people for too long. Not everyone needs a college degree. We have made college just a continuation of high-school. People go to college because it is expected of them, or because their is a social stigma about not going to college.
A college education can be a useful thing, but so can trade school. Many successful people are self-taught and succeeded in their chosen field without formal training. Much can be learned via b
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are about 6000 colleges in the US. 20 closing is nothing. All that means is 20 schools were so poorly run they couldn't manage to thrive in a business where they can almost print their own money.
The actual number of colleges closed in the last 18 months is over 100. And its an accelerating trend. And most are small, independent colleges. Money is money, but it'll be a shame to see some of them go. A lot of these places were schools where you could still get that old-fashioned type of college experience, i.e. a reasonable class size with a full professor that actually discussed things in-depth with undergraduates. In most larger schools these days, at the freshman and sophomore levels, you're crammed into a class 75-100 full, with a graduate assistant using a PowerPoint to regurgitate pre-digested stuff that you could get from the book on your own. If you're at an Ivy, you're paying a premium for that as well.
There are going to be three types of schools that survive in the 4 year school market:
1 - Ivy + schools (I'd add Vanderbilt, Rice, Georgetown, and a couple of others to this list)
2 - Private Northeastern Off-Ivy schools with deep pocketed donors ( Places like Ithaca, Rensselaer, Syracuse, etc) and pockets of similar rich private schools elsewhere (Texas Christian, Reed College, and the like)
3 - State supported schools, especially the big ones. Even the smaller directional schools are safe because once a state supported college is established, it's nearly impossible to kill it politically
The rest are probably doomed from one degree to another, especially a lot of the smaller Catholic schools established by specific orders
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Geaux Tigers!!
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you are a raging fucking moron.
Re: It's just diploma mills (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow,
Rarely are /. Comments so 'spot-on'!
The last crackdown I heard of went after for-profit colleges, where the gov't made up standards that only applied to 'for profit' schools.
Previously, the gov't went out and shutdown trade schools, where people were learning things like welding, secretarial skills, cosmetology, mainframe programming, and other trades that required training but not necessarily a four year college degree. Again, they made up standards, only applied them to certain schools, and shut them down.
Why don't they impose the same standards on ALL schools that accept federal student loans?
There are a lot of schools that are little more than 4 year playgrounds where a significant percentage of graduates struggle to find a job after graduation and before the loan payments are due...
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The schools that got shut down were straight-up scams (and in most cases, it was just federal student loan funding that was cut off- the government didn't say they couldn't operate on their own dime). Welding schools are all well and good if they actually teach welding... but there were scammers who would market a welding school, take student loans, and then not actually teach (or not teach enough for anybody to actually get a job doing it).
The schools that really suffer from job placement and loan delinque
The standards applied to every school (Score:1)
The government didn't shut down any trade schools that could place kids in jobs. They shut down crap like ITT tech and the "University" of Phoenix.
Go look up public University's "Degrees Awarded By Major". It's public info and carefully tracked. 80% of the degrees are law, STEM & medical. Another 18% or so are for public school teachers. There's a tiny, *tiny* number of degrees in stuff like wom
Demographics (Score:3)
If you look at the population pyramid of the U.S., you'll see that there are far fewer people of age to enter college today than there were just a few years ago. That decline is set to continue as there are even fewer children elementary age bracket than current high-school age, and fewer babies/preschoolers than elementary age children. So even if college attendance rates stay the same or modestly increase, the total number of college students will continue decline over at least the next two decades. The current educational landscape is simply designed to serve a larger population of college-age people than exist.
The colleges that hit hardest will of course be expensive colleges that aren't selective- they won't be able to fill a full class at anywhere close to full price. They have less of a job pipeline/name recognition than a state school that can operate cheaper due to public funding. Flagship state schools and "Ivy Plus" schools will always have a market.
Re:Demographics (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual number of people applying to college has actually increased dramatically since 1970s, although it's dropped of slightly in the past five years.
If you look at US demographics [wikimedia.org], there is a minima around age 50 -- people who would have applied in the early 1990s. This corresponds to a decline in applicant age people in the 1990s, but then we see each age cadre increasing in size for the next fifteen or twenty years before stabilizing. On top of that you had increased *high school* graduation rates, and an increase in the percent of eligible students who apply to college. So overall up until about five years ago the size of the applicant pool was increasing, but small colleges and universities have been failing at a high rate for over twenty years.
So the idea that small institutions are failing because the demand for higher education has collapsed doesn't stand up to examination. I don't think we can simplify this trend to one thing, but perhaps we can to *two*: the rising cost of delivering higher education, and a shift in market preferences from quirky small institutions in the 1970s to something more like big box store higher education with more conventional branding. Those two trends arise in turn from many other trends, but total market demand hasn't played a part in the failure of colleges *yet*.
But it soon will. Take a look at the demographic pyramid I linked to. What you see is a catastrophic reduction in fertility rate from 2.05 live birth/woman (roughly replacement, which is 2.1) down to just 1.6. Starting about three years from now there will be a rapid and steady drop in the applicant pool for at least the next 15 years. This will look like a bloodbath in higher education.
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I wasn't arguing that demand has collapsed. Rather, it's started to decline. Unsurprisingly, it's the weakest institutions that are being hit by even this modest decline. However, we agree that it's going to get much worse.
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It's going to be a demographic collapse *on top of* the thing things that were causing institutions to fail while the size of the market was *increasing*.
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Thanks for that analysis. That graph speaks for itself once you look at 18 and lower.
How does a school plan for that? I'm sure they are aware (being in IT I realize those are "famous last words").
Anyway, thanks, and you terrify me.
Kinda overdue (Score:2)
Saturated (Score:3)
Per Google, there are currently around 5916 colleges in the US. Losing 40 of them isn't likely to hurt that much. They were likely 40 private and obscure colleges.
To me, unless someone else is paying for it (eg rich parents or you got a scholarship), a private university is a pointless waste of money. Part of becoming an adult means making more intelligent purchasing decisions, and a large well-known subsidized state/public university is financially your best bet for a college education. They're well known, and most of them are pretty good (yeah the top schools in the country are private, but some of the worst schools are also private - public universities are more consistently decent).
Personally I'm fine with some of the stragglers closing down.
PS I found most of the list here: https://www.bestcolleges.com/r... [bestcolleges.com]
Yep, its mostly private schools. The few public ones were largely satellite campuses closing or 1 entity splitting into 2 (which I guess counts as the original closing).
US state colleges used to be free or virtually fre (Score:2)
California colleges and many others were free before Reagan started charging in-state tuition.
Conservatives have waged a war on higher education that eliminated free college.
There are a few US states where tuition is free for some. The fees are often covered by lottery revenue. A much better use of the money than dumping it into the general budget or buying sports stadiums for billionaires.
I paid 100 dollars per credit for college capped at the cost of 12 credits.
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California colleges and many others were free before Reagan started charging in-state tuition.
Nope. Reagan tried, and failed to establish tuition at colleges in the state: [abc10.com]
“Reagan fought hard in the legislature to impose tuition at four-year colleges. He lost the battle to lobbyists for the university
But the writing was on the wall long before Reagan was governor. As far back as the 1920's, Cal schools started to charge various fees to students in lieu of actual tuition to cover costs. Because college, like anything else, costs. And even after Reagan failed to implement tuition, the state legislature raised "fees" once again to mask the costs. But it couldn't last. Tuition was inevitable.
New Millionaires: Plumbers and HVAC Entrepreneurs (Score:2)
https://www.wsj.com/business/e... [wsj.com]
Trade school should be pushed harder than college for many kids.
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I respect those who work in the trades. But it is hard on your body, and the hours are long and demanding, and the jobs are often repetitive and boring. And most people who work in the trades do not become rich unless they are the owner of the business for many years and are able then to sell it off to an investment group.
And now that these investment groups are taking over, there will be no more independent trade shops, so salaries will come down, no local o
Its mostly the Liberal Arts Colleges (Score:2)
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Those schools that claim they make "superior thinkers" because you have to make up your own degree. In other words, no minimum qualifications to enter and no grading while "studying".
Which liberal arts college lets you "make up your own degree"? All of the ones that I'm familiar with have a set curriculum with required classes for defined degree programs, and most had solid-to-difficult entrance requirements. I've heard of individual teachers that refused to grade (most famously/infamously W. Edwards Deming at NYU), but never have I heard of a college that refused to grade as an institution.
The fact is... (Score:2, Interesting)
The fact is that most colleges are sports venues with a side hustle in 'education'.
Michael F. Bird said it better:
"If the highest paid person in your university or college is the basketball coach or the football coach, then it is not a university, it is a sporting franchise with a side hustle in tertiary education."
In other words, they'll build a new $50M stadium for the football team but won't spend $10K on new lab equipment for an entire department to use.
Re:The fact is... (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact is that most colleges are sports venues with a side hustle in 'education'.
Oh there are bigger college grifts than sports.
"Harvard is a hedge fund that offers classes" - Scott Galloway
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Exactly. But they are marketing their side hustle to 18 year olds. If you don't have savvy parents to help guide you, you are going to get taken to the cleaners. That "college aid" you are getting is really a price markdown based on what they think you are willing to pay. If you have a parent with good negotiating skills you are going to get a much better price. If you and your parents think the price is fixed based on some objective criteria, you are easy marks.
The colleges understand that kids aren't go
Useful vs useless degrees (Score:2)
Colleges that spew out graduates who have useless degrees deserve to shut down.
Want to be the University that survives ?
Start focusing on useful degree programs we'll need for the job market of tomorrow instead of
trying to wring as much money from every graduate you can all while selling them degree's that
were useless before they even got started.
Become a University where people are applying in such numbers due to your reputation for academic
excellence that you have to turn them away.
Those are the only Univ
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What you're talking about is definitely a problem, but if you look at the numbers the biggest issue is actually people who don't get degrees. There's a lot of people who do 1-2 semesters at college and drop out. The people who do that are way more likely to take out student loans and when they graduate they're way less likely to pay them back.
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More Colleges Should Close (Score:4, Informative)
Honestly, more colleges should close. There's a lot of non-profit universities out there that produce more people with student loan debt and no degree than people with degrees. These institutions are doing more harm than good.
Discrimination breeds success (Score:2)
Universities with low admission rates and high graduation rates are the most likely to provide people worth hiring.
This is easy to understand too. Universities who discriminate against everyone but high achievers and only accept applicants who would succeed in no matter which school they attended end up with students who genuinely put the effort in and produce the output requested.
Also, attending elite institutions (when not in covid loc