Academic closures, mergers, and cuts: July 2024 edition

Greetings from the start of August.  This week I’ve been home, here in Manassas, and that’s meant some pretty substantial heat, with temperatures in the upper 90s and heat index cracking 101.

Today’s post covers another kind of heat, how colleges and universities have been cutting programs, cutting faculty and staff, merging institutions, or shutting down campuses completely.  I’ve been blogging this theme for months now (March 1, March 20, March 28, April, May, June), partly as evidence for some points in the book I’m writing.  Let’s look at how July wielded the knife.

1 Closing colleges and universities

Clarks Summit University (private; Baptist; Pennsylvania) will close before fall semester begins.  The reasons are financial, driven by enrollment which dropped by one half in recent years, according to Inside Higher Ed.  A summer furlough of all employees and a fundraising drive didn’t turn the ship around.   The shut down announcement is the institution’s main page:

Northwestern College (for-profit; Illinois) announced it would shut down for financial reasons.  The college started 122 years ago.

The Rocky Mountain School of Photography (private; Montana; no Wikipedia entry?) closed up shop. One local account cites rising costs and competition from online education.  As with Clarks Summit, RMS turned their home page over to the announcement:

Back in Pennsylvania, the president of Harrisburg University announced he would shut down their Dubai campus, after shuttering their Panama one.  It seems that investors were funding those overseas efforts, and changed their minds.  Which saddened the president, because apparently the process of creating then shutting down a campus was arduous, and also because this was an attempt to boost well-paying international enrollment.  Here’s a local media announcement:

2 Mergers

One merger to report this time: two Iowa Catholic institutions, St. Ambrose University and Mount Mercy University, announced they would combine.   Inside Higher Ed describes the intended process and results:

St. Ambrose will operate Mount Mercy as an independent institution through 2026, when St. Ambrose will become Mount Mercy’s parent organization and operate it as the Mount Mercy Campus of St. Ambrose University.

Each institution stated that this wasn’t an emergency measure, but a strategy for long-term sustainability:

Federal tax forms show St. Ambrose’s revenues outpacing expenditures in the 2022–23 fiscal year ($121 million versus $113 million), with Mount Mercy operating at a slight deficit ($3 million on a budget of about $55 million).

But while neither institution may have been facing immediate existential threat, few college leaders can afford not to be looking for ways to ensure long-term sustainability, the two presidents acknowledged.

A note on language: “the presidents of the two institutions, Amy Novak of St. Ambrose and Todd A. Olson of Mount Mercy, took great pains to avoid calling the alliance a merger; their preferred term is ‘strategic combination.'”

3 Campuses cutting programs and jobs

Valparaiso University (private: Indiana) announced a series of cuts this summer.  It will shut down some degrees which had low or zero enrollment, including:

Three programs initially slated to be cut (astronomy, music therapy, public health, Spanish, supply chain and logistics) are reorganizing, scheduled for reappraisal in 2027.

Valpo also laid off fourteen staff this summer, including a museum director. Plans to sell off selected art works are in motion as well.

Reasons for the cuts include a serious enrollment decline: “In fall 2022, the private nonprofit enrolled 2,958 students, according to federal data. That’s down 27.5% from 4,078 a decade earlier.”

Meanwhile, various universities are cutting, closing, or breaking up diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices.  We’ve seen that at the University of Missouri, the University of Alabama, and elsewhere.  Florida and Ohio passed laws which will make it more difficult to maintain academic DEI work.

4 Budget crises, programs cut, not laying off people yet

Averett University is cutting some staff pay and also making others work four day weeks, due to a financial problem.  Averett leaders describe this as a one-off issue, not a systematic one, but Inside Higher Ed isn’t entirely happy:

Administrators blamed the financial shortfall on an unnamed former employee. While officials told the news outlet that the university had learned of unauthorized withdrawals from its endowment, they said there was “no evidence of embezzlement, theft and the use of funds for non-university purposes.” They did not specify, however, how the money was used.

What can we learn from these stories?

I’ve commented on related events in previous blog posts, and don’t want to be too redundant here.  I would like to offer a few notes.

First, should we expect more of this over the rest of 2024?  We’re heading into fall term, which means campuses and throwing a lot of energy into starting up classes and all the operations around them.  Perhaps we’re done with the emergency management season.  On the other hand, the FAFSA debacle remains unsolved, with fewer forms completed than last year (down 10.4% as of today by this tracker). The politics and cultural attitudes around higher ed haven’t gotten any better.

Second, there are signs of some successful faculty resistance to administrative cuts. Note that instructors managed to give some programs a temporary respite at Valparaiso.

Third, I write posts like this one based on a combination of public, open source information with tips shared by helpful people. Not all of these cuts are getting media play.  There might be another stratum of cuts going on, it seems – perhaps small, but there, below the public’s notice.  We need more transparency and better information.

Please, if anyone wants to share their news, contact me.  You can use the comments below, publicly, or reach me privately here.