Vermont's Goddard College is among dozens of mostly rural liberal arts campuses that have announced they will close after having received billions of dollars in federal pandemic relief funding.
As COVID stimulus runs out, rural private colleges are now shuttering weeklyThe Manor House at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vt., is seen on Wednesday, April 10, 2024. The college’s Board of Trustees announced Tuesday, April 9, that the school is closing at the end of the semester after years of declining …Graduate student Kait Nascimento, a disabled single mother living on welfare benefits, says it took her 10 days to “freak out” about Goddard College closing this summer.
“The pace of closures is accelerating … because small private colleges are struggling with declining enrollment, rising costs, an inability to increase tuition revenue, and the end of federal pandemic relief funds that helped plug budget gaps,” said Robert Kelchen, head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the public University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
“I think schools are worse off than they were before the pandemic because they never rebounded,” said Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst for SHEEO, a group representing state officials in charge of public colleges. “They were artificially kept afloat by pandemic funding, but their enrollment numbers never recovered.”
The pace of closures has accelerated since COVID-19 lockdowns: In 2021, about 5,900 colleges were serving an estimated 19 million undergraduate and graduate students, NCES figures show. Between 2004 and 2021, SHEEO found 861 higher education institutions ceased operating. Most were small liberal arts schools, often founded in the 19th century in rural areas of the Midwest and East Coast.
Higher education economists say declining birth rates have made it impossible to produce enough students to sustain hundreds of small colleges, many of which have anchored the local economies of small towns for more than 100 years. Other challenges facing small colleges include rising maintenance costs, a slowing pipeline of international applicants amid COVID-19 travel restrictions and political tensions with China, and the relatively low value of rural real estate, which prevents campuses from boosting revenue by leasing space.More than 40 million Americans have dropped out of college without finishing their studies, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
“Families are asking if the cost of a college education at a mediocre college is worth it,” said Michael Warder, a California-based nonprofit consultant and former vice chancellor of private Pepperdine University. “A good number of young people believe software, technology and AI are the future, and there are opportunities to learn online or on the job at tech companies.”
Stephen Miller, an economist at public Troy University, said small and middle-sized campuses long benefitted from a “college enrollment boom” of rising demand that let them increase revenues by hiking tuition and fees from 1970 to 2010. Nevertheless, some flagship state universities with extensive research programs have added students in recent years as small private colleges flounder.
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