Academia: The End of (One Institution's) History
Thursday's Child (One of Them) Has Nowhere Left to Go
Long-time readers know that there is nothing that gets me more irritated than the pack of higher education journalists, pundits and consultants who swarm all over every announcement of an institution closing its doors as the AT LAST confirmation of what they’ve been ardently predicting for five, ten, maybe twenty years or more, which is a massive wave of colleges and universities going out of business.
When you’re all-in on a prediction of an imminent doomsday, you don’t generally back down even when you’ve gotten a bunch of people to a mountaintop some freezing midnight to await the Rapture. You just go back down the hill in the sodden morning and announce you got the date wrong: it’s actually a year from now! Back to the business of usual of getting ready for the end.
Let me be clear here: yes, there’s going to be some tuition-dependent colleges and universities going out of business in the next decade, likely more than in previous decades, and some of that will be a consequence of the equally-much-forecasted “demographic cliff”. Some of it may also be that the generally unsettled nature of the labor market of the near-term future shakes what Tressie McMillan Cottom calls “the Education Gospel”, the idea that the achievement of aspiration and greater economic security invariably follow from the acquisition of more educational credentials.
But every closure has its own story if you look closely at it. Some of the prominent closures of the last decade were the result of administrative incompetence or inaction and some of those have been successfully reversed or contested, such as Sweet Briar and Hampshire.
Far more importantly, though, if you look at the history of many closing institutions, what you find is the opposite of a set of common trends overwhelming a set of very similar colleges and universities. You find institutions with very particular histories which could serve entirely sufficiently as an explanation of their closure.
Newbury College in Massachusetts, for example, was described by many journalists as a typical small liberal-arts college that got caught in a financial death-spiral and had to close. I’m not sure what counts as typical, but Newbury wasn’t it. It was founded in 1962, decades after the major wave of institutional foundings that swept across the United States. Those institutions were usually founded both as an expression of civic pride in medium-sized towns with the financial backing of the richest families in the area and as expressions of congregational affiliation. Newbury was founded by a businessman as a school of business and was dominated by his personality in its early existence. It relocated early on. It shifted to being a 2-year college. It absorbed some other institutions that were failing in the 1970s, built a bunch of extension campuses and tried to become a franchise. It went back to being a 4-year institution in 1994. It tried to go pre-professional. It tried to build up its athletic programs. It pitched to first-gen local students. It partnered with another struggling college to offer a leg up on a professional master’s degree. It rebranded and remarketed. Newbury was always unstable in its relatively short existence. This wasn’t the closing of a long-successful business done in by trends beyond its control, it was a brand that never even established a brand image in the first place.
Now we have news of the closure of Cazenovia College in New York, and I’m sure the usual trend-pronouncers will affirm it as evidence of the trend’s full arrival. Clayton Christensen’s prediction of half of American colleges and universities closing has only seven years left to come true, and it’s nowhere near that number so far. (Most of the closures since he made the prediction have been for-profits.)
Cazenovia is not a new institution; it was founded in 1824. But for a good portion of its existence, it was a seminary rather than a standard four-year college. It only became a general-purpose educational institution in 1942 and a women’s college in 1961, then co-educational in 1982.
What the current trend-watchers tend to overlook is that colleges and universities in the US have been created through ongoing waves of mergers, acquisitions, renamings, repurposings, restructurings, rebrandings. And failures. The fecundity of higher education in American history, especially after World War II, tends to make it hard to remember how the sector mirrors lots of other business histories. The more entrepreneurial an educational institution has been—or the more prone it has been to fundamentally shift its identity, its location, its constituency, and its name—the more precarious it often has been over much of its existence.
The trend-watchers tend to stress that institutions with fewer than 1,000 students and small endowments are especially vulnerable at present. Well, yes, but this is like saying that 90-year olds with multiple co-morbidities are vulnerable to serious illnesses. What they don’t tend to do is look at the histories of why institutions are that size, why they have small endowments, and why they’re located where they are—often in small towns with declining populations and struggling economies. The explanations for all of that aren’t a matter of a current demographic cliff or the disruptive challenge of on-line education. The trend predictors tend to forget that right now there are more students chasing college degrees than at any time in American history, and not just because US institutions have become global in scope—it’s also because a BA is now perceived to be an essential credential for access to the labor market. If we’re in a moment of decline, it’s from the highest peak ever in the history of higher education.
To understand a given closure, look to the longer histories, most of which are highly particular. Cazenovia is in a small New York village near a Rust Belt New York city (Syracuse). It was only a seminary for more than half of its two centuries of existence during which it received direct funding from a religious congregation, and only a 4-year coeducational college in the last forty years. The institutions that today are not under 1,000 students and have sizeable endowments got that way by having a much more continuous identity, by having gifted funds that have been accumulating over a century or more, by riding the wave of the general expansion of college education in the 1920s and again in the 1950s, and often by being in towns and smaller cities that still have some economic viability or are in regions that have suffered less of a relative decline since the 1960s.
The trend-watchers ignore most of these histories because they can’t sell any advice about them. There’s nothing Cazenovia could have done about its history. It can’t undo being a seminary for so long. It can’t hop in a time machine and start building an endowment in 1920. It can’t undo the deindustrialization of the Syracuse region. The trend-watchers can only tell institutional leaders how to zig against the zags of the moment, and so they overweight how important the moment is in determining the fate of institutions.
That has value to the trend-watchers beyond whatever paying advice they might provide to institutions that are under real threat. More importantly by far for their own consulting viability, they can counsel wealthier and more secure institutions whose histories are not a vulnerability by implying that they too are under the cloud of this economic and social moment, and that they too must embrace austerity to survive, must move to contingency and reduce faculty governance, must move to outsource staff roles and use third-party services, must regard all budgetary demands as suspect except perhaps the expansion of administrative hierarchy. If you can convince everyone that they are operating in a moment of unique threat and that all failures of institutions, however unlike their histories may be, are a potential contagion, well, you’ve got a chance to sell your strategic counsel to the worried well and the gravely ill alike.
Image credit: Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash
This is absolutely right in the sense that there are common histories here: many institutions have had major changes to their identity and mission at least once, sometimes more. Many are located in towns that have had a seriously downward trend in their history since the 19th Century, that are now in some sense 'remote' when they were formerly 'close to the heart of things'. (And the Sun Belt and the West weren't part of the major wave of institutional foundings in the 19th C. for the same reason.) And current trends are hitting institutions with those shared histories particularly hard.
My major point is that the people eager to pronounce a trend are focusing not just on institutions whose current predicament has something to do with shared histories but on institutions whose histories did not create the same vulnerabilities, and are using the idea of a current crisis to imply that all institutions have to pursue austerity now or risk their futures.
I think this is far too sanguine, even if the desire to push back on people preaching doom and transformation is well taken.
In particular, while every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way, the situation of Cazenovia is far from unique. Here's another college I know about that closed recently, with a very similar story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacMurray_College There are many small colleges that were once single-sex, that are located in declining areas, that are small in a time when that is harder. If even half of them close it will be a major shock to American higher education, even if it's not Christiansen's ridiculous prediction of half of all colleges.
Furthermore, places very unlike Cazenovia and MacMurray are suffering in related ways. Here's a story about Indiana State: https://www.tribstar.com/news/local_news/overall-enrollment-drops-at-isu/article_cb6a662e-958f-509d-ba7c-51a09edd1c06.html They put an optimistic spin on it but it's the kind of place that's under significant threat today, and is similar to many many institutions across the country.