Posted on 10/30/2019 7:19:32 AM PDT by C19fan
Not interested in paying to see a Paywall article from the ComPost. Interesting that Hampshire is that close to death, though. I wish I were a real estate investor. I’d love to buy up their campus; it’s in a beautiful location and would make for a great housing development.
Any normal person would avoid such a place like the plague.
We are right in the middle of the college search process right now. Amazing to me how many of my kid’s fellow students are clamoring to go Up East to obscure Liberal Arts colleges.
We looked but didn’t see the value.
Evergreen University will end up like this.
If you want to have a successful career an apprentice certificate in welding is infinitely more marketable than a liberal arts degree.
Virtually any entry-level job is infinitely more marketable than a woke college degree.
Value is the correct criteria.
Keep your costs as low as possible—you want to be paying for your kid’s education, not covering the scholarship costs of somebody else’s kids.
You also want to be vetting for professors who hate white people—you don’t want your kids taught self-hate as part of their “education”.
The article (which I have seen printed in full elsewhere) includes a discussion of how smart parents are choosing state schools (instead of private schools) to get the best “bang for the buck”.
That should come as no surprise. When your industry is surviving on massive debt and government cash infusions and raising prices even as the quality of your product declines dramatically, it's only a matter of time before you collapse.
In a strange turn of fortunes over the last 35 years, we have now reached the point where state schools that used to be considered second-rate are now more competitive for admissions than most of their private counterparts.
So true. I got my liberal arts education in homeschool, and among my fellow homeschoolers there are plumbers, welders, truckers, electricians; we're all making very good money, basically following in our parents' footsteps and learning our skills from them.
There are also plenty of kids who are "sidelined" to vo-tech, in public school. They end up being indispensible people.
And speaking of indispensible people, the military churns out a lot of those!
Meanwhile, Hillsdale University is still doing fine. No government loans allowed and they turn out kids who actually know something about the world.
Top heavy with highly paid “Diversity” Deans and other useless administrators isn’t helping struggling liberal arts colleges.
> If you want to have a successful career an apprentice certificate in welding is infinitely more marketable than a liberal arts degree. <
You betcha. The problem is that a college degree is looked upon as something of great value, where a trade certificate is not. So now we have folks with degrees in French poetry working at McDonald’s. And no one can find a good plumber.
George W. Bush deserves at least some of the blame for this. His idiotic “No Child Left Behind” law (2001) put great emphasis on college-bound courses. There was no emphasis at all on the trades.
And woe to the school that scores low on the NCLB tests.
So guess what happened? Schools eliminated trade education, and loaded up on the college-bound courses. The high school where I taught had an excellent carpentry program. Simply fantastic. The carpentry teacher was fired after NCLB started. And all the carpentry students were shoved into courses like English literature and advanced algebra.
Crazy.
Are Liberal Arts Colleges Doomed?
________________________________________________
One can only hope that most of them are.
“....50% of all the universities in the U.S. are projected to be bankrupt within the next ten years or so. ...”
I assume you mean private ones.
The 2020s will be the bonfire of the universities.
If such an institution can’t prosper at the demographic zenith, how will it fare on the downslope?
After every Podunk State College relabeled itself a university, there may be some luster for an institution to continue calling itself a college.
Of course some don't really have a choice, like Boston College (since another institution already has the name Boston University).
How is a university able to stay in business with only 13 incoming freshmen?
Tuition must be through the roof and not in line with any degree they could grant. Student debt must be enormous.
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