The thing is...they only have around 2,900 students paying this $50,000 a year. If you just dipped ten-percent on freshmen in one single year...you’d have to lay off a dozen professors real quick. Sounds like they already had issues over the last year or two, and probably took out some loans to get by, and they are falling behind on debt.
If you were the parent of some kid bent on ‘magic-ticket-degree’ and all this antifa/Marxism was pay-back after four years...you’d tell the kid to find another college for entry. I’ll bet that the college is shut down within five years because of debt issues.
For a small school they have a huge endowment (web claims around 770 million). If memory serves, it stemmed from patents in aluminum refining that they licensed.
Of course, a lot of endowment is restricted in use. Rich folks call this a “cash flow problem” that is a bit different from being flat broke.
All that aside, Oberlin used to (and may still) have a good rep in the sciences, of all things, with lots of NSF graduate fellows hailing from there and, of course, their conservatory. Their rep is developing into something quite different.
Fire all the silly liberal studies profs and cut the silly fluff required courses for graduation. That would cut a student’s time by an entire semester. That should go a long way in winning back parents’ wallets.
How about lay off a couple dozen useless administrators instead?
But of course a lot of those are affirmative action hires so that's a no go.