By Professor Doom
The student loan
scam hasn’t just hurt our high school graduates, sucking them into a lifetime
of debt before they’re old enough to truly understand what’s being done to
them, it’s also hurt many small private schools, schools which built a
reputation of excellence and dedication to education, concepts of no value to
the “more more more” mantra of our self-proclaimed leaders in higher education
today, leaders who can only exist because student loans care nothing for
quality.
The end result is
the small schools are having a hard time competing with huge schools—both offer
easy credit, but the larger school has a lazy river, a choice of on-campus
coffee shops…and the same accreditation, even if the smaller school has a
better reputation. Just the loss of a few hundred students to the temptations
of the larger school can be devastating.
And, of course, a
rapacious administration can completely destroy a small school’s finances in
short order, transferring the school’s wealth into their own pockets. Seeing as
there’s nothing to stop this, and no penalty for doing so, this seems to be the
more common fate.
--there was
no warning before this point, so it really was a big surprise. What caused the
problem, according to admin, was the school’s enrollment went from 760 students
to 700 students, over the course of 5 years. Does anyone else think maybe the
leadership here could have handled things better? We’re talking less than a 2%
decline per year, hardly precipitous.
Today I’m looking
at Sweet Briar College, a century-old school with a fine reputation. A very
smart friend of mine from grad school, far brighter than me, used to teach
there, but after his time at Sweet Briar he walked away from academia, and tossed
his Ph.D. in mathematics, to pursue a career in a completely different field,
far, far, away from higher education. What he saw going on in Sweet Briar was
more than sufficient for someone with his keen intellect to read all the
writing on the wall about the fate of higher education.
A lawsuit has been
filed to keep the school from closing, but I see little reason for optimism:
Hmm, money, money
that should have been enough, has disappeared. That sure happens a lot in these
schools, it’s a shame accreditation doesn’t seem to care. For some reason.
Sweet Briar
wasn’t even a free school, in fact it was, on paper, a pricey one: tuition ran
$47,000 a year. I specify “on paper,” because the school gave all sorts of
scholarships and discounts. Let’s see here, an $84,000,000 endowment, buildings
and land all paid for, and 700 students, even if they only averaged paying
$10,000 apiece (that’s much lower than the estimated true discount price) would
yield another $7,000,000 a year in revenue. You could pay 70 faculty $50,000 a
year (more faculty pay than I’m ever likely to see), and still come out pretty
far ahead while maintaining a faculty/student ratio of 10 to 1 (again, way
better than many schools, in terms of real faculty), with another $3,500,000 a
year for expenses, without even touching the endowment.
My very crude
calculations seem to indicate the money should be there, I do hope those
finances get looked at a bit harder, and I can’t help but suspect the rapid
closing is so that there won’t be time for those finances to be studied hard.
Checking the
comments section on one of the articles on this closing, someone with more
experience in financial matters has also done the math and come to the same
conclusions:
Now, often I give
the faculty perspective of the plundering of our nation’s quality schools, but
this time around I’m lucky to have the point of view of a trustee, one that
also thinks something was going very wrong at Sweet Briar, but was pushed out
before he could do anything about it.
The title alone
smacks of credibility; having been personally chastised by admin for wasting
“college time” talking to 14 year olds about the wonders of my (then mostly
legitimate) school, with admin telling me that I was wasting time because the
school, being a community college, didn’t really cater to 14 year olds, I
completely understand how our “leaders” in higher education are hysterically
short-sighted.
Before I cover
what the former trustee had to say, allow me to give the version of events
leading to Sweet Briar’s demise, as told by the Pooh Bahs:
“President Parker provided notably strong
leadership at a time when a perfect storm of external forces beyond her control
was brewing and which eventually overwhelmed a precious but vulnerable
institution.”
Ah, the old
“leadership” mantra. I’m sorry, but a 100 year old institution that collapses
due to a 2% per annum loss of students over the course of 5 years has, on the
face of it, crap leadership. Honest,
our “leaders” in higher education give themselves huge salaries and heap
endless praise upon themselves, but can’t handle even a smidgeon of adversity. I imagine quite a few of my readers have
experienced a 10% loss of revenue at some point in their lives, and yet managed
to avoid bankruptcy within a handful of years of such a loss.
Anyway, that’s the
leader’s story, and you won’t get anything more than that, not without an
investigation, one that is unlikely now that the school is closed. One more
look at the leader, namely her pay, which is
fairly low compared to many Poo Bahs, although still grotesquely high:
No.
319 Jo Ellen
Parker, Sweet Briar College – $319,679
--do math
here, and the gentle reader will see each student “contributes” about $500 a
year to the Poo Bah’s salary, a person who does nothing for education. My
salary would be amazing if each of
my students gave me that much every year…
Now, that’s just
salary. Perks and benefits, as I’ve shown several times with other Poo Bahs,
can easily double, triple, quadruple that amount, if not much more. Hmm,
$600,000 every year. Imagine if, instead, a blow up doll was put in the Presidential
palace, and we got rid of the Poo Bah (and sold the palace, for that matter).
The money from the salary alone would have covered much of the shortfall of the
loss of 60 students, total, over the course of the last five years.
This leader, this
highly paid leader, can’t handle an institution losing about 2% of the student
base a year for five years. But if they’d gotten rid of the leader, the savings
from just having a blow up doll would have covered most, if not all, of the
losses.
I really can’t
emphasize strongly enough that we have too many administrators in higher
education, and they’re way too highly paid, and especially so considering their
often minimal competence.
Next time around,
I’ll look at what an insider, a former trustee at the school, had to say about
what happened.
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