Eight American colleges were already closing each year before the pandemic hit
, a criminology student at Stonehill College, can’t wait for classes to restart in August. Her campus in Easton, Massachusetts, “feels like a village”: its elegant red-brick buildings sprawl over 384 bucolic acres. She judges time spent there less of a coronavirus risk than staying at home in Chicago.
Whether or not universities get back quickly to that, many are likely to suffer. Stonehill is private and Catholic, with 2,500 students and a $200m endowment. It looks in good shape, but many similar liberal-arts colleges, especially in the north-east and Midwest, are not. Their problems are long-standing. Nathan Grawe of Carleton College in Minnesota, who researches demography and higher education, says the core difficulty is the slipping fertility rate.
Robert Zemsky of the University of Pennsylvania, who co-wrote a recent book on the growing woes of universities, expects a “collapse, lots of closures” of smaller colleges, notably in the wider Midwest. He blames both demography and teaching methods that do not suit some students, noting how, at many universities, more than a quarter of freshmen quit in their first year.
Consolidation of higher education is overdue. Students increasingly prefer bigger and more urban institutions, so some smaller, rural ones will go. How many? Just before the pandemic, Mr Zemsky and his co-authors suggested that 10% of colleges would eventually close. He now expects 20% to shut or merge with others.
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