Becker College in Massachusetts in Danger of Closing Permanently
“The school had been hoping to partner with another college in an attempt to stay afloat.”
There is more of this to come in the near future. The pandemic has driven many schools to the brink.
The Worcester Telegram reports:
Becker College in jeopardy of closing for good
The future of Becker College is shadowed by uncertainty, with state education boards determining that the school’s struggling financial standing makes it unlikely to survive another academic year.
The school had been hoping to partner with another college in an attempt to stay afloat. That effort failed, according to Becker President Nancy P. Crimmin.
In a letter to the college on Tuesday, Crimmin wrote: “Since the negotiations with a potential affiliation partner ended in January, I, along with cabinet members and appropriate staff, have been working to further analyze the financials, and to develop numerous scenarios regarding our operations. The situation has been dynamic.”
The Massachusetts Department of Higher Education and the New England Commission of Higher Education, with oversight and accreditation standing, said in a statement that work is underway on “contingency closure planning.” This includes working with current students who want to transfer to other schools.
Becker, its origin tied to Leicester Academy and Becker Business College, has campuses in Worcester and Leicester. The four-year school has about 1,700 students.
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Comments
Fewer staff, faculty, students for the communist indoctrination mills. Great news!
Why can’t a Harvard, Yale, Columbia, or some other name-brand one be in such trouble?
Well, they have massive endowments and assets they can draw on. They’re being hit just as hard, but they have deeper pockets so the deficit is much smaller relative to their overall financial position. They’d need to get hit by a Gibson’s-sized judgement for it to sting.
Becker hasn’t fallen victim to the “woke” groupthink nearly as much as many other colleges. It has a long and distinguished history and many famous graduates:
https://www.becker.edu/about/history/
Becker’s international reputation is based on its Game Design program. (No kidding!) In order to design games, the students have to become computer nerds of the highest order.
https://www.becker.edu/becker-college-game-design-ranked-2/
For decades Becker-Worcester was a 2 year college for women. Then they went co-ed and 4 year in a multi stage approach to staying relevant. I assume too many people are weighing the cost-benefit of dropping $50k for a college most people have never heard of.
I would note also that even though they took about $5M in taxpayer funded Coved grant money they still ran a deficit in 2020. That is clearly not sustainable.
Ten years ago I taught at a small liberal arts college that was struggling financially as well (it still is). It was still a special place to teach and work, a great way to give and get an education.
Unfortunately, we’re going to see this whole tier of the industry go under in the next five years. Take a look at the Forbes financial report card for private colleges and universities — there is a huge tranche of them rated “D.”
Boiled down, unless they are a Carlton or a Middlebury, they can’t compete financially with public institutions.
I explored this market (yes, it’s a market) quite a bit from the “demand side” when my son was applying to colleges 3 years ago.
The small’ish less-prestigious liberal arts colleges that can not reduce their delivery costs are in trouble, because frankly there is less demand for their product.
Big State University’s may have to retrench, a bit, but provide a lot of value in various ways. They may face a slightly smaller market, but with their broad base of alumni, taxpayers and sports fans, won’t have trouble surviving.
The prestigious Universities will have no trouble finding the next N,000 fools, even those who pay full price to subsidize the agenda of leftist Professors and SJW’s. As a graduate of one of them, I am reminded regularly that my education wasn’t that much better than those who went to big State schools.
Smaller colleges that are prestigious and/or can afford to offer a quality education at “advantage prices” to upper/middle purchasers may do ok as well (e.g Elon, College of Worcester, Beloit). They still will show a high “list” price for retail purchasers, but they can afford to provide a significant discount/scholarship to many who they want to attract.
The small schools without endowments, or any particular “brand” or identifiable educational value proposition . . . probably will go away. Big State universities have branch schools that can compete with them quite effectively. And the limited pool of quality students with funds will shop for better deals at better schools.
Well, Harvard’s Asian discrimination lawsuit might help. The majority of the Swamp, DNC, NBA, and Hollywood are on the CCP payroll so they might pull the rug out from under the school.
The value of a liberal arts degree has been destroyed by the purveyors.
Completely agree. Back when, a college education in liberal arts or sciences had some value in opening a student’s mind by the creation of critical thinking and analysis skills. Whether it was some kind of obscure poetry or an organic chemistry class, you had to work to get through it. Even with the existence of perpetual “throw-away” GPA builders, those classes served a purpose.
Now we have essentially attendance trophies for radical leftist orientation and groupthink. The only diversity of opinion left in most liberal arts undergrad courses exists in students trying to outdo each other in creating false victims and habitual outrage.
Now that COVID has demonstrated that distance learning via Zoom is viable, the best way out is for five to ten colleges to pool their instructional faculty. Cross-list courses on all the campuses and then have live instruction on one campus and Zoom instruction offered on the others. You can get the best teachers to reach a wider audience and increase offering while reducing overall costs.
Higher education needs to find its economies of scale.