Private US college closures look to gain public attention

Amid a run of college closures in the US, the shuttering of Philadelphia’s University of the Arts is getting pushback from the city, in what might signal a new-found determination by public officials to fight for their private institutions.

The almost 150-year-old campus in downtown Philadelphia, a beloved training grounds for local artists, suddenly closed its doors earlier this month, uprooting 1,100 students and 700 employees. The accompanying shock and anger mark a fairly common scenario in a nation that largely protects its public institutions from shutdowns despite often severe enrolment stresses, while doing far less for private campuses.

But in the case of the University of the Arts, the familiar procession – institutions hunting for merger partners, administrators resigning in frustration and students and workers filing lawsuits – is being joined by Philadelphia City Council ordering hearings into what happened.

It is not clear how energetically the city might actually get involved, especially while other possibilities – including Temple University weighing a purchase and revival – still play out.

The Philadelphia drama demonstrates, however, that the raft of campus closures around the US has overwhelmingly been left for the private sector to figure out, despite private campuses bringing their municipalities and regions much the same level of benefit that is widely attributed to the public side.

“Clearly, public involvement in the stability of private universities or colleges is not the norm now,” said Mark Muro, the policy director of the Metropolitan Policy Programme at the Brookings Institution and author of numerous reports on the value that higher education represents for local communities.

That might have to change, Mr Muro said, as both cities and rural communities look at the wave of coming closures – driven by population declines and other factors – and realise the implications.

“There may, in some cases, need to be innovative partnerships to try to stabilise” private universities, Mr Muro said. “That could become a very challenging next stage” of confronting the shrinking size of US higher education, he added.

States have long been willing to cut funding for their public colleges and universities, then baulk at actually letting them close, for fear of potential repercussions from voters. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have recently allowed closures and consolidations to occur, but those states are generally the exceptions, said Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. “It would be a very political decision to close a public institution,” Dr Burns said.

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At least 30 US colleges and universities closed last year, after nearly 50 the previous year – almost all of them private, despite the public sector being much larger – as the nation appears on a pathway to losing by 2032 about a quarter of the institutions it had in 2017.

There are some key differences between public and private institutions in the ways that they interact with their local communities and economies. Two-year institutions, in particular, have been held out as especially responsive to shifts in local job demand. Numerous detailed studies, though, have repeatedly shown both public and private institutions as carrying high economic importance.

Higher education’s value goes well beyond each state’s major research universities, Mr Muro said, despite the heavy tendency of policymakers to focus on them. Private institutions might be contributing to that oversight, he said, because many of them “have often zealously guarded their independence”. Behind that veil, though, “the actual closure of the higher ed institution in a medium-sized community could be absolutely cataclysmic”, he added.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com