By 2017, as many as 15 colleges may be shutting down each year, according to Moody’s Investor Service.

The Atlantic reports:

Farewell to America’s Small Colleges

“Schools will do anything to survive,” said Kent Chabotar, a former president of Guilford College, in a recent interview with Inside Higher Ed. “The last thing a school wants to do is shut down.”

Take Sweet Briar College. The small women’s school—a quaint liberal-arts college in rural Virginia—was famously slated to close up shop this year. Although the March announcement came rather abruptly, Sweet Briar in many ways had long been fated for collapse. It was, as Laura McKenna reported for The Atlantic in March, both tethered to its single-sex enrollment policy and removed from many of America’s modern-day realities. The $47,000 ticket price didn’t help, either.

But then, at the very last minute, Sweet Briar was miraculously resuscitated, largely thanks to a generous influx of alumni donations. Determined to keep the school alive for at least another year, administrators managed to enroll roughly 250 women this semester—about half of last year’s enrollment. “At Sweet Briar, the impossible is just another problem to solve,” read a sign in front of the admissions office on the first day of school, according to the Washington Post. The college’s students are now a little over a month into their fall classes.


 
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