Four recent news items that I believe are additional evidence of a trend that is going to poke a large hole in the finances of many small, private colleges and universities in the U.S. — a hole that is going to help make some of these institutions insolvent:
First, an online program will replace the residential MBA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Second, Iowa Wesleyan University has signed an articulation agreement with Kishwaukee College, a community college located three hundred miles away in another state, whereby students complete three years of study at Kishwaukee and obtain a bachelor’s degree in business from Iowa Wesleyan with a fourth year of online courses.
Third, Linfield College is shedding approximately one-fifth of its tenured and tenure-track faculty positions. Undergraduate enrollments at Linfield’s main campus and in its online programs have declined precipitously, while the size of its nursing program in Portland has been flat. My guess is that the college’s leadership has decided to radically shrink its liberal arts curriculum and focus on offering degrees in business in addition to nursing.
Fourth, as described in this New York Times article, data indicates that there is often an inverse relationship between the cost of a graduate program and its quality.
Business programs, both undergraduate and graduate, have been cash cows for small U.S. colleges and universities for decades. But in 2019, why pursue this field of study at a small, struggling, largely-unknown college when one can get the same degree online at less expense from a much larger, better-resourced, nationally-reputable state university? Iowa Wesleyan has been in a death spiral for some time. The chances of its articulation agreement attracting enough business degree-completion students to pull the school back from the brink are slim to none. The same is true of an institution like Linfield College. Offering business degrees at a higher price than more-prestigious competitors does nothing to differentiate either institution in the market.