Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Sweet Briar with a $94 million endowment is shutting its doors, and people in higher ed should be scared

Via Cousin Joel

 150303_sweetbriar

Unbelievable. Visited here many times when I was young and I know the sickening feeling they must be experiencing as I did when Greenbrier went under.

A women's liberal arts college in Virginia announced Tuesday that the spring 2015 semester would be its last — even though the school still has a $94 million endowment.

Sweet Briar College — located near Lynchberg, Virginia — will close "as a result of insurmountable financial challenges," the school said in a statement.

Sweet Briar administrators cited several trends that informed the decision to close, including the declining number of female students interested in all-women colleges and the dwindling number of students overall interested in small, rural liberal arts colleges.

8 comments:

  1. Ya they can go to any college in America and get the mostly Women, run by Women and for Women experience. No reason for separate all girls schools any longer.

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  2. A liberal arts degree ensures you get a 'want fries with that?' "career".

    The more expensive the school is, the more "money" they throw at students (grants scholarships and financial aid and loans) to entice them to go there. Ensuring a life of debt repayment.

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    1. liberal arts degree

      Practically every small college in Virginia was liberals arts when I grew up and stood all very well, but then you were actually tested, for instance, the Civil Service Entrance Examination which wasn't dumbed down and not easy. No wonder the government is so screwed up these days.

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    2. I read about this at GVDL's site at American Digest. They actually ran a liberal art program that didn't cater to feminists and alphabet gender bent students. The classic liberal arts degree was education rather than P.C. propaganda. Education, like other institutions, is entering the final phase of moral degeneracy where feelings supplant critical thinking.

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    3. Oh, no, I didn't see where you were coming from with liberal. :) I had a liberal arts education, but as described below:

      The liberal arts (Latin: artes liberales) are those subjects or skills that in classical antiquity were considered essential for a free person (Latin: liberal, "worthy of a free person") to know in order to take an active part in civic life, something that (for Ancient Greece) included participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and most importantly, military service. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric were the core liberal arts, while arithmetic, geometry, the theory of music, and astronomy also played a (somewhat lesser) part in education.

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  3. Glenn Reynolds writes quite a bit on higher ed and the student loan bubble that is about to burst or in the process of bursting. Full scale social engineering pushing every student to go to college subsidized by gvt loans -- which increased the costs of higher ed astronomically. Means that all of them are suffering financially.


    Likely the progressive solution to this is to make college mandatory to "bail" out the elites -- a large majority arent teaching. They are indoctrinating. not long ago the pResident was pushing free college ..

    And they constantly push preschool ed (free babysitting) in order to suck the kids in sooner and justify more confiscation of funds thru taxation.

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    1. I don't think the average college graduate these days from the indoctrination colleges has more education than I received by the 8th grade. Here's the graduating class from last year http://tinyurl.com/lmpe2dl
      and reminds me very much of my mother's graduating class from public high school in Littleton, NC in 1932 except for the absence of white gloves in this picture. How far public education has fallen.

      http://www.thehillschool.org/

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