‘A Scramble to Keep Our Promises’: How Colleges Make Teach-Outs Work After Sudden Campus Closures

AJ Mast for The Chronicle

Rumors of financial problems had been swirling around Saint Joseph’s College, in Indiana. While students and faculty members whispered concerns about the institution’s fate, officials were scrambling to keep the doors open. The college was $27 million in debt, facing a loss of accreditation, and producing deficits of $4 million a year.

The Saint Joseph’s community was tight-knit. The rural campus had fewer than a thousand students, and professors and staff members came to feel like an extended family. So when the college held an assembly, in 2017, to announce that it would close by the end of the year, feelings of anger, confusion, and loss followed.

But within an hour of the announcement, an escape hatch opened on the sinking ship. Marian University, another Roman Catholic institution, two hours south on Interstate 65 in Indianapolis, announced it would accept Saint Joseph’s students. By the end of the week, admissions counselors were on the Saint Joseph’s campus to answer questions.

“We looked at our shared mission and knew what was most important was to help those students find a home,” said Daniel J. Elsener, Marian’s president.

Faced with declining enrollments and insurmountable financial strains, small, private colleges across the country are closing their doors. Teach-out partnerships, which arrange alternate pathways for students to complete their degrees, often follow announcements of such closures. But the work isn’t over when the students find new campuses. Once an institution agrees to take in the stranded students, the additional leg work can be more than administrators bargained for. And students’ expectations of their new colleges can be more than officials are able to live up to.

“The people you’re inviting to your institution just got kicked in the shins pretty hard, and they’re aching,” Elsener said. “What I’ve learned through this process is, whatever work you think it’s going to take, it’s going to take twice that much.”

The Path to Normalcy

Maria Pizano had never heard of Marian until the teach-out was announced, during her sophomore year at Saint Joseph’s. But she knew a lot of students were transferring there, and it seemed like the smartest choice to make at a difficult time.

Still, the path to normalcy wasn’t as seamless as advertised. At Saint Joseph’s she’d been studying education, but she felt Marian’s program wasn’t a good fit. By the end of her first semester she was placed on academic probation.

She decided to switch her major to Spanish, to get back on track for graduation in May 2019, but her academic adviser told her she’d need to take an extra semester of classes before she could graduate. “Right now I’m not even considered a senior at Marian because of my poor first semester,” Pizano said. “The whole transition was really hard.”

Although officials at Marian had encouraged the transfers to take advantage of campus counseling and tutoring, Pizano didn’t reach out to anyone until her second semester at the university, when she joined the Student Organization of Latinos and got more involved.

“I didn’t know the people here, so I just felt like it wasn’t really my home like Saint Joe’s was,” she said. “I’m starting to adjust now and slowly creating the connections I had back home.”

When Joshua Christian got to Marian, as a sophomore, he struggled, too. His new college had general-education requirements that Saint Joseph’s had not, landing him in classes he never expected to take. And like other transfers, he initially struggled to make friends.

“It was definitely a transition to be in such an academically challenging environment after everything that happened,” said Christian.

Eventually he learned what his professors expected of him, and classes became manageable. He became a resident assistant. By the end of his first year at Marian, he felt able to get past the “bumps in the road.”

Making and Keeping Promises

As the new students tried to acclimate, Marian officials were hard at work trying to smooth those transitions.

The university guaranteed not only that it would honor the students’ transfer credits, but also that everyone who transferred would continue to have the same out-of-pocket payments.

AJ Mast for The Chronicle

Tuition at the university was more expensive than at the college, and many of the transfers had gotten more financial aid from Saint Joseph’s than Marian gave to its students.

“That was a bit of a sacrifice on our part because they were paying less than what we typically would’ve charged students,” said Mark Apple, Marian’s vice president for marketing communications. “But we did make a commitment to them, and we were able to fulfill that.”

Seniors were told that they could take whatever courses they needed to graduate in the same amount of time as at Saint Joseph’s. Then officials had to find space in classes and residence halls in a matter of weeks.

“There was definitely a scramble to keep our promises,” said Apple.

Marian has given nearly $2.5 million in institutional aid to the Saint Joseph’s transfers, according to Apple, and that amount will continue to rise for at least another year. The university did not disclose other costs related to the teach-out. Elsener said he knew from the start that it would be costly.

“It was a good mission move, but it wasn’t a good cash move,” Elsener said. “Some members of our board wanted to do a total financial analysis of what this was going to cost us, and I said, Frankly, we don’t have time. It’s going to cost us, but these people need help.”

Elsener credits the flexibility of his campus in making the teach-out a success. Admissions and financial-aid counselors set up several informational sessions, both at Saint Joseph’s and at Marian, from the time of the closure announcement until the end of the next semester.

The university organized “puma-knight” events meant to encourage a sense of community and a dual identity. The Saint Joseph’s mascot had been the puma; Marian’s is the knight.

Elsener asked professors with Saint Joseph’s transfers in their classes to adapt their curricula and offer one-on-one guidance. He also instructed academic-support centers to reach out to the students individually.

“The community that surrounds you affects your learning and acclimation,” said Elsener. “If you transferred after years in one system, there’s a cognitive jolt. Our goal was to help them get past that.”

Eighty Saint Joseph’s students initially transferred to Marian, the same number of transfers that the university typically accepts annually from all institutions combined. Of that group, 53 were seniors. All of those seniors, Apple said, graduated by their expected graduation date. The following year, nearly two dozen more Saint Joseph’s students transferred.

Elsener had served on the board at Saint Joseph’s, and a son of his had graduated from the college. He said he sympathized with the new students. He personally met with many of them in the first weeks of the new semester.

“I’m very proud of the spirit with which the Marian community took this on,” said Elsener. “The Saint Joe’s kids have brought a lot to Marian too. They’re talented, and they were thankful, and they contributed right away.”

‘A Lot to Ask’

Linda Finley Albanese, vice president for enrollment management at Molloy College, in New York, estimates that staff members spent more than 4,000 hours trying to make sure the teach-out with Dowling College, which closed in 2016, went smoothly. Some administrators, she said, canceled their vacations so they could help with the transition.

She and other officials met individually with more than 500 students at counseling sessions, took over 300 phone calls, and replied to hundreds of emails from students and parents. At the time of its closure, Dowling had just a skeleton staff. Many students weren’t getting answers to basic questions like whether they would get their transcripts.

“Molloy’s goal was to have every student find the best option for their success — whether that was at Molloy or elsewhere,” Finley Albanese said. “We were working from the time we found out in the latter part of the spring semester. Everybody pitched in because we knew things had to be turned around very quickly.”

Ultimately, Molloy enrolled 20 students in the summer semester and an additional 165 in the fall. Extra courses and class sections had to be added to allow the students to graduate on time, and for those who needed it, certain academic requirements were waived. Molloy’s president authorized additional institutional aid for the Dowling students.

An official at the college declined to say how much additional aid had been provided.

Once the more practical needs were met, Molloy also made sure students had access to student-support specialists.

“It’s very traumatic for the students who’re placed in a situation like that,” Finley Albanese said. “They may also need personal counseling if their chosen path has been disrupted, academic support if the new program is more rigorous, and a way for them to connect. It can be a lot to ask of everyone involved.”

‘A Big Challenge’

When Mount Ida College closed, in the spring of 2018, the University of Massachusetts system agreed to accept its students.

The agreement with Mount Ida, in a Boston suburb, was that UMass branches would enroll former students based on their specialized programs. The Amherst campus took on the veterinary-technology program, and with it, roughly 150 students. As part of the closure, Amherst acquired the Mount Ida campus, meaning the program could continue with the same facilities, faculty, and staff.

Despite that advantage, Farshid Hajir, UMass-Amherst’s senior vice provost for academic affairs, said the transition was far from stress-free. “A lot of the work that was done was trying to organize the very many parts of an institution that come together to create a successful structure in a matter of weeks,” Hajir said. “We had everyone from student affairs to academic affairs to financial aid to operations and facilities together, and putting in extra hours.”

Amherst offered all the transfer students in-state tuition, even if they were not Massachusetts residents. Tuition at Mount Ida had been higher, but most students had received discounts and scholarships. Amherst offered its students aid on a need-based model. In order to keep the cost of attendance as low as possible for the transfers, financial-aid packages had to be adjusted.

UMass extended help to the Mount Ida students who wouldn’t be transferring in as well. Throughout the summer, counselors provided advising to any student who needed help finding a program to transfer into, whether within the UMass system or outside of it.

“There was a big challenge to try to make sure we gave all the information we had to the students and their families,” Hajir said. “No matter how many informational websites we set up, it was clear there was no substitute for having staff available to answer specific questions.”

Teach-outs can be disorienting, Elsener, the Marian president said, and institutions considering such partnerships must recognize that reality. The students are facing a loss, he said, and that will inevitably affect the transition.

“It’s not unusual that there’s some growing pains in that process,” Elsener said. “For it to be successful, you have to feel that the sacrifices are worth it from the outset.”

Follow Zipporah Osei on Twitter at @zipporahosei, or email her at zipporah.osei@chronicle.com.