What’s New
The College of Saint Rose, a Roman Catholic institution in Albany, N.Y., will close its doors at the end of the spring semester, following years of declining enrollment and labor battles. The institution’s board voted on the closure at a Thursday meeting. The president, Marcia J. White, called the decision “truly heartbreaking” in her announcement to the campus community on Friday.
The Details
Saint Rose, which was founded in 1920 and enrolled nearly 2,800 students in the fall of 2022, according to federal data, has endured years of financial hardship, which came to a head this week when it asked the City of Albany, Albany County, and the State of New York for emergency funding, as the Albany Times Union reported. None of those entities were able to provide an immediate bailout, leading the college’s board to call it quits.
Saint Rose’s accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, began requiring the college to provide annual proof of “improved financial viability” in 2020, and in June it warned the college that its accreditation was in jeopardy. Middle States gave Saint Rose until mid-January 2024 to show it had the funds to stay open, though the agency stopped short of putting the college on probation at the time.
The college has seen several rounds of program cuts and restructuring; dissatisfaction with cost-saving measures in 2015 led to the resignation of the then president, Carolyn J. Stefanco, and a censure from the American Association of University Professors, which accused the college of violating shared-governance and academic-freedom principles. (Saint Rose was still on the AAUP’s censure list this week.) More recently, the college eliminated 25 programs and 41 faculty jobs in 2020, saving about $5.97 million in academic expenses.
The Backdrop
Among those who lost their jobs in the 2020 cuts were four tenured professors in the music department, who sued the college, alleging a lack of due process. A judge found that, in firing the four longtime employees, Saint Rose had kept intact the jobs of less-senior faculty members, seemingly “by design” making a “select, narrow, and erroneous interpretation” of the college’s faculty manual. That January 2022 ruling was celebrated as a rare victory for the sanctity of tenure, but it didn’t last long. A New York appellate court in October of that year voted unanimously to reverse the decision, saying that the layoff plan “was supported by a rational basis” and “was not unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious, or made in bad faith.”
But the savings Saint Rose gained from dropping those salaries wasn’t enough to keep it afloat. The bond-rating agency Fitch Ratings last fall downgraded Saint Rose’s outlook to negative, citing “sizable, multiyear declines in the college’s already limited student enrollment.” The rating agency noted that Saint Rose’s enrollment had been hit especially hard during the pandemic, dropping 15 percent in the fall of 2020 and 18 percent more in the fall of 2021. By the fall of 2022, the college enrolled just 1,432 undergraduates, according to federal data, down from 2,200 undergraduates in 2020. For an institution that depends on tuition for more than 80 percent of its budget, as state officials pointed out in a news release on Thursday, such a drop can prove fatal.
What to Watch For
Saint Rose’s closure is sure to cause immediate economic ripples in Albany, with more than 500 employees soon to be jobless and 87 properties in downtown Albany becoming vacant. Teach-out plans for Saint Rose students are being developed but have yet to be announced.
The college also joins a growing list of institutions that are closing or facing dire financial straits, though experts have been lukewarm on whether a mass die-off of small private colleges is in the offing.
