Hilary Bowie remembers when she made the mental jump from being a college student to being a member of her college’s Board of Directors. It was at her first board meeting, in November 2012, six months after she had graduated from Sweet Briar College.
The college had announced a new strategic plan a year and a half earlier. Ms. Bowie, then a junior, had been taken in by the upbeat language in the title: “A Plan for Sustainable Excellence.” Her college, already excellent, was going to get even more excellent. There was a plan — a beautifully worded one, at that.
Sitting in her first board meeting, Ms. Bowie realized that the words in the plan didn’t really mean much. It was the numbers that counted. Sweet Briar had missed its target numbers for enrollment and per-student revenue, explained Jo Ellen Parker, then the president. The college really needed to start hitting those numbers, the president told the board.
Sweet Briar missed its targets again the next year. And when the board met on the campus this past November, it was more of the same. Every year since the strategic plan had been announced, the gap between the words of the plan and the numbers on the college’s balance sheet had widened. The college wasn’t pulling in enough revenue from tuition to cover its costs, and for years it had been using its unrestricted endowment funds to help pay its bills.
During that meeting in the fall, Ms. Bowie, who ran cross-country as a student at Sweet Briar, decided to clear her head by running the dairy loop, a three-mile route around the campus. She jogged past the music and science classrooms, the horse barns, and the art studio, which had been a dairy barn in an earlier era.
It had begun to dawn on her that some major change was on the horizon — maybe a merger with another school, maybe something else. Either way, the Sweet Briar she knew would probably never be the same.
When she got to the boathouse, she walked to the end of the dock and cried.
Less than four months later, on February 28, Ms. Bowie woke up at 5:45 a.m. in a house in Washington that she shared with three other Sweet Briar alumnae. She stared at the ceiling. It was still dark out. She wanted it to stay that way. If the sun came up, that would mean she would have to get out of bed, take an Uber downtown, and cast her vote to close Sweet Briar.
Elizabeth H.S. Wyatt was a shy valedictorian. She grew up in Petersburg, Va., in the 1960s; young women were not necessarily encouraged to speak their minds. If Ms. Wyatt was one of the smartest students in her high-school class, she was also one of the least assertive.
Sweet Briar changed that. After she graduated, in 1969, Ms. Wyatt got her M.B.A. at Harvard Business School. She ascended in the business ranks, eventually serving on the boards of several companies. She also joined the board of her alma mater, which she credited with turning her into somebody who could not just think through hard choices, but act on them with confidence.
By November 2014, it was clear to Ms. Wyatt that Sweet Briar faced many hard choices. New programs and marketing efforts had failed to raise enrollment and tuition revenue at the 114-year-old women’s college. Applications had gone up, but the number of students accepting Sweet Briar’s offers of admission had gone down. Only 20 percent of students who were getting in were choosing to go.
Now, years of bad numbers were finally catching up to the college. In early November, days before the board’s fall meeting, Standard & Poor’s fired a warning shot. If things didn’t improve, the agency said, it would downgrade Sweet Briar’s bond rating.
Sussan Corson, a credit analyst, explained the agency’s pessimism in a release: “The negative outlook,” she wrote, “reflects our expectation that Sweet Briar College’s enrollment pressures, high and increasing tuition-discount rate, and deteriorating matriculation rate will likely continue to weaken net operating margins and cause the college to rely more on already high endowment spending in the next two years.”
The big picture was equally discouraging. Ms. Wyatt had been particularly struck by a study of women’s colleges by Linda Sax, an education professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. Ms. Sax found that the demographic profile of students who attended women’s colleges had changed drastically since the 1970s, when those students tended to come from relatively wealthy families. “Now students entering women’s colleges hail from families with the lowest incomes,” she wrote.
That paper made an impression on Ms. Wyatt. Those findings mirrored demographic changes at Sweet Briar, where 37 percent of students are the first generation in their families to attend college and 43 are eligible to receive federal financial aid in the form of Pell Grants. The college had raised its own financial aid to help this new generation afford Sweet Briar’s expensive tuition. It had been good for diversity but bad for revenue.
Sweet Briar had been looking for ways to maneuver out of the hole. It had hired the Art & Science Group, a market-research firm, to study how it might draw more students. The study was to be completed in time for the board’s scheduled retreat in June.
By January, however, it had begun to look as if Sweet Briar wouldn’t be able to wait that long. James F. Jones Jr., the recently appointed president, was worried about how long the college could stay afloat, says Ms. Wyatt. “He was beginning to say, ‘We need to pull the information together about what it would take to close,’” she says. “Not to say, to close, but what it would take to close. It was clear that we needed to do that.”
Quietly, Sweet Briar had been courting other institutions to step in and save it. In one scenario, says Judith W. Grant, chair of the board’s committee on development, the college would have become “a satellite school of a bigger institution.”
The college hoped to engineer “the preservation of the campus itself, and at least a retention of the name in some visible form,” says Ms. Wyatt, but its financial straits gave it very little leverage. All talks fell apart in January.
“I don’t think any of them were really what would be, in most of our eyes, a happy solution,” says Ms. Grant. “No matter what you were going to do, you were not going to have the Sweet Briar we all knew.”
On campus, life continued as usual. Students returned from winter break. Professors plotted syllabi for future courses. The admissions office prepared to train a new crop of campus tour guides.
“You always have this question about transparency,” says Ms. Wyatt. But the vice chair says she does not regret remaining discreet about the board’s maneuvers until after the votes to close the college had been cast.
“It’s the board’s role to decide whether the college is viable and whether it should continue or not,” she says. Until that judgment had been made, the board should focus on “preserving the mission of the college insofar as possible.”
In February, shortly before the board was to meet, Art & Science delivered its market research — most of it, anyway. The college had leaned on the firm to finish in time for the meeting, and most of the order had been filled.
The news was not good. The things that made Sweet Briar indispensable in the eyes of many alumnae — its intimate campus, its remote location — did not seem to move prospective students, says Ms. Wyatt.
The firm made two or three recommendations for changes that might enhance Sweet Briar’s desirability, she says. Ms. Wyatt would not say what changes the firm recommended, only that executing them would have taken more time and money than the college could spare.
Colleges that want to overhaul their missions must spend a lot of money upfront, says David W. Strauss, a principal at Art & Science. Women’s colleges that decide to admit men, for example, often have to build new facilities, athletics programs, and academic programs — not only to accommodate male students but also to entice them.
“Many of those that have gone coed have mistakenly thought that’s all they have to do to open up the floodgates,” he says. But it is not that simple. “Going coed is a way to make it possible for other students to consider them,” says Mr. Strauss, “but it doesn’t make the students choose them.”
The key question for a struggling women’s college, he says, is: “What would it take for us to do and become something that would be so compellingly attractive that students will choose us?”
The answer can be expensive, and there are no guarantees it will work. “You would undertake those things,” he says, “only if you have some confidence that the revenue implications will be greater than the costs would be.”
Board members were informed in early February that their meeting at the end of the month would be held in Washington, not on the Sweet Briar campus. Ms. Bowie, the young board member, felt the location change was significant.
“Whatever we’re talking about,” she remembers thinking, “the catering staff couldn’t overhear it.”
The Palomar is a posh hotel housed in a yellow brick building near Dupont Circle, northwest of downtown Washington. To the right of the reception desk are a bar and lounge. To the left, a hallway leads to a longer hallway with two fake bookshelves painted on the wall.
Near the end of that corridor is the meeting room where Sweet Briar received its death sentence.
Ms. Grant arrived in Washington a day early, on February 25. Her travel agent had squeezed her onto a flight to beat a snowstorm headed into the Denver area, where she lives. It was a middle seat at the rear of the plane, near the bathroom. “I’m taking one for the team on this one,” she thought.
But she knew it was important that she be there. Everyone did. Ms. Bowie remembers getting a letter in the mail from Paul G. Rice, chairman of the board, about two months before the meeting. It said, “You have no idea how crucial your attendance at the meeting would be” — or something to that effect, she says.
The meetings began the next night. President Jones spoke, as did Mr. Rice. They laid out a narrative of what had been happening in the preceding months, along with a summary of the longer-term trends that had worn down Sweet Briar’s finances. The board members were told that the meeting might culminate in a vote to close the college.
Afterward Ms. Bowie turned to the board member seated next to her, and asked if she thought Sweet Briar had enough time and money to stay open until the current freshman class could graduate.
“She said, ‘I think we’ll have to see the numbers tomorrow,’” recalls Ms. Bowie. “And I immediately looked through my handout and flipped to page whatever, and I looked at the numbers and was like, No. No we won’t.”
The next day was long. The tables were set up in an elongated rectangle, with college leaders — including the president, Mr. Rice, and Ms. Wyatt — seated at the head of the room.
Scott Shank, vice president for finance, gave a presentation. He didn’t necessarily seem to be arguing for closing the college, says Ms. Grant, but the facts in his slides seemed to point in that direction. “He didn’t make any bones about the fact that it was a grim picture, a very grim picture,” she says. “And he did want to make sure we got that, that there was no silver lining there.”
Ms. Wyatt asked Mr. Shank to go over one slide twice. According to Mr. Shank, it included information about the college’s budgetary shortfalls, the “projected continuation of those shortfalls,” the outstanding debt, and how much of the endowment the college could legally spend on operating costs. The slide portrayed “the whole picture of what it means to try to move forward — and try to not move forward,” he says.
Both he and Ms. Wyatt declined to share this slide with The Chronicle. Mr. Shank insists the numbers were unambiguous.
Board members were also handed three-page summaries of the market-research findings from Art & Science. After they were done reading the documents, they were asked to hand them back. (The firm was “a little uncomfortable” having a written report of its findings out in the world, says Ms. Wyatt.)
Then the board went over a fund-raising-feasibility study from the consulting firm Grenzebach Glier and Associates. It had found that Sweet Briar has many alumnae willing to give to their alma mater, but not enough who were able to write checks as big as the college needed, says Ms. Wyatt.
Large chunks of the day was taken up by question-and-answer sessions. Mr. Rice would occasionally go around the room and invite people, even those who had not raised their hands, to say what was on their minds. If the board was going to vote to close Sweet Briar, there could be no lingering doubts.
There were questions about whether donors could move their own contributions from the restricted endowment to the unrestricted endowment. (Yes.) Someone else asked if the college was legally allowed to set up a separate fund for donations to severance payments for the faculty and staff. (No.)
The fate of the faculty and staff was the hardest part for the board to swallow, says Ms. Wyatt. Officials had calculated that the college would probably not be able to pay its employees a year of severance without drawing on the restricted part of the endowment. How the college would be allowed to spend that money would have to be negotiated with the Virginia attorney general, she says.
“Not being able to give those people — who have given their working lives — adequate compensation,” says Ms. Wyatt, “is a very tough thing.”
By dinner time, a funereal mood had descended on the room. The board members ate at their seats. Dinner was salmon with kale salad and cauliflower. “It was not comfort food,” says Ms. Grant. She only picked at hers.
The meeting wrapped up sometime after 9 p.m., and several board members retired to the bar on the other side of the hotel lobby.
The day had been akin to a family talking to doctors about whether to pull the plug on a dying matriarch, says Ms. Grant. The scene in the bar was more like a wake. Ms. Bowie and two other young-alumnae board members joined the old guard at a cluster of tables near the back of the crowded room. They drank wine and swapped stories about what it had been like to find their footing in the real world after leaving Sweet Briar behind.
The final day was short. The board members were given a chance to air any lingering doubts.
Julia K. Sutherland, chair of the board’s external-affairs committee, and Christy Jackson, the college’s communications director, gave a PowerPoint presentation about who would be told what, and when. They would wait three days before breaking the news to the faculty, staff, and students.
Shortly afterward, the college staff members were sent out of the room. Their work was just beginning. Mr. Shank, along with Sweet Briar’s lawyers and the rest of the staff, would have to begin the process of putting down a college, which is nearly as complicated as keeping one alive.
The board read over the text of a resolution that would shutter Sweet Briar at the end of the academic year. Mr. Rice, the board chair, moved to close the college. Somebody seconded it.
All in favor? Aye.
All opposed? Silence.
They took a break. Some board members wandered the hallway. Ms. Grant stayed in her seat. Growing up in Houston, she always assumed she would go to Southern Methodist University, like her mother. Sweet Briar may as well have not existed.
Then one day Nancy Baldwin, a graduate of the college, visited her high school. Ms. Baldwin wore a stunning burgundy suit. She was charming and fun. When Ms. Grant got home, she told her parents she was going to a women’s college in Virginia. She enrolled without ever having seen the campus.
Ms. Grant looked down at her notebook and noticed that she was crying. She felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Elizabeth Wyatt. She was crying too.
