Tuesday’s announcement that Sweet Briar College will close later this year despite still having $84-million in its endowment comes as a grim reality check for small liberal-arts colleges that have been facing enrollment and financial challenges in recent years—and particularly for the dwindling number of small women’s colleges.
The chairman of Sweet Briar’s Board of Directors, Paul G. Rice, blamed “insurmountable” financial challenges and years of “intractable” admissions problems for the decision, made at a February 28 board meeting in Washington. The board’s vote was unanimous, he said.
This year’s graduation will go forward as scheduled, on May 16, and a final on-campus reunion for alumnae will follow, from May 29 to 31. The 114-year-old college will officially close on August 25, after completing summer courses. About 300 faculty and staff members will lose their jobs.
The board had considered a wide range of alternatives, including admitting men, overhauling the educational program, and merging with another institution, Mr. Rice said. But unlike boards at a number of other colleges that hope making significant changes will keep them alive, Sweet Briar’s concluded that none of its options were viable, given “declining interest in these types of colleges,” he said.
The college’s president, James F. Jones Jr., said no amount of wishing would change “the national vectors, the marketplace vectors.” Mr. Jones came to Sweet Briar just last year, having previously been president of Trinity College, in Connecticut, and Kalamazoo College, in Michigan.
Mr. Rice said in a video posted online and in a conference call with reporters that while hard work by the college’s admissions and marketing staffs had increased the number of applications Sweet Briar received, the number of women actually enrolling was at “an all-time and unsustainable low"—even as the college’s discount rate soared to 62 percent.
“The reality is that we are unable to reverse two intractable issues,” he said. “The first is that fewer and fewer students are choosing to attend small, rural private liberal-arts colleges, and that fewer women today are choosing single-sex education.” The second issue, he said, is that the discount “that we have needed to offer to enroll students is no longer sustainable.” The published price for tuition, room, and board at the college, located 12 miles northeast of Lynchburg, Va., was just over $47,000 for the current year.
He said the board had decided to act now so the college could do its best to help students who aren’t graduating this year transfer to other institutions and to help faculty and staff members find employment elsewhere. The college hopes to provide severance payments to employees, said Elizabeth H.S. Wyatt, a member of the Class of 1969 who is vice chair of the board.
Mr. Jones said that the board had struggled with the question of the college’s future for eight months, since it became clear that this year’s enrollment would again fall short of the college’s goal. He said the college had just 523 students on the campus for the current semester—few of them paying full price—although its enrollment target was 800.
The board’s research suggested that even admitting men, the most controversial of the possible alternatives, would be “simply not enough to give us a sustainable platform,” said Mr. Rice.
Women’s institutions that have succeeded in becoming coeducational, President Jones noted, have needed “a very long time and vast amounts of money,” which he said Sweet Briar did not have. Of the amount remaining in the endowment, about $56-million is in accounts restricted by donors to particular uses, he said.
The decision was announced to faculty and staff members in a meeting in the chapel at noon, and to students at a similar meeting 45 minutes later. Mr. Jones said during the conference call that it was too early to know how alumnae would react, but that faculty and staff members and students were grieving over the loss of “something you hold incredibly important down to the core of your being.”
Sweet Briar is working on agreements that would let undergraduates transfer easily to one of four institutions—Hollins University and Mary Baldwin and Randolph Colleges, all in Virginia, and Kettering University, in Michigan. Mr. Jones said Kettering had been included in the mix because of its strength in engineering, science, and mathematics. Hollins and Mary Baldwin are both women’s colleges; Randolph was known as Randolph-Macon Woman’s College until it admitted men, in 2007.
Decisions about the future of Sweet Briar’s 3,250-acre campus and the disposition of its endowment will be made in coming months, Mr. Rice said.
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
