Many small colleges have faced challenges in recent years, but only a handful have survived anything like the decision by Sweet Briar College’s Board of Directors to shutter the institution this summer. And while their situations were different in many ways, three institutions that have lived past such painful, high-profile experiences — Antioch, Mills, and Wilson Colleges — may offer lessons for the alumnae and faculty members pressing to keep Sweet Briar open.
They may not, however, be lessons Sweet Briar’s fans are eager to hear.
If they succeed in reversing the board’s decision, “there’s going to be a tendency to feel like you’ve won because you’ve reopened, but the real challenge is the marketplace that has told you something significant,” says Barbara K. Mistick, Wilson’s president. Like Sweet Briar, Wilson has seen its trustees vote to close — back in 1979 — but the decision was overturned several months later in court.
Should the Sweet Briar closure be reversed, says Ms. Mistick, “they’re going to have to take a very realistic look at what happened there — why was the institution going to close?”
She is now leading Wilson through a series of changes prompted by enrollment problems that were never resolved after its 1979 reopening. The changes include admitting men to the undergraduate program, which has outraged some Wilson alumnae, though by no means all of them.
Ms. Mistick hopes the college, in Chambersburg, Pa., is now on a path to fiscal health. But she cautions that “you have to approach it with a very realistic — maybe almost a pessimistic — sense of, How do we make this come back? You really have to deal with the underlying issues.”
Mark Roosevelt, president of Antioch, offers similar advice. “If you’re going to reopen,” he says, “you better have a good reason other than nostalgia — nostalgia won’t get you there.” Antioch reopened in 2011 after a three-year closure ordered by the board of Antioch University, which had grown out of the college and then abandoned it. The resurrection was driven by alumni.
But Mr. Roosevelt says the “underlying economic challenges” for small residential liberal-arts colleges that don’t have big endowments are serious — so serious that the search for alternative revenue sources “is going to be a constant.”
Antioch, says Mr. Roosevelt, is casting a wide net in that search. The college has just opened a wellness center in which local residents can buy memberships ($430 a year for a single adult, $750 for a household), and it’s reopened its theater, which is being shared with residents of Yellow Springs, Ohio, the college’s hometown. Antioch is now exploring what Mr. Roosevelt calls “a residential community for next-chapter adults” — a retirement village for people who want to live among smart neighbors.
“I’ve come to believe that each women’s college is going to have to identify its own model and its own strategy,” says Marianne B. Sheldon, a Mills College history professor who was on the faculty in 1990, when a two-week strike by students and faculty members forced the Board of Trustees to back away from a plan to admit men.
At the time, the board had said the change was necessary to keep the college open. But 25 years later, Mills has remained women-only in its undergraduate programs and has put itself on firm financial ground.
“Mills is not Sweet Briar,” says Renée Jadushlever, chief of staff and vice president for communications and external relations for the college, in Oakland, Calif. “Students come to Mills irrespective of its being a women’s college. They come for our renowned faculty, our commitment to social justice.” Mills, with 922 undergraduates this year, is far larger than Sweet Briar, Antioch, or Wilson. In addition to its undergraduate degree, it now offers more than a dozen graduate programs to more than 600 men and women.
Every time a women’s college debates admitting men, “we’re always called,” Ms. Jadushlever says. “But I’m not sure that what we’ve done could be replicated elsewhere.”
Indeed, every small college’s circumstances are unique, as are the personalities of its leaders, and drawing conclusions based on what happened at other institutions may be of limited value. “Each of these is a different story,” says David L. Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, adding: “There are all kinds of interesting success stories of meeting declining demographics. One or two closings does not a tsunami make.”
‘Inventive’ Programs
In Sweet Briar’s case, though, its location a dozen miles outside of Lynchburg, Va., and its reputation as an institution of elite, horseback-riding white women seemed to have created something like a perfect storm — at least according to the college’s president, James F. Jones Jr. In announcing the board’s unanimous vote to close, he said that in recent years Sweet Briar had managed to increase the number of applications it received but that the number of students actually enrolling had continued to fall even as the discount rate rose to 62 percent.
“Fewer and fewer students are choosing to attend small, rural private liberal-arts colleges,” he said, and “fewer women today are choosing single-sex education.” He and others say the board sought suggestions from consultants for changes that would help improve enrollment, but none of the alternatives seemed likely to make the college viable in the long term.
John Stevens, president of the consulting firm Stevens Strategy, advised Wilson during a 2012 internal study that ended with the college’s admitting male undergraduates, reducing tuition, and adding more nontraditional programs. He says that Sweet Briar’s problems sound much like Wilson’s, and that if Sweet Briar were to remain open, “they would have to be pretty inventive” to achieve sustainability.
“There are new ways to deliver programming, both on campus and at a distance, that could have a very positive impact on a women’s college’s enrollment,” he says. Science programs have helped some women’s colleges go forward, he adds. But he also says his firm has worked with at least two other institutions besides Wilson — Rosemont College and Immaculata University — that have looked at declining interest in women’s colleges among high-school girls and decided to become coeducational.
Donald F. Bletz has a much longer view of Wilson’s challenges. A newly retired Army officer, he joined the college’s faculty in 1975 as an adjunct professor of political science and then served as interim president for two years after the court overturned the trustees’ decision to close.
“Admissions efforts had ceased,” he says. “Advancement and fund raising had ceased. We literally had to find the keys to the admissions office.”
“It was the alumnae, a very, very energized group of alumnae, who saved the college,” he says, but Wilson had well under 200 students the following year. “It was tiny.” Some faculty members agreed to stay on — even some who had been offered jobs elsewhere — but challenges loomed on every front.
His biggest problem was not learning how to run a college, which he had never done, but rather figuring out “how to deal with an organization that was in serious difficulty — how to maintain morale among the faculty and the students who came back.”
Nor was morale the only issue. Many people at the college were reluctant to see Wilson change, even when its situation was so dire. “As we would try to do something, members of the faculty would come say, ‘That’s not the way we’ve always done things,’” he recalls. “The temptation was to say, ‘Maybe that’s why we have a problem.’”
Mr. Bletz’s successor, Mary-Linda Merriam Armacost, says another difficulty Wilson faced in reopening was distrust. “Alumnae had gotten a letter in January saying how wonderful everything was at Wilson, and in February they got a letter saying it was closing,” she says.
After she took office, she says, “I hit the road. I did 22 alumnae groups, and laid everything open.” She refused, however, to pin blame on anyone. “You need to not sow enmity. The way I handled that was to say, ‘I will not engage in discussion of the past,’ and to engage everyone in a discussion of the future.”
Ms. Armacost stayed 10 years at Wilson before becoming president of Moore College of Art & Design, a women’s college in Philadelphia. She is now an adjunct faculty member in the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, where she teaches about small colleges and uses Wilson as a case study.
Wilson’s recent decision to admit men, she says, should remind people to ask: “Why do you try the same things and expect different results? We’ve had 30 years of trying to move that undergraduate women’s enrollment.”
“Part of the difficulty is having your alumnae understand the changes that have taken place in the marketplace,” says Wilson’s current president, Ms. Mistick. “What’s working for us is not just making the decision about coeducation, but having a comprehensive affordability plan that really meets the need of incoming students and their families, and adding new programs, including in the health sciences.”
It’s equally important to pursue “programs for which there is a market,” she says, “not programs for which you wish there was a market.”
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
