Southern Vermont College is closing: Shrinking demand for expensive liberal arts degrees

Inside Higher Ed has done a terrific job reporting on the demise of small liberal arts colleges, and Greg Toppo's recent story on the closure of Southern Vermont College is a fine Inside Higher Ed story on this sad phenomenon.

As Toppo reported, David Rees Evans, Southern Vermont's president, announced that the college is closing at the end of the spring semester. The college has been buffeted by a series of blows: an embezzlement scandal, accreditation problems with its nursing program (which the college resolved), and news that the college's principal accrediting body is planning to put the school on probation.

Closing was the right decision. After all, Southern Vermont only has 332 enrolled students--down from a peak of 500 students just nine years ago. President Evans candidly admitted that the trustees decided to announce its closure now rather than later due in part to fear of being sued if it continued recruiting new students and then shut down precipitously. That's what happened to Mount Ida College, and Southern Vermont wisely decided to wind down its affairs more transparently than Mount Ida apparently did.

President Evans partly blamed negative demographics for its predicament. "New England is in a bad way--especially the rural parts of New England," Evans said. Vermont's high school population, which provides Southern Vermont with about a third of its students, has declined dramatically, and it will decline even more in the years to come.

But demographics doesn't fully explain why so many small liberal arts colleges are closing. There are two more major dynamics in play--and small colleges have no means to counter either of them.

Small, private colleges are too expensive.  First, small, private colleges are simply too expensive for the average family to pay. Most of these small institutions charge somewhere north of $30,000 a year for tuition, fees, and room and board--around $120,000 for a four-year degree. Few families have the resources to pay these costs out of pocket, which means students must take out loans to finance their education.

It is true that small private colleges are discounting tuition drastically--on average by about 50 percent. But $13,000 a year in tuition (about half of Southern Vermont's posted rate) is still a big nut to crack. Increasingly, families are sending their children to attractively priced, regional public universities, which look pretty appealing compared to a rural college with less than 400 students.

A liberal arts education has lost its appeal.  Secondly, some would say tragically, a liberal arts education has lost its appeal in the minds of most Americans. There was a time when most Americans believed that a liberal arts education has intrinsic value. People once believed that a grounding in the liberal arts nurtured civic values, cultivated an appreciation for beauty, and promoted rational thinking. Liberal arts, it was generally believed, helped prepare young people for a fuller and richer life.

I don't think many people believe that anymore. Most young people are keenly aware that they will go into debt to get their college degrees, and they know they must get a degree that will lead to a well paying job or they will be in big financial trouble.  More and more undergraduates are majoring in business, and fewer and fewer are majoring in English, history, and philosophy.

Indeed, colleges themselves are finding it increasingly difficult to articulate exactly what a liberal arts education is these days. For example, there was once a broad consensus about what constitutes the canon of American literature. Scholars might disagree on the details, but most would identify The Great Gatsby as a great American novel--perhaps the great American novel. And most would agree that a basic knowledge of American literature includes at least a passing acquaintance with the works of Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, and perhaps Steinbeck.

That's not true anymore. After all, these authors are all dead white men. Where are the works of African American writers, Hispanic writers, women writers, LGBTQ writers?

Of course colleges can add books by marginalized writers to the curriculum, and most are doing so. But students can only read so much, and somewhere on the road to greater relevancy in the liberal arts students start asking--what's the f-cking point?

In fact, I have great sympathy with the critics of traditional liberal arts. I for one would rather be shot than read a novel by William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, or Henry James.

Moreover, literature that is particular to my own life experience means more to me than the so-called great works of American literature. I am a Catholic, and I have read widely in the works of Catholic writers: Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham, Walker Percy, and Alice McDermott. I am a great fan of Myles Connolly's Mr. Blue, a hidden treasure of Catholic literature that is sadly out of print.

But I would not argue to anyone that the Catholic novels that mean so much to me should form part of the liberal arts curriculum. So how can anyone argue that every educated American should read The Great Gatsby?

And so the liberal arts colleges are dying--victims of demographics, soaring costs, and perhaps most of all by our increasingly diverse society that has become fragmented with regard to our understanding of what it means to be an educated American.

Dying with Dignity: College of New Rochelle will probably close

Over the course of my life,  I have witnessed the death of several friends and relatives; and some of them did not die a good death.

My father expired miserably in a VA hospital because his government doctors did not diagnose his treatable cancer in time to save his life. He had survived the Bataan Death March and three years in a Japanese concentration camp during World War II, but that sacrifice did not entitle him to decent medical care in his final years.

I witnessed the death of a relative who died in a ramshackle house he inherited from his mother--a house that smelled of urine and dirt. I was the only person with him when he closed his eyes for the last time.

America's small liberal arts colleges are dying too--brought down by a host of maladies for which there is no cure. And like too many people, many of these colleges are closing their doors without dignity--a fate I don't think they deserve.

William Latimer, president of the College of New Rochelle, sent a memo to the campus community last week, announcing that the college will probably close this summer.  The college was doomed two years ago when campus officials revealed that the college had a huge tax liability because it had failed to pay federal payroll taxes--a $20 million tax bill. Judith Huntington, New Rochelle's president at the time, resigned; and a senior financial officer precipitously retired.

Soon after that revelation, the college received an anonymous $5 million gift, which might have been a payout from the college auditor's malpractice insurance (just a guess), but the infusion was not enough to restore the College of New Rochelle to financial health.

That was two years ago. The college tried to lay off some faculty members to stem the flow of red ink, but the professors sued, and a judge ruled that the college had fired the professors in violation of the faculty handbook. But of course, the professors won a Pyrrhic victory. A college with no money can't pay its faculty, no matter what the faculty handbook says.

New Rochelle's fate is somewhat similar to the fate of Mount Ida College, a tiny little institution located in a Boston suburb. Mount Ida sold out to the University of Massachusetts amid accusations that it had misled professors and students about its imminent demise.  Maura Healy, the Massachusetts Attorney General, expressing the self-righteous indignation so typical of New England bureaucrats, launched an investigation. But to what purpose? Mount Ida still closed.

Other small colleges are cutting academic programs in an effort to stay alive--particularly programs in the liberal arts.  McDaniel College announced a few days ago that it is eliminating five majors and three minors--all in the liberal arts. Students responded as they always do to bad news--by lecturing their elders.

"As students at a liberal arts college," McDaniel  students said in a priggish statement,  "we believe firmly in the first principles of this institution, which advocate for the importance of a liberal arts education."

In ringing tones of high-mindedness, the students sermonized about the importance of the liberal arts. "As you all know, having the opportunity to take courses across many disciplines creates students who are flexible, knowledgeable and able to think critically in the face of all that the world has to throw our way." Music and German, two programs that were cut, "are both living, breathing, culturally relevant languages," the students pointed out. As for other programs being jettisoned,they too are "integral to the creation of well-informed citizens and academics."

Blah, blah, blah. The students who penned that blather ought to take some responsibility for the decisions they made to enroll at McDaniel--just another wobbly and obscure liberal arts college. And what do they think a McDaniel degree in German is worth on the job market? Not enough to pay off their student loans, I wager.

Students can express their rage about programs being slashed and colleges closing. Attorney generals can launch investigations. And professors can sue to try to save their jobs. But the colleges that are closing or downsizing are not generating enough revenue to keep their doors open. That is the stark reality.

Let's let these little institutions die with dignity--because they are dying anyway.

College of New Rochelle (photo credit Inside Higher Ed)

Congressman John Katko introduces bill to make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. Will presidential candidates endorse the bill?

Last month, John Katko, a Republican congressman from New York, filed H.R. 770, a bill that would make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy like any other consumer debt.

Titled the "Discharge Student Loans in Bankruptcy Act," Katko's bill is quite simple. It merely strikes the "undue hardship" clause from Section 523(a) of the Bankruptcy Code.

Congressman Katko filed the same bill two years ago. When he filed the bill in 2017, it had ten co-sponsors, including Maryland Congressman John Delaney. When Katko refiled the bill last month, he only had two co-sponsors.

If H.R. 770 becomes law, millions of Americans who are overwhelmed by student loans will get relief in the bankruptcy courts. They will have an opportunity to start families and buy homes. They will get the fresh start that bankruptcy is intended to provide.

Let's make Katko's bill the litmus test for everyone who is running for president or is thinking about running. Let's ask them one simple question: Do you support Katko's bill or not?

• President Donald Trump, do you support H.R. 770?
• Senator Elizabeth Warren, do you support Katko's bill?
• Senator Kamala Harris, do you support H.R. 770?
• Senator Bernie Sanders, do you support Katko's bill?
• Former Vice President Joe Biden, do you support H.R. 770?
• Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, do you support Katko's bill?
• Senator Amy Klobuchar, do you support H.R. 770?
• Michael Bloomberg, do you support Katko's bill?
• Beto O'Rourke, do you support H.R. 770?
• John Delaney, former Maryland congressman who co-sponsored Katko's bankruptcy-relief bill in 2017, you are now running for president. Do you support Congressman Katko's bill?

Our federal legislators are fond of holding committee hearings where they bully witnesses by demanding yes-or-no answers to all their hectoring questions.

Well, here is a question to everyone who wants to be president, and we should demand a yes-or-no answer. Unless a presidential candidate can say "Yes, I support H.R. 770 without qualification," that person is nothing more than a windbag who doesn't care about average Americans and does not deserve our vote.

*****

Note: I am grateful to Phil Uhrich for calling this bill to my attention.  Mr. Uhrich wrote a provocative essay on national politics in 2016 that is still timely.

Representative John Katko (R-NY)

Cooking the Books: Federal Reserve Bank Says $166 Billion in Student Debt is Delinquent, But the Crisis is Worse Than That

Most Americans have confidence in what the Federal Reserve Bank says about the national economy. I know I do. But when the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that $166 billion in student debt is delinquent, it vastly understated the enormity of the student-loan crisis.

In its most recent quarterly household debt report, the Fed pegged total outstanding debt at $1.46 trillion as of the end of December. According to the Fed, about 11 percent of that debt ($166 billion) is delinquent or in default. That's a startling number. But the picture is far bleaker than that.

Just two months ago, Secretary of Education Betsy Devos stated publicly that only one out of four student borrowers (24 percent) are paying down the principal and interest on their loans. "As for FSA's portfolio today," DeVos said, "too many loans are either delinquent, in default, or are [in] plans on which students are paying so little, their loan balance continues to grow." In total, DeVos admitted, "43 percent of all loans are currently considered 'in distress,'" and 20 percent of all federal student loans are delinquent or in default.

DeVos also implicitly acknowledged that the federal government is cooking the books by classifying a lot of student debt as performing loans even though millions of people are not paying them back. "Only through government accounting is this student loan portfolio counted as anything but an asset embedded with significant risk," DeVos observed. "In the commercial world, no bank regulator would allow this portfolio to be valued at full, face value."

In addition to the millions of people who have defaulted on their loans, millions more are in various plans that allow borrowers to skip their loan payments without being counted as defaulters. As of last summer, 7.4 million people were enrolled in long-term income-based repayment plans who are making payments so low that interest continues to accrue on their loans.

Think about that: 7.4 million people whose loans are labeled as performing even though their loan balances get larger with each passing month. You can label that scenario any way you like, but we're talking about 7.4 million additional defaulters.

The Department of Education has been scamming the public for a quarter of a century regarding student-loan defaults. For years, it only reported the percentage of loans that defaulted within two years of entering repayment. To keep their default rates down, colleges encouraged their former students to enter into economic-hardship deferments, which excused them from making payments without officially putting them in default.

Then DOE began reporting three-year default rates, which showed defaults ticking up slightly to the neighborhood of 11 percent. But the Brookings Institute (in a paper written by Looney and Yannelis) reported in 2015 that the 5-year default rate for a recent cohort was 28 percent--more than double the three-year rate.

In other words, for a cohort of borrowers that the Brookings researchers analyzed, more than one out of four student borrowers was officially in default after five years. According to the same Brookings report, the five-year default rate for students who attended for-profit colleges was 47 percent--nearly half!

Of course, loan default rates vary some from cohort to cohort, but there is no sign that the percentage of student borrowers paying off their loans is going up. In fact, the data show the opposite.

In short, the Fed's recent report may be technically accurate but it understates the magnitude of the student-loan crisis. When the Department of Education finally comes clean and gives us some accurate figures, I think we will find that half of all outstanding student loans are not performing--about 20 million borrowers with collective debt totally three quarters of a trillion dollars.

 

Congressman Alcee Hastings introduces bill to abolish corporal punishment in schools, but the bill will go nowhere

Congressman Alcee Hastings, dean of the Florida congressional delegation, introduced a bill last month to abolish corporal punishment in the schools. Titled "Ending Corporal Punishment in Schools Act," the bill would cut off federal funding to any state that permits corporal punishment in the public schools.

Hastings, you may not remember, was once a federal judge. In 1989, Congress impeached him and removed him from the bench based on charges of bribery and lying under oath.

But that was 30 years ago; and, as the Psalmist observed, if God kept a record of all our sins, "who could stand?" Hastings' constituents must share that sentiment; they've sent Hastings to Congress for 25 years.

I hope Hastings' bill becomes law. Irrefutable evidence shows that beating children with sticks and boards is not good for them. Research has documented that African American students and children with disabilities get a disproportionate share of corporal punishment.

Moreover, all the leading child advocacy organizations and educational groups oppose the corporal punishment of children. Even the Catholic Church, which has a high tolerance for child rape, does not permit Catholic school administrators to paddle school kids.

Most states have abolished corporal punishment in their public schools.  Nineteen states still allow it, but the practice is mostly confined to rural communities in five Southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana Mississippi, and Texas. Hastings' bill, if it becomes law, would wipe it out across the whole United States.

Hastings' bill, labeled H.R. 727, has six co-sponsors--all Democrats. Surely some House Republicans can step up to support H.R. 727.  On the Senate side, perhaps some lawmaker running for president might stop campaigning for a couple of moments and endorse Hastings' proposal to stop corporal punishment in the schools. Senators Harris, Warren, Booker, Gillibrand, and Klobuchar--are you listening?

But here is my prediction. No Republican congressperson will join Democratic colleagues as co-sponsors of  Hastings' bill. The bill will never get out of committee. In spite of the fact that Democrats control the House of Representatives, HR. 727 will never come to a vote on the House floor.

Our elected representatives are now so intent on destroying their political enemies, so obsessed with getting a few seconds of media attention, that they have forgotten that there are some simple and noncontroversial things they can do to make America a better country.

Dorothy Day, the great Catholic social justice activist, once had this to say about people's talk and people's deeds. "I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions."

So, as the 2020 election season begins, let us judge all our braying politicians by what they have done, not by what they are saying. And if Representative Hastings gets a law passed to stop children from being assaulted in the schools, he will have redeemed himself in my mind for his misdeeds as a federal judge long ago.

Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.)

We are all peasants now: The student-loan crisis is destroying the middle class

As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we'd thought were obsolete.  . . . A plain majority of the townspeople were laborers now, whatever in life they had been before. Nobody called them peasants, but in effect that's what they'd become.

World Made By Hand

James Howard Kunstler 

American higher education is the emperor who wears no clothes. College leaders boast that our nation's universities are the envy of the world while they rake in so-called federal "student-aid" and parade about in medieval regalia peddling worthless degrees.

And America's young people are the losers. They've been gulled into thinking they can gain a middle-class lifestyle by getting a college degree and maybe a graduate degree as well. But millions are finding that their college degrees gained them little more than massive debt. And those online MBAs and doctorates they purchased with borrowed money--just junk.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank, outstanding student-loan debt reached $1.56 trillion last January. Around 45 million Americans have student-loan obligations and 7.4 million are enrolled in long-term repayment plans that stretch out for as long as a quarter of a century.  As Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos admitted with shocking candor last November, only one out of four student borrowers are paying off the principal and interest on their loans.

It is now well documented that student-loan debt is contributing to the nation's declining birth rates--now near a record low. People can't afford children because they're paying off student loans.

Young people can't afford to buy homes, they can't save for retirement, they can't pay off their debts.  Their liberal arts degrees, their shoddy law degrees, their fluffy MBAs and doctoral degrees qualify them to become baristas and clerical workers.

We are now in the early stages of the 2020 presidential election season, and what do our politicians talk about? Russia, border walls, free health care, and the Green New Deal.  We should be discussing the New Raw Deal--the deal our government and our universities have imposed on guileless young people.

For too long, Americans have bought the line that our colleges and universities operate for the public good and that the people who run them are wise and kindly. We particularly revere the ivy league colleges where we get nearly all our prune-faced Supreme Court justices and most of our presidents.

But if the folks who run Harvard are so goddamned wise, how could they have fallen for Elizabeth Warren's scam that she's a Cherokee? And if our elite college leaders are sensitive and kindly, how did little boys wind up getting raped in a Penn State shower room? And how could dozens of female athletes get groped by Larry Nasser while he was on Michigan State's payroll?

No, let's face the truth. Many American colleges and universities are not run by wise and kindly people; most are run by administrators who are primarily concerned with the bottom line. And far too often, higher education is not preparing young Americans to enter the middle class. On the contrary, by forcing people to take on oppressive levels of debt to get a college degree, colleges are setting up millions of Americans for a lifetime of peasantry.

Senator Elizabeth Warren can survive Cherokee-Gate if she focuses on student-loan crisis

To my surprise, Senator Elizabeth Warren officially announced she is running for President, her head "bloodied but unbowed" by the scandal about her ethnic heritage, which I will call Cherokee-Gate.

Warren is a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, which is remarkably tolerant of screw ups. Senator Ted Kennedy's political career survived Chappaquiddick (although Mary Jo Kopechne did not). Congressman Barney Frank continued serving in Congress after he admitted hiring a male prostitute as a personal aide. Representative Gerry Studds was elected to Congress six more times after he was censored by the House of Representatives for having a sexual relationship with a 17-year old page (the vote was 420 to 3). In fact, Studds' constituents on Martha's Vineyard gave him a standing ovation after his sex scandal broke.

So Liz came take comfort from the fact that Massachusetts probably doesn't give a damn whether she advanced her career by calling herself an American Indian. The Bay State likes to send moral reprobates to Washington DC.

But playing footsie with one's race to get ahead in the Ivy League won't play well in the Rust Belt, where the children of unemployed steel workers lack the temerity to call themselves Chippewas in order to get a college scholarship.

Thus, if Warren's presidential bid is to have legs, she needs to develop a substantive campaign platform to distract potential voters--and she needs to do it fast. How about focusing on the student-loan crisis?

Senator Kamala Harris stole a march on Warren when she came out for free college, so Liz has got to think of something sexier regarding the student-loan fiasco.  Here are some suggestions, which I hope she will embrace:

1) Legislation barring the federal government from garnishing Social Security checks of elderly student-loan defaulters, a proposal that Senator Warren and Senator Claire McCaskill proposed a few years ago.  That's a no-brainer, in my view.

2) Amending federal law to stop the IRS from treating forgiven student-loans as taxable income. Who could argue against that?

3) Capping accrued interest, penalties and refinancing fees on student loans to no more than 50 percent of the original amount borrowed. Currently, we see college borrowers whose student-loan balances have ballooned to three or four times the original loan amount. Surely that' a reasonable proposal.

4) Revising the Bankruptcy Code to allow distressed student-loan debtors to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy like any other unsecured consumer debt. Or if that lift is too heavy, at least let borrowers discharge their private student loans in bankruptcy.

5) Allowing parents to discharge their Parent Plus loans in bankruptcy if they run into financial trouble and can't pay off the loans they took out for their children's college education.

I admit I hold a grudge against Senator Warren for her Cherokee scam. After all, I grew up in Anadarko, Oklahoma; and it never occurred to me to call myself a a Nadarko Indian. Just like Liz, I've got a law degree; and Liz's eyes are bluer than mine.  If I'd played my cards right, I too might have become a Harvard law professor.  I might have been Harvard Law School's first cisgendered person of color!

But all will be forgiven as far as I'm concerned if Senator Warren will only endorse some of the proposals I've listed. And if she would do that, I think she might do very well in the Iowa caucuses.