The same day Sweet Briar College announced its controversial and since-abandoned plan to close, two private New York colleges made public an entirely different plan: a merger.
Union Graduate College is a small college that offers advanced degrees to a steady number of students, and has minimal debt and a balance sheet that is squarely in the black. Yet enrollment, while stable, is quite small — fewer than 400 full-time students — and the college doesn’t have enough money to expand as it would like.
Union Graduate was not weak, but it wasn’t necessarily strong enough to continue to remain healthy, and that’s why the president, Laura Schweitzer, urged the college toward the path of merger with Clarkson University, 190 miles away, which was already looking to strengthen its graduate offerings.
Schweitzer believes other colleges should follow suit. Mergers, she says, aren’t as scary as they seem.
“More colleges should really consider this. More boards should really think about how to best serve their mission. It’s not always through just keeping things going,” she offered. “It’s not always self-preservation.”
Read more at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/07/07/colleges-struggle-some-look-partnerships-and-mergers-relief
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