Requiem for a College: The Troubling Trend of College Closures in the United States by Jonathan Nichols

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Jon Nichols gave his heart and soul to St. Joes College, as did his brother, as did his father before him. And over the years, it became his home, his sanctuary. He loved teaching. He loved being a professor and he loved his students…

Until the cracks in the institution began to be exposed…rising debts, years of “deferred maintenance” (a euphemism for ‘not fixing things’), declining enrollment coupled with less cash from greatly discounted tuition…

And suddenly he and his colleagues realized it was too late to save it from itself finally closing down for good in February of 2017….

The closure was devastating to faculty and students alike.
It is also becoming commonplace.
*
What happened at St. Joes is the stuff of Greek tragedy, or at least Death of a Salesman territory. It is seeing the iceberg way too late…or perhaps seeing it while no one believes that you have seen it…and then it suddenly becomes too late for anyone to do anything about it.
Jon searches for answers in the failure of other schools like his…
And finds many reasons why one school or another will fail.
“Each case is different, there are numerous variables at work all the time, and there is no single answer as to why a college might close. I mean apart from the obvious: ‘They run out of money.’”
Many look at education as the way to earn a living and then judge it solely on that.
I believe it is something more.
The mission of education is the betterment of society…the make better decisions in the future…to ensure that we even have a future.
But it is also to make us better humans, capable of a wide range of understanding and empathy.
*
“The love people have for the institution, and their desire to keep the doors open for the sake of the students, blinded so many of us. It silently urged us to continue at all costs and obfuscated our view of the facts in favor of taking on more debt, delaying key maintenance, and increasing tuition discount rates well above the market.”
This is an excellent book that details the journey through a traumatic event of losing one’s home, job, and purpose…and trying to make sense of it all. I feel like I really understand it now.

Very well done.








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