Changing Course: Reinventing Colleges, Avoiding Closure: New Directions for Higher Education, Number 156

by Alice W. Brown (Editor), Sandra L. Ballard (Editor)

Institutions of higher education are constantly facing economic challenges to their survival. Nowhere are the challenges greater than in small private colleges and universities across America. None of these colleges can assume that its stability is assured in perpetuity. No thriving college is immune from unforeseen disaster, just as no struggling college is irreversibly destined for closure. This issue presents stories of colleges in crisis and considers what makes the difference between a college that closes and one that nearly closes but manages to remain open. It offers a range of revealing, hard-won experiences of college presidents who led their campuses in times of crises. Some colleges found no way out, and their stories offer lessons that are just as valuable as the stories of colleges that reinvented themselves and survived. This is the 156th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Higher Education . Addressed to higher education decision makers on all kinds of campuses, it provides timely information and authoritative advice about major issues and administrative problems confronting every institution.

106 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Matt Ely · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like any edited volume, this is going to have some variance with each essay. The issue is that more essays than you'd think face the same issue. Most of these case studies of college closures and near-closures are written by those colleges' presidents. As such, many of them seem almost defensive, more interested in explaining how the institutional issues weren't their fault, actually.

If I were to recommend anything from this volume, I'd go with the chapters on St. Mary's Academy and on College of Charleston. The St. Mary's case study focuses on realigning an institution with its founding charter, which is an uncommon approach to closure. The Charleston chapter is, honestly, better because it wasn't written by the college's president. The volume's editor does a good job of illustrating the unusual process of a single institution going from municipal to private to state control over the course of thirty years.

The rest of the chapters are pretty forgettable for broad purposes unless you're studying those specific institutions.