Enrollment Challenges at Several Colleges in Virginia and Maryland

Sweet Briar College, a small women’s school in rural Virginia, got much smaller in 2015 amid the tumult of a shutdown plan announced abruptly in March and then canceled three months later. Its fall head count was 320 students, down more than half from the previous year’s total of 700.  But new data from Virginia and Maryland show Sweet Briar was not the only college in the region with significant enrollment challenges.