The 7 Trends Shaping Small Colleges - Commentary

Mary B. Marcy, president emerita of Dominican University of California, and president of MBM Consulting, writes:  The question of how many small colleges will close has become something of a cottage industry over the past decade, and the intensity and frequency of these predictions only increased during the pandemic. But as Chronicle reporter Lee Gardner recently pointed out, a catastrophic die-off of small colleges has been predicted for well over a decade, and has not come to pass. The more pressing question is how small colleges are managing ongoing austerity, and how they are using new approaches — some of them risky or controversial — to meet difficult circumstances. There is more to be learned from how these campuses are coping with their challenges than there is from post-mortems of closed institutions.