

Why Is It So Hard to Kill a College? - diodorus
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Is-It-So-Hard-to-Kill-a/231161/?key=SzpzJFE7MHdPNnFlMTZFYjcHO3VoMUkiYydKaHslbl5TEQ==

======
omnivore
The real problem is the way accreditation works. I've been in higher ed for
most of my career and the real issue here is once a college has accreditation
they can pretty much operate in perpetuity. Unless they go broke.

Sweet Briar was an unusual case because you had a fervent alumni, a dedicated
type of institution (all female) and a desire from people to close the place
without giving anyone say in the process.

The fact that they tried to do abruptly was precisely why the alumni rallied,
but they've been screwed because of how it was done.

If you want to talk about disruption, here's your trick. Raise enough funds to
take a college over and run all of the online programs you want, keep the main
campus and do what you want with it, but...ultimately, if you can get the keys
to a regionally accredited college, you could do a lot of things.

Most people just don't know the sector well enough to really understand how to
disrupt it from the inside out. (I obviously do.)

~~~
untilHellbanned
Are you going to do anything?

~~~
kansface
Raising a hundred? million dollars to "acquire" accreditation via a small
college is not within the realm of startups. Perhaps just tens of millions is
needed? Even if you acquired a college, turning it into a de facto online for-
profit institution would be an impossible sell to professors as an outsider. I
think its far more likely that some existing (accredited) college will offer
degrees online for pennies on the dollar with open enrollment - perhaps they
could start with degrees in eg CS, where online grading is trivial. Disruptive
innovations typically start at the bottom.

------
bcheung
With how expensive college is, and the fact that kids can borrow money from
the government to pay for it, how is it possible for them to go broke?

~~~
ghaff
Because they're expensive to run as they're set up today (large
administration, tenured faculty--although there's less of that than there was,
fancy physical plant). Small liberal arts colleges don't typically have
especially large endowments. They don't have access to a lot of the government
dollars that large research universities do. And, expensive as they are,
they're still constrained in how much they can charge and enrollments are
trending downward because they are expensive and the degree isn't necessarily
worth a whole lot. (In the case of Sweet Briar specifically and a variety of
other schools that are at or over the edge, they're also the victim of
changing preferences or demographics: all-women colleges in Sweet Briar's case
and many religious schools in the case of a college in my town.)

