Top Problems Facing Colleges: And What to Do

Top Problems Facing Colleges lists the sixteen most daunting challenges facing the majority of private colleges in America. Many pundits have predicted that hundreds of the approximately two thousand private colleges in existence will fail and close within the next decade or so. What is happening? Over the past fifty years since the 1960s, the majority of college students have gravitated away from private colleges and toward community colleges and public universities, which is the result of massive public higher education expansion during the baby boom college years of the 1970s. The comparative high cost of private colleges, combined with growing doubts about the relative value of private college degrees, has resulted in major enrollment declines that are placing many private colleges in financial jeopardy. At the same time, the Internet is making these problems more apparent to prospective students and their families, thereby intensifying the seriousness of the crisis for many smaller, unendowed colleges. Top Problems offers strategies for colleges being subjected to these declines that can help avoid demise and construct a template for survival and even future success. The book is written for senior officers and trustees of private enrollment-revenue-dependent colleges. The sixteen problems cited include the need for challenged colleges to completely rethink the way in which they select presidents and trustees, along with the need for better cost management that will likely require goring many of the most cherished academic sacred cows.