Spotlight on Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University

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AmConMag: A College That Can Endure The Storm by Rod Dreher

David Whidden:

For the last several years higher education leaders have been talking about the demographic cliff that was set to arrive in 2025 – we knew there was going to be a lot of institutions that would struggle to stay open when that hit, but I think this pandemic has sped up the timeline.  Even big universities are financially struggling due to returning room and boarding fees, losing international tuition (international students tend to pay full tuition, so are cash cows for universities), losing athletic revenue while keeping coaches and support staff on the payroll, etc.  Marquette, for instance, has lost $15 million in revenue and the University of Wisconsin is going to lose $100 million (which is a small part of their budget, but still!).  If students stay at home next fall, small tuition driven institutions that were already dangerously on the brink of insolvency may not make it.

So, as a small, Catholic, 100% commuter school, in a small state, with a very small endowment you would think that we’d be one of the first colleges to fall off the cliff, but I am much more hopeful about our future than I am of other colleges.  All the things that used to be disadvantages for us are suddenly advantages.  We have no dorms, no Greek life, no sports, and not even a cafeteria, so we haven’t had to return any money to students.  And let me add that while the lack of those things might have seemed like a disadvantage before the pandemic, I never considered them to be a disadvantage, because when I walked into a classroom I knew my students had only one reason to be there, which was for an education (for instance, the day after the national championship game I had my first class of the semester at 7:45 am and only had two out of 29 students absent).  Most of our budget is spent on what is supposed to be the main mission of higher education, which is to teach and support students, not on things that are secondary to the university.  And it keeps our prices low compared to private Catholic colleges at around $10,000 a year for undergraduates, before TOPS (or to put it another way, a lot of our students who went to private high schools in the area pay less for college than they did for high school).

Maybe. Maybe not. Is there anyone there assisting the women with realistic life coaching/planning? Or do they not raise the issue of a "vocation" to be a wife and mother? The school may be safe from the higher ed bubble popping, but what's going to happen to the school and its graduates when the health care bubble pops and collapse proceeds?