Forever Valpo Fundraising Campaign

[valpo95]

Here is a recent story about Allegheny College, showing their declining enrollment trends and recent S&P ratings cut for their debt. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/longtime-pennsylvania-liberal-arts-college-204417049.html

Allegheny has a good reputation as a small, quality, private liberal arts university located in western Pennsylvania. I have had several colleagues who have kids who graduated from there, and they generally thought it was a good school. Allegheny has 1,353 students, but this is down 37% from 2012. It also has an endowment of $264M (or about $198K per student per the NACUBO report;  VU has an endowment per student of $110K per student). The report highlights some of the same enrollment headwinds that have been discussed elsewhere.

My recent posts seem to be negative, instead I am trying to share some facts about the situation facing VU and other, similarly-sized private institutions.

[vu84v2]

Here is a recent story about Allegheny College, showing their declining enrollment trends and recent S&P ratings cut for their debt. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/longtime-pennsylvania-liberal-arts-college-204417049.html

Allegheny has a good reputation as a small, quality, private liberal arts university located in western Pennsylvania. I have had several colleagues who have kids who graduated from there, and they generally thought it was a good school. Allegheny has 1,353 students, but this is down 37% from 2012. It also has an endowment of $264M (or about $198K per student per the NACUBO report;  VU has an endowment per student of $110K per student). The report highlights some of the same enrollment headwinds that have been discussed elsewhere.

My recent posts seem to be negative, instead I am trying to share some facts about the situation facing VU and other, similarly-sized private institutions.

I took a look at Allegheny College's website. The striking thing here is that they have very few majors that can directly be tied to jobs/careers. Computer science is the exception. For "business", it is really just economics branded as business - no faculty or courses in accounting, marketing, supply chain, finance, etc. Bottom line is that they are a pure liberal arts + sciences college. Allegheny may do this very well, but that is not where the market is. Students and their families value these areas, but if they are going to pay a significant amount for college they expect a clear path to meaningful employment after four years. Thus, Allegheny is different from Valpo as Valpo has a meaningful and accredited College of Business, engineering, health sciences, nursing, etc.

[valpo95]

I took a look at Allegheny College's website. The striking thing here is that they have very few majors that can directly be tied to jobs/careers. Computer science is the exception. For "business", it is really just economics branded as business - no faculty or courses in accounting, marketing, supply chain, finance, etc. Bottom line is that they are a pure liberal arts + sciences college. Allegheny may do this very well, but that is not where the market is. Students and their families value these areas, but if they are going to pay a significant amount for college they expect a clear path to meaningful employment after four years. Thus, Allegheny is different from Valpo as Valpo has a meaningful and accredited College of Business, engineering, health sciences, nursing, etc.

84, all good points. Allegheny is not the same as VU, though there are few direct comparisons to VU that map across all dimensions. However, historically VU's largest program has been the College of Arts and Sciences - this is the same "pure liberal arts" focus you mentioned above. The challenge is the market and interest is moving away from those programs, even as the pool of eligible students gets smaller.

One of the continued takeaways for me is how difficult the job is for VU's leadership to navigate all of those factors. 

[vu84v2]

One of the continued takeaways for me is how difficult the job is for VU's leadership to navigate all of those factors. 

In fairness to VU's leadership, this is hard for most university's leadership to navigate. A company facing a major shift can repurpose or retrain its people, but that is far more rare for universities. Further, because of tenure universities need to retain many faculty regardless of whether their discipline is growing, steady or in decline. Only deep-pocketed universities can fund this sort of inefficiency. Not to mention the resistance by some parts of the organization or the need to partially retain those areas for a robust core curriculum.