The Liberal Arts College Death Spiral
Early reflections on the downfall of Roanoke College
When the history of Roanoke College in the 21st century is told, it will most likely be described in one of two ways: either as a heroic narrative of outsider technocrats swooping in to rescue a small, private, liberal arts college on the brink of financial collapse, or as a tragedy of Shock Doctrine profiteers swooping in to manage a controlled demolition.
Either way, the opening chapter of this history will look back in time at the larger forces that propelled Roanoke College to the cliff’s edge. (I am a historian and a former professor at the college, but I am not a historian of higher education, so what follows is just my novice stab at a suitable backstory.)
Many small private colleges in the U.S. began either as the intellectual playgrounds of a moneyed elite (who sometimes funded these institutions through the buying and selling of enslaved people) or as seminaries supported by Christian denominations (who also sometimes funded these institutions on the backs of enslaved people), and in many cases they began as both these things—as white supremacist, Christian seminaries for a moneyed elite.
After World War II, there was a rapid democratization of the college experience in the U.S., which saw the explosive growth of state institutions of higher learning. As public higher education expanded, private colleges, in turn, pitched themselves as part of the great democratization experiment, throwing open their doors to a more diverse student body, while also focusing on ‘selectivity’ to maintain a cultural (and also, still, class) elitism. (They could never turn their backs on the upper class.)
By century’s end, when I applied for college as a teenager, it seemed that private colleges advertised themselves in a somewhat paradoxical way: as diverse yet elite; as high-status, yet also readily accessible through aid and scholarships. Most of all they chased the lowest-possible student-faculty ratio—advertising themselves as a place of close collaboration and care between faculty, staff, and students. The view from my high school was that if you could get into—and afford to go to—a small private college, then there was a greater likelihood that you would finish college and be primed for a successful career. At the big state school, on the other hand, perhaps you would get lost in the shuffle and fall between the cracks. And if you did graduate, your degree would have less cachet in the post-graduate labor marketplace. Or so we were told. (A private school diploma is actually only as valuable as that school’s name recognition.)
All of these ideas came crashing down in the 21st century. College student applications began to decrease, especially at too-expensive private colleges. (A society with extreme income inequality cannot support hundreds of small private colleges.) Meanwhile, labor and operational costs at these institutions skyrocketed—no thanks to the lean, capitalist American system in which healthcare and other workers’ protections (heinously referred to as “benefits,” as if healthcare is a employee perk rather than a human right) are shouldered by private employers rather than by the state.
Those how-low-can-you-go student-faculty ratios started to become untenable, not just because the average student was paying far less than the actual sticker price, and employee ‘benefits’ (basic rights, not perks) were costing colleges more and more, but also because there were just so many employees now at the 21st century college. Whereas a century prior, faculty were basically the entirety of professional staff at a small, private college, covering not just curriculum but most aspects of what today might be called student life (for better or for worse), in the 21st century there is an ever-expanding non-teaching professional staff—from recreation managers to licensed professional counselors to career advisors to student support specialists—as well as an ever-growing administrative structure with a “VP” at the top of every division, supported by requisite six-figure-plus salaries, of course. The student ‘experience,’ as it is called—an increasingly micro-managed, market-driven, technocrat-led imagining of what college should feel like (much less what classes a student should take)—has come to define private college management in the 21st century.
When I arrived at Roanoke College in 2015 as a new assistant professor, it seemed that the institution was doing its best to stave off the consequences of these worrying trends by flying ever closer to the sun. The goal was to increase the value of a Roanoke College education such that the college might break into the top 100 of ranked liberal arts colleges (a status it never attained). Efforts were made to recruit and retain world-class faculty, as well as financially well-off students from new ‘markets’ around the country. Luring applicants to this small college in Southwest Virginia was essential to helping the institution pay its bills, we were told. Admissions counselors jet-setted to the Midwest, to California, to the Sun Belt, seeking the next ‘New England’ of financially-endowed young people (or, more precisely, their parents) to keep the liberal arts college afloat.
On top of that, the 21st century student, understood as a ‘consumer’ in a ‘marketplace,’ is looking for more than just an academic program, but rather a whole college ‘experience.’ This means that the quality of the residential college’s housing, food, and recreational offerings were seen as essential for luring in a tuition-paying, revenue-generating clientele. So, for example (and like many other colleges), Roanoke College built a major new athletic facility in the 2010s—a showpiece to be witnessed in admissions videos and on campus tours. (Yet the college’s dormitories remained in reportedly horrid conditions, according to both students and alumni. And that’s not even mentioning the recurrent flooding, black mold, and an alleged cancer cluster on campus.)
All told, the 2010s represented a kind of ‘Hail Mary’ effort at staying relevant in a crowded marketplace. Go big or go home. If Roanoke College could increase its reputation, then it might just stave off closure.
Finally, our historical overview ends with the COVID-19 pandemic. For the small, residential college that spent the 21st century building up ‘room and board’ as an essential component of their business model, having students return home for several semesters (not paying room and board) resulted in an incredible financial loss. Many small colleges laid off employees during the pandemic. Roanoke College was not immune from this trend, sacking roughly a dozen professional staff employees (but not faculty—a point that would be used by the subsequent administration to pit staff against faculty when the next round of cuts were announced). The administration also made cuts to employees’ retirement benefits. And wages, at least for the faculty, remained painfully stagnant.
While Roanoke College survived the pandemic, it did not emerge in anything that could be called ‘good shape.’ There would be no return to the heady days of the 2010s. Instead, faculty were told that the college was hemorrhaging money. The figure we were given was always shifting, but it seems that the college was coming up short by at least $5 million dollars per year in the early 2020s—if not much more.
What happened in this post-pandemic period—when the technocratic outsiders and their neoliberal consultants swept in and attempted to gut-then-rebuild the college in an effort to “save” it—is a story for next time.
A final word…
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So heartbreaking!