Small colleges try to weather change

Future uncertain as birth rates decline, attitudes shift about education

By KATHLEEN MOORE

ALBANY — When Cazenovia College outside Syracuse announced in December that it would be closing after 199 years, it was a frightening prospect for other small liberal arts colleges across New York.

With birth rates on the decline for nearly two decades, post-pandemic inflation and attitudes about the value of traditional education likely forever changed, how will smaller colleges weather such uncertainty?

It is hard enough for public colleges to remain healthy, as the State University of New York system has seen enrollment declines since 2019 — even with the lower tuition that state schools offer. But for small, private and mostly liberal arts colleges, there is no government subsidy that will help with debt, operating cost increases and dwindling enrollment.

For the seven schools with fewer than 4,000 students in the Capital Region the Times Union spoke with, the future is mixed. Some, such as The College of Saint Rose and The Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, are facing large enrollment declines. Others are thriving and running out of space because they have so many more students.

At small liberal arts colleges, students are the biggest source of revenue, which creates a financial crisis when enrollment drops. But on top of the institutions practicing self-preservation, the cities and towns they are in also nervously await the future because of the thousands of people colleges’ employ and for the artistic and intellectual contributions they make.

Enrollment declines

Some struggling colleges are turning to mergers, new programs and adding master’s degrees.

The Sage Colleges, which were technically under one umbrella but had separate names and campuses, merged in 2020 to manage enrollment and debt crises. Sage was founded in 1916 as a liberal arts college for women. In the merger, they gave up Sage’s single-gender education philosophy to become one coed college — Russell Sage, but retained the two campuses in Albany and Troy. And it worked. Debt has been reduced from $20 million to $9 million, “rightsized” by dropping many programs, and have had operating surpluses every year since the merger.

The College of Saint Rose in Albany has also been exploring partnerships with other colleges as its finances have tightened. The liberal arts college, founded in 1920 by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, used to have 4,000 students. This year it had 2,800.

“(Its) not laying down and accepting a dreadful fate,” spokesman Bob Bellafiore said. “It’s hard and they’re working through it.”

It cut many programs and refocused on creating a “teacher pipeline,” which seems to have resonated with students. Deposits for the fall for incoming education majors have tripled in comparison to last year, Bellafiore said.

Amid a lengthy lawsuit from a laid off professor, the college cut most of the music program but kept a music industry program.

“Looking at what students want, students say, ‘I want to be a music producer.’ So it’s a student interest matched with a potential career path, and they de-emphasized some things where students have less interest that frankly were high-cost programs,” he said.

Saint Rose also refinanced its debt last year, before the interest rates jumped, and saved $700,000 a year. But the college is still heavily burdened with debt, Bellafiore said.

“They did build a lot of property and acquire a lot of property.”

The Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, also in Albany, has seen a 33 percent decline in enrollment, from 1,234 students in 2019 to 930 students this year. The college was founded in 1881 and started out as one of only 14 colleges of pharmacy in the United States.

To increase enrollment, it is branching out to what the college sees as a booming career field: biopharma.

The National Institutes of Health annually awards more than $50 million to Capital Region companies involved in biopharma, life sciences and research and development, such as Regeneron and AngioDynamics. It seems like a wide open field for a college to teach, college President Toyin Tofade said.

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