Well, if a potential new student vets their university options properly, they won’t touch St. Aug with a 10 foot pencil.
Although correct - the university is laying out a falsely optimistic outlook and pitching it to 17/18 year old’s, who probably don’t know better.
Oh yeah, highly unethical sh!t right there
Oh you mean the same people that take out 300k in loans, when their starting salary will barely be enough to cover living expenses?
Well, for reputable colleges it still ends up being a highly worthwhile investment. For St. A’s in its current form… trade school would be a MUCH better idea.
St. Augustine’s secured “substantially all of the university’s real estate holdings” to get up to a $30m loan from Durham-based Gothic Ventures. I wish them the best, but this seems like a bad idea.
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$30M really isn’t all that much money when you talk about running a university.
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Just kicking the can further down the road!
For reference their operating budget for the 2022-2023 school year was $35m. But they also now have $10m in tax liens and are facing other lawsuits. As @Jake said, just seems like they are kicking the can down the road and have now used seemingly their only asset ($100m assessed value) to fill in the hole. Just seems easy to envision a future where Gothic Ventures get all of their real estate for pennies on the dollar.
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Yup, that’s a fantastic investment for Gothic, but wow is SAU poorly run.
This article about St. Augustine’s also came at the same time this WSJ came about the surge in college closures.
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Who I really feel sorry for are the students and their families who are putting money and trust into a ship that’s doing everything to pretend that it isn’t sinking. Imagine starting your education, going into debt, and shelling out money, only to find that you can’t complete your degree? At some point, this is going to happen to a number of unfortunate people.
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Yeah that’s what the WSJ article talks about mostly. They estimate that over 500 private nonprofit schools have closed over the last 10 years impacting at least 1.25m students. Sad situation for all those students.
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Well, there’s a harsh-reality first-step towards your adult education: do a little research on where you’re about to drop a $40k+ annual student loan and make sure it’s not, you know, a sinking ship!
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Seems like a win-win for Gothic Ventures. Hopefully it works out for St Aug’s. I don’t think it will, but for the sake of the students I really hope it does.
PREDICTION: Gothic will seize all assets within 14 months…& flip the property for $60Million.
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In hindsight, they should have gone big on rezoning like Shaw did. Then they could have struck a deal like this which would not put the whole place on the line (which I am guessing this does).
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Think it would have been a lot more difficult. Shaw is already in the shadow of some larger buildings, while St Aug’s essentially borders Historic Oakwood. If you thought the ‘save our neighborhood’ rhetoric was bad on New Bern, this would be a whole new level of shitshow.
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I both agree with you on the resistance, and still think it would have been a better move. They could have gone for 5-6 stories stories on parts of the campus that don’t face the western neighborhoods.Oakwood cemetery is between them and the core of Oakwood, and they could have gone big near the highschool they border. Would it be painful? Sure, but they are in a pretty painful spot now
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Primary issue is time, which is something St Aug’s doesn’t have. Oakwood doesn’t need to get the zoning denied. They’d just need to wait it out until St Aug’s runs out of money.