SAU will go to the highest bidder after the school inevitably fails…especially if they default which looks highly likely.
Shaw has NO money…NONE. They can barley pay their own bills…look at their own campus.
The private sector will take these assets …which is what is needed…not Shaw
Why not just help the college? Why perform the same ole typical land grab towards the same demographic of people? Gentrification is warfare. The sugar coating in this thread is cringing.
We certainly do have a lot of experts on the intricacies of dissolving long-running universities. Does anyone have any reading about schools that have turned it around after going through dire financial challenges?
Morris Brown College went through dire financial challenges and lost accreditation in 2003, but got it back in 2022 after 19 years. Enrollment dropped as low as 35 students: Morris Brown College's hard reset - Atlanta Magazine
I do think that’s a fair question on its face, but I also think it’s largely been asked and answered both in this thread and in the real world: good-faith outside parties have been unwilling to provide assistance to St. Aug’s because they lack confidence in the current university leadership to be able to turn the ship around. I think the best example was the potential Self Help deal, which got spiked because the Trustees wouldn’t agree to a change in leadership.
Hard to turn the ship around when the University’s own leadership insists on driving it off a cliff. This article from the Assembly (The Fight that Fractured St. Augustine’s University) is the best reported piece I’ve seen on the situation.
…I can’t even take this seriously, SAU has shown to be beyond “helping” at this point, if not downright criminal (the board/people in charge, obviously), given that they’ve defaulted on loans and so clearly-as-day mismanage funds to the point that it’s become a detriment to the students they’re SUPPOSED to be serving. None of this is news, have you followed any of the verifiable updates in this thread about how poorly managed SAU has been??? LMAO
I just took (and passed with barely a passing score) the “Expert Consultant in the Intricacies of Dissolving Long-Running Universities”, course.
How can I help?
It does feel like there are folks on here who are cheering for the school to fail, which is messed-up…I am not one of them, but I think the majority of us do agree that the school has been mismanaged for sometime now, leadership seems unwilling to step back or take steps that will solve things, and failure feels nearly inevitable at this point.
No one here is cheering for its demise; the school has willfully dug itself into a debt hole that is clearly impossible to get out of. We just want the best development possible once they have to liquidate.
Exactly, no one is “cheering for the school to fail” - the school HAS FAILED and we’re cheering for the people responsible to face… any sort of accountability? At all??
Again, this is ALL to the detriment of SAU’s students. They’re the only people I have sympathy for, as I certainly cannot in good faith have sympathy for SAU leadership who have quite literally proven to be inept and possibly even corrupt.
I think some people are forgetting SAU had $10M in unsupportable cash disbursements in FY21 alone. A criminal investigation is needed to know where that money went at minimum.
I don’t know how long you’ve been following this thread, but I can think of one very specific poster who has been loudly and actively rooting for the demise of both of Raleigh’s HBCUs since as soon as this thread was started.
Meow meow meow Meow Meow meow meow Meow meow Meow meow Meow/ s
Last time I checked over half the of the schools in the United States have been suspected of mismanagement. Jim Goodman and the good ole boys seem exuberant with greed and propaganda (WRAL)… Meanwhile the Oakwood neighborhood is protected by historic redlining…
St Augustines college is a staple in American history and should be treated as such, not bulldozed.
We’re all dying to hear your recommendations for how they climb out of this insurmountable financial hole they’ve dug for themselves. Without the help of Federal, State or local funds because that ship has sailed.
I don’t see anyone cheering, I see people being honest and realistic about the situation. In my opinion the only people hurt here are students that this university is taking from with little to no chance of fulfilling the “student - university” contract. The board and admin have continued to act in bad faith on several fronts. In the real business world you would be committing fraud if you took on a contract knowing you had little to no ability or plan of completing it.
SAU remains accredited while the most recent SACSSOC decision is arbitrated. There should be an announcement on that soon. Meanwhile, classes and diplomas for the semester just completed were accredited. SAU may seek accreditation from another agency if the arbitration committee upholds the SACSSOC decision.
St Aug’s faces some strong headwinds, even with out a number of self-inflicted wounds. I am afraid they are in a death spiral, and without a deep pocketed angel stepping in it is is doomed.
The headwinds are common to all of higher ed, but are hurting the small, private liberal arts colleges the hardest.
I see these four as the most important: 1) the so called demographic cliff with a declining number of high school graduates beginning with this next graduating class. 2) The total devaluation of the liberal arts education. Students, and their parents, are more interested in being certified than educated. College more than ever is seen as an advanced VoTec, and ROI is the guiding concern. 3) Costs - which I blame on administrative bloat, which naturally effects the ROI. 4) Growing disinterest in college at all. I was at a meeting the other day where they hammered home that our biggest competition is not another institution (cough, Bama, cough cough) but hs grads choosing not to college at all.
HBCU’s and Women’s colleges are at the forefront of the danger line. The markets they once possessed a monopoly over, thanks to discrimination, now enjoy many more choices. With out state support, they are enrollment driven and any small drop in that enrollment can lead to economic crisis. I had a college buddy who as a dean at a small HBCU. 25 or so freshmen they were expected didn’t enroll for the fall, and he had to let to instructors go right at the start of the term!
All this gets around to @dtraleigh question about schools turning it around. I don’t know of any that faced SAU’s trouble pulling themselves out. I do know that at one point Meredith was in trouble, 20 years or so ago, but they seemed to have righted the ship. St. Mary’s just got rid of their 2 year college program and focused on high school. Birmingham Southern was in trouble, spend a ton of money and thought they were gonna rebound, and then sunk under the debt and shrinking enrollment.
There is a great culling of the colleges and universities occurring. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up losing 400-500 colleges in the next decade. I am afraid, again with out a real deep purse and some really creative thinking about curriculum, St. Aug’s is on this list.
These are huge. Even NC State estimates $5k/semester just for tuition+books, so you’re looking at $10k/year minimum not including any additional fees, food, housing, transportation, health insurance, or other expenses. They estimate double that if you live with your parents, or triple if you don’t. So let’s say between $80k and $120k for 4 years in-state at a public university. Expect to spend 2X that for out-of-state or 2-4X that for private (Duke is $70k/year for tuition alone, Peace is $35k).
From my perspective, unless college costs come down it will just never make sense unless it also means better job prospects on the other end. It makes more sense to just put the money in a Roth IRA for your kid instead.
We are definitely in a nationwide shakeout, and for most of the smaller institutions there is no light whatsoever at the end of the tunnel. St Andrew’s in Laurinburg is another closure. In a sense, many of these institutions did it to themselves. They feasted on tuition that most students could pay only by borrowing tons of money. In the process, the institutions raised their breakeven points. Shrinking an institution (or for that matter, a for-profit corporation) and stabilizing it financially at the same time is very, very difficult.
Meanwhile, 21 universities (Duke, among them) have endowments larger than $10 billion. Another 120 or so including UNC-CH and NCSU have endowments larger than $1 billion.