When Cazenovia College, a 199-year-old private liberal arts school in upstate New York announced last Wednesday that it would close after the spring semester, sophomore Ally Ruetton was shocked.
“No one thought it was really going to happen,” she said. “I was talking with my professors Monday and Tuesday, and they just kept saying, ‘It's sounding positive.”
Junior Kailee Corlew compared the impact of the news to the sudden onset of the pandemic.
“Nobody really thought this was going to be a real thing,” she said. “Then out of nowhere it changes the whole direction of how we’re going to be thinking and living.”
Students and faculty became aware that Cazenovia might have to close when it defaulted on a $25 million bank loan earlier this fall. But the college’s financial problems had been building for years. In recent years, the student body had decreased 40% from a peak of nearly 1,000, a product of declining college enrollment rates across the country.
“Part of it is concerns about the affordability or value of higher ed,” said Dr. Robert Kelchen, head of the department of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “Part of it is, it’s just easier to go out and get a decent job at the moment without an education.”
Dr. David Bergh, president of Cazenovia College
