The Small Private Colleges Dying in a Winner-Take-All University Marketplace [ WSJ ]

The flava:

The financial troubles at St. Michael’s College hit home for biology professor Declan McCabe when he noticed Buckthorn shrubs encroaching on walking trails near the house of the campus president. 

Enrollment declines opened the door to maintenance staff reductions, giving the invasive shrub the upper hand. McCabe—a roll-up-your-sleeves, get-it-done Irishman—taught his students to identify the woody plant and cut it back with handsaws and loppers. He turned the chore into lessons on the environment.

Tenured professors doubling as groundskeepers at a $70,000-a-year private college in New England is another sign of what is shaping up as the bleakest era for America’s smaller private schools. 

Consolidation of the nation’s nearly trillion-dollar higher-education sector is driving a new winner-take-all market, benefiting Ivy League campuses, flagship public universities and schools with high-profile sports teams and renowned research institutions. They enjoy high demand and a surplus of full-tuition payers, while lesser-known campuses juggle cost cuts and steep tuition discounts, including at St. Michael’s, to fill seats. . . .     

The article:

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/college-tuition-loans-budget-cuts-7d0ea05f

Entire NSF science advisory board fired by Trump administration [ Nature ]

The flava:

All 22 members of the advisory board that advises and oversees the US National Science Foundation (NSF), a leading funder of basic science, were fired on 24 April without explanation. Each member of the NSF’s National Science Board (NSB) received an e-mail on Friday afternoon saying that “on behalf of President Donald J. Trump”, their positions were “terminated, effective immediately”.

Members of the NSB are appointed by the president and serve six year terms that are staggered, avoiding complete turnover. The White House did not immediately respond to Nature’s queries about the reason for the terminations or whether members would be replaced.

“This action to dismiss the NSB is unprecedented,” says Dan Reed, a computer scientist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and chair of the NSB from 2022 to 2024. . . .   

The article:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01361-7

Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators [ Washington Post ]

The flava:

It takes most college students at least four years to earn a bachelor's degree. Christie Williams finished in three months.

The North Carolina human resources executive spent two months racking up credits through web tutorials after work in 2024, then raced through 11 online classes at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in four weeks. Later that year, she went back to earn her master's — in just five weeks. The two degrees cost a total of just over $4,000.

Since then, she has coached a thousand other students on how to speed through the state college, shaving off years and thousands of dollars from the usual cost of a degree.

"Why wouldn't you do that?" Williams asked. "It's kind of a no-brainer if you know about it."

Many U.S. schools have been experimenting with ways to speed up traditional college programs to reduce the burgeoning cost and help students move into the workforce faster. Some offer three-year bachelor's programs, reducing the number of credits needed for a diploma by one quarter. Many more allow students to enroll in college classes while still in high school.

But the breakneck pace of the fastest online programs concerns some academics, who say there is a big difference in what students can learn in weeks or months compared with three or more years.

The phenomenon — sometimes referred to as degree hacking, college speed runs or hyper-accelerated degrees — has spawned a cottage industry of influencers making videos about how quickly they earned their degrees and encouraging others to follow suit. . . .    

The article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/04/19/accelerated-college-degree-hacking/

'I would've never stopped': Mass. college student thanks FBI for arresting him [ WCVB Channel 5 Boston ]

Filmmaker Ken Burns on the closing of his alma mater

“I think there’s an inability for those people who have wealth in the country to understand and value something like Hampshire. It was dedicated to a transformational education, in an era when higher education has been hijacked by the transactional: A college education is, to some, like a Louis Vuitton handbag. And that’s not Hampshire.”

--Ken Burns

More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing, a new projection shows [ NPR ]

The flava:

More than a dozen newborn lambs cavorted around a fenced-in yard beneath the scrutiny of their mothers and a few watchful students taking turns attending to them.

The lambs' successful births have been a needed bright spot at tiny Sterling College, which uses a 130-acre farm to teach agriculture and other disciplines in a part of northeastern Vermont so isolated there's no cell service and it's rare to see a passing car.

LillyAnne Keeley, a senior, likes that remoteness. "We have a beautiful view," said Keeley, in the barn where she's come for her turn checking on the lambs. "There are beautiful sunsets here. I kind of take it for granted every day."

She and her classmates have started taking such experiences less for granted now, since Sterling has announced that it will close in May at the end of this semester.

They're not the last students around the country who will suffer such disruption. A new estimate projects that 442 of the nation's 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities, with a combined 670,000 students, are at risk of closing or having to merge within the next 10 years. . . .    

The article:

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/13/nx-s1-5777582/many-private-colleges-at-risk-of-closing

College professors turn to oral exams to combat AI [ NBC News ]

Dr. Michael Sorrell and The Reinvention of Paul Quinn College [ Small College America ]

Karnataka professor proposes to student in front of class, beaten with slippers [ NEWS9 Live ]

A note about love from Southern Bubba, Ph.D.

I have heard Warren Buffett say that the greatest gift he had was his father's unconditional love.  And Lana Wachowski has said something similar--that it is like winning the lottery.  So many people have said this.  

I have sat in department meetings and other shared-governance meetings and so on. . . .  And while I have sat there, sometimes I have thought about another person in the room, "This person is always fighting.  Everything seems like a fight to them.  Did they never get unconditional love from anyone?"  And I think maybe they didn't.  Perhaps I am wrong.  It is humbling.  I don't know.  

My mother loved me.  I don't know why she loved me.  I don't know why she never abused me.  I don't know why she always treated me with respect and kindness.  But there it is.  I won that lottery.  It's not fair.  There's nothing fair about it.  I did nothing to deserve it.

This is something I wonder about.  Did my students get unconditional love?  Did my colleagues?    Same with administrators and board members.  It affects so much.  

What can I do to make this a better world?

--Southern Bubba, Ph.D.