Small Colleges Can Save Towns in Middle America (2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-14/small-colleges-can-save-towns-in-middle-america

by Tomte • 8 years ago

43 50 8 years ago

zenbob• 8 years ago

I wonder if the student loan/debt bubble will hit these towns hard (if it turns out to be a bubble). Spending on higher education seems like its gains are unsustainable.

Apocryphon• 8 years ago

Valid counter to the article's premise, and leads me to a dumb question: why haven't more colleges attempted to cut costs in recent years, as tuitions and student debt continue to spiral?

village-idiot3• 8 years ago

Because there’s no incentive to.

First, the market clearly does not reward cheap education. A lot of prospective students and their parents are enamored with pricey colleges either for the status or for the perceived value. This is probably a result of cultural expectations lagging behind actual reality by a few decades.

Second, all the intermediary parties have no incentives to control cost. Student debt cannot be discharged under bankruptcy, so why would the lenders ever say no to any debt? They don’t care that the college is overpriced by a factor of 10 and the student will never pay off their debt fully, they’ll still pay 6-11% interest for the rest of their lives, which is highly lucrative for the lender.

mavelikara• 8 years ago

Because the cost reduction attempts are likely to reduce the paychecks of those in a position to make such decisions.

throwaway080383• 8 years ago

I grew up in one of these towns in the Midwest, and this is exactly what I fear for its future. The college tuition costs nearly as much as Harvard but the educational value is worse than that of a public university in many ways.

johnminter• 8 years ago

It is unsustainable. US higher education costs have risen faster than health care. The fraction of graduates who are behind or deferring their student loan payments has been rising. Queue Admiral Ackbar: It's a trap!

Students and their parents need to have some difficult conversations: 1) How well prepared is the student for a given major? Remedial classes add cost but not credits toward the degree. 2) Does the student have a track record of finishing what they start? 3) Will the starting salary for graduates with that degree permit the student to pay their living expenses and their loan debt? 4) Are the time-to-finish estimates realistic? IIRC, the majority of students in 4 year programs actually take 5-6 years.

hatmatrix• 8 years ago

*cue ?

rootoor• 8 years ago

I am skeptical that this can scale well. Not every small town can have an expensive college or university.

And besides, the towns that do get/have these institutions become gentrified and all of the the original residents get pushed to nearby small towns by professionals from more affluent regions.

In the end you end up with an upscale, expensive small town and surrounding depressed blue collar towns.

Source: I’m from a small town with a university.

fspacef• 8 years ago

Currently in Pittsburgh, PA and I'm seeing this happen on the daily.

stcredzero2• 8 years ago

I was born in Pittsburgh. Are you saying it's becoming a gentrified college themepark surrounded by hovels?

stevecalifornia• 8 years ago

San Luis Obispo is a good case. Really expensive. None of the graduates can really live here. Also, very gentrified. The mayor recently said that she didn't want to be mayor of a town that's all old white people. Not sure how that's not incredibly racist-- but you get the point.

stcredzero2• 8 years ago

The mayor recently said that she didn't want to be mayor of a town that's all old white people. Not sure how that's not incredibly racist

Perhaps the assertion of racism isn't quite true, because to be really complete, you'd have to add ageism.

gowld• 8 years ago

It's not racist to not want to drive away non-white and young people.

drb913• 8 years ago

It’s hardly racist to express personal preference.

It’s also not the same as saying “I don’t want any old white people in this town”.

hexane360• 8 years ago

She shouldn't have to specify "I don't want to be the mayor of a town that's all any race" because the only race that has any chance of dominating her town is non-hispanic white.

Similarly, it's not heterophobic to say "I don't want to work someplace where they don't hire gay people".

DoreenMichele• 8 years ago

I imagine no one would be offended had it been couched in different terms as desiring a more diverse and vibrant community with more of a future.

Agism or not, it's generally true that small towns with a lot of old people are typically towns in their death throes and white enclaves are typically practicing some form of racial exclusion.

pesmhey• 8 years ago

Punching up vs. punching down. Still a pretty mean thing to think or say.

anonymous5133• 8 years ago

Of course it can't scale. Traditional universities by definition are expensive. People like to think of education as being a quality problem but the real issue is education is too expensive for most. We are better off with lower quality education that is affordable by all.

wenc• 8 years ago

Also, the economy in college towns is very seasonal, plus if they are located in geographies with harsh weather, retail businesses are going to see a lot of peaks and troughs in foot traffic. Not all businesses are equipped to handle this type of fluctuation. Inventory forecasting becomes really hard, and business risks are increased.

Restaurants that serve cheap-eats (e.g. Chinese restaurants) tend to be ok since they have low overheads and are designed to handle peaking volumes easily (stir fries are easy, and most are family owned). But shoe, book retailers etc. will suffer in the summer when school's out, and in the winter when nobody's out and about.

sjg007• 8 years ago

I mean, not everywhere. Minnesota has plenty of small colleges and housing near by can be very cheap.

adventured• 8 years ago

Small to mid-size college towns are among the best places to live in the US, and there are a lot of them to choose from coast to coast.

They have an economic base - and often tax support - that keeps them from eroding as other small towns without colleges tend to. Their infrastructure tends to be reasonably maintained, whereas most non-college towns always struggle to upkeep even basic infrastructure. Crime and murder rates are typically between very low and moderate (and almost universally below what you see in large cities). Housing is extremely affordable. Connectivity is usually solid, another perk of the town having more resources and consistent economic activity.

Pikeville, KY is too small imo at just 7,000 people, however you can find a lot of other college towns / cities at more like 15,000 to 30,000 that have better lifestyle amenities.

thrower123• 8 years ago

Land-grant colleges on the east coast tend to be a bit of a raw deal for their communities, since they don't pay taxes and require additional services and policing.

UNH is particularly bad.

munk-a4• 8 years ago

Sort of, but if you live in one of these towns and something expensive that the university can opt out of is wrong then the city can end up subsidizing the university as the local populace is held hostage by monied interests. Assume that the city water quality is poor and there are 5k students and 7k residents, if the residents can be sated safely off of wells but to support 12k people the city would need a desalination plant then will the university shoulder that full cost? What portion should they be on the hook for?

It's a complicated question but in today's world likely the answer is that the university will threaten to remove all their tax paying and the city will shoulder the burden entirely themselves.

pmiller22• 8 years ago

How often have you known a (non-diploma mill) college or university to just pick up and move? Or, how else would they “remove all their tax paying “?

analog31• 8 years ago

Factories do this all the time. The paper companies are all lining up for state subsidies in Wisconsin.

electricslpnsld• 8 years ago

Housing is extremely affordable.

Is there data for this? I spent a good chunk of my life in a mid-sized college town in the south, and last I checked the average home values there are eclipsing $400K.

Just some data points, pulling median home values in some college towns across the US off the top of my head:

Davis, CA: $641,500

Charlottesville, VA: $412,700

Chapel Hill, NC: $449,980

State College, PA: $316,600

Williamsburg, VA: $303,400

Berkeley, CA: $1,281,900

Wellesley, MA: $1,267,600

Davidson, NC: $360,000

Ann Arbor, MI: $360,300

Some of these aren't too bad, but I don't think they fall into the category of extremely affordable. Professors and doctors and all the folks associated with Colleges and Universities make enough money to drive up home prices!

munk-a4• 8 years ago

Amusing, in Burlington VT the housing costs have risen to the point where professors can't afford to live in Burlington, it's all the student money that drives things up, this is due in a large part to the fact that most students only dorm 2 years of their degree and senior year housing isn't actually guaranteed by the university, it's a lottery of whatever units are left over after allocating the more junior years.

Boston actually has a similar issue with students inflating housing, but it's diffused over a much larger population so it's less directly impactful. I think a large part of this is that since, as a parent, you're mortgaging your house to send your child to university anyways a few extra thousand for a nice apartment for them isn't too bad.

topkai22• 8 years ago

About half (the expensive ones) of those listed are suburbs or exurbs of major cities, not really what the article is talking about, and they are all pretty large.

It’s probably fair to say that university towns see prices go up relative to their surrounding towns, but fundamentally almost any piece of real estate in rural Kansas is cheaper than coastal California.

gnulinux• 8 years ago

Among all the middle sized cities you could choose, you included Berkeley? One of the most expensive cities in the whole US. Since Berkeley is a college town, most people (i.e. students) are ok living in very, very shitty conditions. When I lived in Berkeley as a student my rent was something like $700 plus utilities and I was sharing a tiny house with 5 other people and my room was a triple. Living comfortably (i.e. single with acceptable personal space) costs you >$1300. I'm living in Boston currently and my rent is $900 for a large single. Am I crazy to guess that Berkeley housing market is even more expensive than Boston? There are definitely better places to live in US than Berkeley, ime most people who live there are either students or engineers working in the Valley making 6 figures. So imho GP comment can still be right if you exclude edge cases.

pmiller22• 8 years ago

I’ve lived in two “college towns,” one with 2 small liberal arts colleges an a community college; and the other with an R1 university, a small liberal arts college, and a community college. All of the liberal arts colleges are private and expensive. Both towns were and are shitholes. The only source of culture, and the main source of jobs in both cases was the schools. That doesn’t work well for people past college age.

Granted, this is merely anecdata, but I think it’s at least enough to challenge you to present actual data.

munk-a4• 8 years ago

Sorry, to clarify... The article implies that a town of 7000 was better off because it had an additional 3000 residents, this is entirely unsustainable and for a small town in middle america to "be saved" a bunch of other failing small towns would need to continue to feed that one working small town. In the long view those other small towns would slowly evaporate into the town with the college (turning it into not-a-small-town) or would evaporate into an existing urban center, and the article specifically notes that the college is notable only to locals, so we can assume (possibly wrongly, I admit) that the majority of the student base isn't composed of people moving from cities for a rural education (which is the only sort of scenario I'd see this working in and actually does work in a number of small towns in new england that are essentially propped up by money flowing in via the university)

HarryHirsch2• 8 years ago

Count me skeptical. The two industries that a smalltown college supports are landlording and beer bars. Neither offer skilled employment for the townsfolk, and there's an incentive for the local politicians to be "business-friendly", i.e. anti-student and pro-landowner. Not a good combination, especially if the landowner lives out of town.

maxerickson• 8 years ago

There's gonna be more educational staff than bartenders. By a fair bit.

HarryHirsch2• 8 years ago

A good number of faculty at smalltown private colleges are adjuncts, with a salary of USD 600 per month and course, or thereabouts. They aren't going to spread the wealth. New faculty are often hired at non-tenure-track level, with a salary around 40-50 kUSD.

Higher education is in crisis. The State University of New York is talking layoffs. They are reasonably sound, if they feel the stress, what is it like at the Catholic College of Our Lady of the High Desert in northeastern New Mexico?

Many small colleges are going to go down in the next 5 - 10 years, and good riddance. They aren't providing a better education than the state school nearby, and they are more expensive. What's the point of Paine College when you can attend Augusta State University for less?

rtpg• 8 years ago

If you live in most college towns you should know it goes beyond that.

A dumb example would be a video game store. College kids have a lot of time and unlike most old people might want to pick up some games. Sure, there’s Amazon but second hand stuff is cheaper.

On a different level, you have stuff like auto repair shops, grocery stores, even gas stations that get benefits from a student population in an area. We all gotta eat after all. Stuff like parks can get use as well

And if even 1% stay and start a business in the area afterwards that’s still something that likely wouldn’t exist otherwise because people tend to start businesses wherever they are.

There is a bit of a risk of simply feeding the students into the nearest large city but even then you’re looking at 4 years of student loan money spent on various consumables in the area.

The biggest worry is indeed for real estate pricing.... which is why it seems very reasonable to force schools to build appropriate housing for their students instead of just relying on local stock.

bongo662• 8 years ago

Lexington Kentucky could be a good example of this, though I dont know if UK would be considered small.

village-idiot3• 8 years ago

At 30,000 students, UK is definitely not small.

Also, it’s a land grant university. Those are big, old, and typically have great endowments.

NTDF9• 8 years ago

I think it is more unsustainable to build infrastructure for small towns sized 7000.

We should want more consolidation so as to spend less on infrastructure creation and maintenance. 7000 is too small.

village-idiot3• 8 years ago

Honestly, I don’t know if anything can save little towns, at least most of them.

At this point it’s a question of which 5% of towns will consume the population of the remainder of their peers.

shoguning• 8 years ago

The overall economics of small mid-tier universities is getting drastically worse--a few exceptions notwithstanding.

I expect a lot more closures and consolidations as tuition competition increases and students become more hesitant to take on debt.

protomyth• 8 years ago

It certainly does work for the reservations that have community colleges. People forget the colleges aren't just students, teachers, and buildings. It does drive jobs, but they also provide a focal point for programs, grant funding, social services, and events that would otherwise not visit the community. Most of the community colleges on reservations are also vocational schools. This combination of activities has a positive effect on a community as a whole.

AtlasBarfed• 8 years ago

That will work out great when the middle tier of colleges implodes.

Small Colleges Can Save Towns in Middle America (2017)

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