Editor’s note: This commentary is by Michael Crane, of Burlington, who is a member of the Marlboro Class of ’92 and the Marlboro College Alumni Association.
Anyone concerned with the demographic crisis in Vermont should work to prevent the unnecessary closure of Marlboro College. The college president and board of trustees are planning to export 110 college students, 80 jobs, and $55 million in assets from Marlboro College to Emerson College in Massachusetts.
Marlboro College students are active members of the Windham County economy. They buy from and are employed by local businesses. They have helped build affordable housing and regularly volunteer in the area. I know many alumni who are now residents, pay taxes, and have built local businesses which now employ the current generation of students. The demographic crisis the governor warns us about is real, but in the case Marlboro College it is preventable.
The college’s current leadership will claim that they have done everything possible to prevent this wholesale giveaway of a treasured Vermont institution. They claim that the combination of declining college students nationwide, decreased demand for liberal arts education, increasing costs, and tuition discounting is insurmountable.
Many former college staff, faculty, alumni, and administrators call these claims bunk. A National Center for Education Statistics 2018 report states “enrollment in postsecondary institutions is expected to increase by 13% between 2015 and 2026.” Statistics aside, consider that there were 19.9 million college enrollments in 2019 and Marlboro only needs to recruit between 50 and 80 freshmen annually to stay alive. In addition, Marlboro has done little recruitment of full paying international students.
While rising education costs are real, Marlboro has exacerbated its own troubles by retaining a nearly 1:1 student to faculty/staff ratio. This is absurdly unsustainable. Marlboro has the lowest faculty to student ratio in the nation at 5:1, a luxury it can’t afford when the average is 11:1. Marlboro spent $8.2 million in salaries and benefits in 2019. If the college maintained ratios closer to the national average, it could save $2 million-$3 million, which is about its current debt.
Degrees granted in liberal arts have decreased by 25% over the last 10 years while degrees in engineering technologies increased by 704% and math, statistics, computer information degrees increased by 54% to 80%. So why has Marlboro leadership chosen to ignore the market demands of 21st century students by not selling what they want? Because those who are making the decisions are those who stand to lose their jobs when the college downsizes. Over the last 10 years they invested tens of millions of dollars in new buildings for the arts, performing arts and music, but left the science building essentially untouched since I was a student in 1988. They also consciously chose to terminate the economics department.
The current leadership of Marlboro claims that they have done everything to prevent the closure of the college. What they haven’t tried is new leadership. The current Marlboro president had no previous experience in higher education administration or even teaching. His record of declining enrollment and revenue speaks for itself. Growth is not only possible at Marlboro, it happened. A former president of Marlboro grew the school to 320 students and opened a 42,000-square-foot Graduate Center in downtown Brattleboro. After his departure in 2002, the graduate center was slowly choked and eventually sold by the same Marlboro administrator who now wants to eliminate the entire institution, but retain his retirement in the Emerson deal. It’s not a mystery why Marlboro is failing. The solution for the school is to downsize and live within its means, to evolve with the changing demands for education, and to hire a president with the vision, enthusiasm, and drive to effectively lead change.