Flunking out

Haverhill's Bradford College is now closed. But the problem wasn't that small liberal-arts colleges are doomed -- it's that Bradford didn't know how to be one.

by David Valdes Greenwood

A grandfather clock stands in the entryway of the main building of Bradford College, the Haverhill institution that saw its final class graduate on May 20. A gift from the first class of the 20th century, the clock had fallen into disrepair over the years. Students from the Class of 1999 -- who had no idea that their graduating class would be the college's second-to-last -- saw the timepiece as a connection to this tiny liberal-arts college's proud tradition; as a gift to the college, they restored the old clock to gleaming hardwood glory. Despite its evocation of a bygone era, the clock still works just fine.

The college, which has graduated thousands of students since it opened in 1803, has not been as lucky in its old age. Citing financial woes, the college's board of trustees announced on November 23, 1999, that the school would close for good after graduating the class of 2000. Administrators insist that the school fell victim to an academic climate that favors large public schools over small private ones. "I do think small liberal-arts colleges are in trouble," says Jean Scott, who was president of the now closed college. "The landscape is shifting a lot, and the system favors public education."

It's a nice theory, but it's not entirely accurate. The hard truth about Bradford College isn't that the school fell victim to an unforgiving marketplace. It's that the school's resources were mismanaged by administrators who made costly financial mistakes as well as miscalculations about what appeals to today's prospective college students. Bradford ignored the fundamentals of good business that other colleges its size practice in order to survive. Instead, the college made logic-
defying choices: failing to balance the budget for years in a row, borrowing heavily on the strength of hazy enrollment forecasts, and dipping into the endowment more deeply and more often than was prudent. If a few crucial decisions had been made differently, the school might still be open today.

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"I've been around 20 years, and only a small handful of independent colleges have closed [in that time], mostly seminaries and religious institutions," says Charles Cook, director of the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education for the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Since Central New England College in Worcester shut down a decade ago, closings have mostly involved sectarian schools such as St. Hyacinth in Granby, Massachusetts, and the two New England campuses of Aquinas College.

John Harney, editor of the New England Board of Higher Education's Connection magazine, says that there was a decline in enrollment in New England institutions of all kinds between 1992 and 1997. "[But] there's been an uptick recently," he says. "Colleges [are] saying they're having the biggest applicant pool in years." National trends bear this out. Although three-fourths of all students attend public institutions, 1997 enrollment (the last year for which final figures are available) revealed that the "uptick" for small private institutions was nearly three times that for state schools
(1.3 percent for private nonprofit colleges, versus 0.5 percent for public schools), according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Harney adds that this may be even truer close to home: "Historically, private institutions play a larger role in New England than in other parts of the country."

But such trends weren't enough to save Bradford. According to Les Ferlazzo, who chaired the college's board of trustees from 1992 through 1998, the school had been "struggling with cash flow" since 1971, when administrators decided to expand from a two-year to a four-year program. Bradford routinely exceeded its budget by about $4 million a year, according to Jean Scott. (Ferlazzo notes that the figure was slightly lower during his tenure.) In the mid '90s, Bradford's board contacted nearly all of its alumni in a drive to raise more than $10 million to stabilize the institution. But the staggering truth is that this campaign, which tapped alumni's deepest pockets, simply kept the school solvent, rather than cushioning it.

Meanwhile, the school's endowment, which Ferlazzo says was once "about $24 million, but shrinking every year," was being used like a checking account. Much of the endowment was legally restricted to particular uses (the library or scholarships, for instance), and the remainder should have been tapped into at a rate of no more than about five percent annually, in keeping with industry norms. That standard was briefly met in the mid '90s, according to board members, but by the end of the decade the college was borrowing from the endowment so heavily that Ferlazzo says the unrestricted monies are now essentially gone. In the midst of such fund-juggling, the board made a bad call, building new dorms in the wake of a slight enrollment increase -- an $18 million mistake from which the college never recovered. Enrollment fell before the dorms even opened.

Financial trouble might explain the hurried decision to close the institution, but that alone doesn't account for why the college ended up in this position. Other small colleges are struggling with finances, but they're finding ways to succeed. Look at Trinity College in Burlington, Vermont. The 75-year-old women's college had been considered to be on death row by education watchers for years. "People expected us to close, " says Kathleen O'Dell-Thompson, vice-president for institutional advancement, "and then we didn't."

In May 1999, Trinity's board of trustees announced that the college would cease independent operations as of June 31, 2000, remaining open after that only if it were to merge with another institution. Six months later, Trinity's board reversed its decision. "There were no angels in the wings," O'Dell-Thompson says. "It took the work and initiative of many people; the entire community got involved." First, Trinity restructured its debt to solve the immediate problem. It followed that up with an innovative plan to generate income by leasing the upper floors of some of its buildings. Alumni and faculty pitched in to become a huge ad hoc admissions team, getting the word out that the school was staying open after all.

So why did one bad decision to borrow $18 million for new dormitories run Bradford into the ground? The answer is that it didn't. The choice to build new dormitories wasn't the only bad call the school's administrators made; it was merely the most obvious one. The school had been making bad decisions about its core offerings for years. That was a major factor in a huge problem: a 50 percent attrition rate among students. Most colleges of Bradford's size have a 30 to 40 percent rate of attrition (nearby Regis College, in Weston, for instance, averages about 33 percent). Bradford was getting the students it needed, but once they arrived, the college couldn't keep them. "Some came and found two or three good professors and built a universe; others came and found that universe too small," says David Crouse, who was an assistant professor of English at Bradford.

Michael Freysinger, an ardent campus activist who graduated with the school's last class, says this smallness offered "the freedom to explore a particular intellectual interest, with brilliant professors willing to sit down with you and hash it out." But with only 35 full-timers on staff, Freysinger admits, "students complained that you could pick a major with only two professors, and have those two for your entire college career."

Perhaps in an effort to make up for these limitations, Bradford was spreading itself much too thin. With just over 500 students, the college offered 29 majors. By contrast, Stonehill College, in Easton, offers the same number of degrees for four times as many students, both graduate and undergraduate. Prospective Bradford students could flip through a viewbook and see the kind of boutique majors, such as gender studies and social-justice studies, that are available at larger universities, but when they arrived on campus, they discovered the piecemeal nature of these programs: shallow majors cobbling together courses and teachers from other departments.

The marketing problems went beyond academics. Bradford's glossy brochure boasted of an 80-acre campus. This was technically true, but it hardly prepared students for the college's concentrated physical plant: you can walk through the impressive Academy Hall (home of the clock) in the center of campus and, as you come out the back, see all the rest of the buildings. The viewbook talked about the importance of sports on campus -- not mentioning that students had to be bused to a local fitness facility and that the gym was an unrealized dream. Bradford's promotional material was a recipe for disaster: clearly made with pride, it nonetheless sold students a very different college than the one they found when they arrived.

In addition, the college itself was having trouble deciding what it wanted to be. In an "undifferentiated market, you need a niche," says Scott, and Bradford was afraid that liberal arts weren't appealing enough. So 10 years ago, the college instituted "experiential learning," weaving more internships, study-abroad programs, and trade-based activities into its curriculum. Colleges nationwide have adopted similar components, though few have made them as key to their academic strategies as Bradford did. In 1999, the board of trustees took it further, adapting the college's mission statement to focus on an integrated program of "hands-on curriculum" with an emphasis on experiences "outside of the classroom."

These high-minded phrases became the marketing slogans for the college, but what did they mean, exactly? "Experiential education is a menu of things -- menu in the worst sense of the word," says Crouse. It was, he says, "a perfect example of the college not knowing what it was." Michael Anton Budd, who was an assistant professor of history, is scornful of what he calls "this phony notion of experiential ed and so-called practical liberal arts." Both teachers maintain that what kept the students who did stay was nothing more than the most traditional virtues of small-school liberal-arts education: intense courses, training for life, and interdisciplinary thinking.

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How the college should have been selling itself is the $4 million question. "We needed to pare back to five things Bradford does well," Ferlazzo says, "but as the number of majors and conceptual opportunities grew, it was hard to tell what we were doing well."

Karen Sughrue, a Bradford alumna and the current chair of the board of trustees, says this concerned her from the beginning of her tenure. "When I took over as chair," she says, "this was one of the key issues: we really needed to focus on what we did best."

If administrators had pared the programs back to the core -- as a strategic-planning committee made up of faculty members was advocating -- the school would have been more clearly and unabashedly a small liberal-arts college than ever. Budd believes this would have been just fine. "The liberal-arts colleges failing are those that are trying to be trade schools," he says. "Good liberal-arts colleges succeed because they're doing it well." Around New England, there is evidence to bolster his claim. Marlboro College, in Marlboro, Vermont, is even smaller than Bradford -- intentionally so. According to public-relations director Donna McElligott, enrollment is capped at 300. This allows the college to budget accordingly while maintaining its original mission: small classes, one-on-one attention from faculty, and student involvement in the school's governance. In other words, a classic liberal-arts education.

Stonehill College has found that those are the qualities that attract its students. Brian Murphy, dean of admissions and enrollment, says that in an annual survey, matriculating freshman always report that the same three or four factors led them to choose the college: small size; location near, but not too near, a city; and emphasis on critical thinking. These are the exact qualities that were once celebrated by faculty and students at Bradford, but Stonehill has managed to translate them into a commanding enrollment of 2100 and an endowment of $100 million. Murphy says this success is due in large part to a past president "who was extremely skilled at conveying what we were doing."

Bradford never managed that trick. "We haven't made our case well enough," admits Scott, "or else it has gotten lost in the shuffle." Despite the widespread desire to look at Bradford's closing as an omen or warning for small liberal-arts schools, the reality is that students will return to Trinity, Stonehill, Marlboro, and other colleges like them next fall. Those in power at Bradford simply did not have the vision that the class of 1999 had when they showed that a relic from the past could be made to work again. If a few decisions had been made differently, the glory of Bradford could surely have been restored. But now, two weeks after the last class has graduated, all that's left is lots of memories, an empty campus, and a 100-year-old grandfather clock that still keeps time.

David Valdes Greenwood is a frequent contributor to the Boston Phoenix. He can be reached at valdesgreenwood@worldnet.att.net.