If you want to know why operating a college like a business is a bad idea, look no farther than City College in Florida. Earlier this week, City College sent an email to its students announcing that it planned to cease operations. It is offering a self-managed teach-out plan, but only to students who are at least 75% of the way through their academic program at the school. All other students will need to continue their education elsewhere.
Businesses operate until they don’t. They can be open one day and gone the next without warning or explanation. In fact, three-quarters of all businesses fail within the first 15 years of operation. If most higher education institutions operated that unreliably, no one would go to college. City College’s Hollywood campus opened in 2011. Its Altamonte Springs campus opened in the 1980’s.
Like many for-profit colleges, City College specialized in training for health occupations. The school’s catalog offered several certificate and associate degree programs, including Diagnostic Medical Sonography, Radiologic Technology, EMT and Paramedic certificates, Surgical Technology, Nursing, and a bachelor’s degree in healthcare administration.
Although City College said it was negotiating teach-out plans with “neighboring institutions,” the school has not provided any indication of which schools will accept City College credits. Further, the school is not responding to questions, even from students who are 75% or more through their programs. Nor has the school provided any information about what prompted the closure.
The move has left hundreds of students out thousands of dollars in tuition they’ve paid for instruction they won’t receive.
This, above all else, is why higher education institutions don’t operate like businesses. For-profit institutions are especially sensitive to marketplace changes. When it no longer makes sense to operate, they shut down.
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I am not sure what the Mott Community College Board of Trustees hopes to accomplish by operating their publicly funded community college more like a business, but this is how for-profit schools – which are primarily businesses – operate. Business don’t operate at a loss – at least not for very long.
The truth is that Mott Community College cannot operate like a business. Businesses don’t get an annual cash infusion from the state and from the local taxpayers. Additionally, businesses don’t have the power to tax residents, nor do they answer to the voters the way at least a few of Mott’s trustees will on November 5. All of these things make schools and businesses very different from each other, and they highlight the reasons that schools are organizationally unprepared to operate like a business.
If the Trustees have concerns about Mott’s financial operations, they could have addressed those without decapitating the school’s academic operations. By placing someone with no academic experience in the President’s office, that’s exactly what the trustees have done.
The professional faculty at Mott are correct to express their concerns to the Higher Learning Commission. Hopefully, the HLC will sanction Mott appropriately and give the trustees sufficient incentive to accelerate their search for a qualified, permanent President.
According to Mott’s new interim President, she has crisis management experience. That’s good because she’ll have a crisis on her hands when she arrives at work on Monday morning.
Photo Credit: Michael Coghlan, via Flickr
