Last year, Katherine Anderson traveled from Texas to Philadelphia to attend a college she couldn’t find anywhere else, combining the music business, entrepreneurship and technology. Two weeks ago she received the amazing news that the university would be reopening. Shutdown within days.
The closure of the University of the Arts left her and 1,300 other students looking for somewhere to go or something to do.
By the time the school announced its closure, many colleges had already closed admissions for the fall. Anderson was accepted into the music industry program at nearby Drexel University, which she says isn’t ideal but is “probably the best option.”
“With everything going on, I felt very compelled to make a decision as quickly as possible,” Anderson said. She is currently suing the University of the Arts.
More colleges across the country are closing as they face plummeting enrollment, a result of both changing demographics and consequences of the pandemic. Closures in recent years have left tens of thousands of students in limbo — and at increased risk of never earning a degree at all.
Across the country, private colleges are closing about twice a month, according to the Association of State Higher Education Officials.
Before announcing its closure, UArts, as it is often called, had trained musicians and artists, dancers and designers in Philadelphia for nearly 150 years. The school has suffered from falling enrollment and said it faced “significant unexpected costs” that forced it to close. Several state and local investigations are currently underway into why the university ran out of money so suddenly.
“We have not yet received an answer to that question,” Lynette Kuhn, a top official at the Pennsylvania Department of Education, said Friday at an online information session for parents and students at the University of the Arts. Kuhn was responding to one of several questions posed by frustrated students about what university officials know about its precarious financial situation and what they are doing about it.
“We understand that you students … are faced with incredible circumstances, with disappointments that are beyond measure,” Heather Perfetti, president of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, an accrediting agency, said at the same meeting. “We all believe that no academic trip should involve this type of severe and sudden disruption.”
Drummer Adam Machado, 18, came to the University of the Arts from New York’s Hudson Valley to study various styles, including jazz and contemporary, in a major city. He had a $32,000-a-year scholarship, and it’s unclear if any other schools could match it. But he also wonders whether he’ll find the same curriculum, sense of community and ability to play shows in both New York and Philadelphia, where he performed Wednesday night with a band called Kids That Fly.
He mourns “not only for me, but also for a thousand other artists (who) were left without a home.”
Like many of his classmates who just a year ago went through the grueling college search process, he’s not sure what he’ll do next.
“You don’t really know where to start,” said 18-year-old student Cyrus Nassib.
“It’s very draining,” said Nassib, a theater arts major who just signed a lease on an apartment near his college campus as his parents move from suburban Philadelphia to the West Coast. “It just saps your motivation to do anything.”
Student enrollment at the University of the Arts has dropped by almost half since 2009. Nationally, the number of college students in the U.S. had already been declining steadily for years before the pandemic led to a sharp decline in student enrollment. Schools’ financial woes have been exacerbated by the botched rollout of a new federal form of financial aid, which has raised fears that hundreds of thousands of students give up college completely.
The University of the Arts has agreements with a half-dozen colleges and universities to admit UArts students and help them earn degrees. Formal agreements with a half-dozen other schools are pending with the school’s accrediting agency.
But the disruption caused by college closures has long undermined students’ education.
Nationally, about half of students whose campuses close do not resume their studies, according to the Association of State Higher Education Administrators, whose data examines both nonprofit and for-profit schools, including two-year colleges. Other students lose points or are forced to spend more to enroll elsewhere.
Democratic state lawmakers held a hearing Monday on whether to close the University of the Arts, and the Philadelphia City Council plans to hold its own hearing later this month.
“It raises so many red flags,” said Councilman Mark Squilla. “How can the board not know about the financial situation and then say, ‘We only found out at the last minute that we couldn’t get the money?’ Were they already fully operational? Did they have a line of credit that they can no longer borrow from? Have the banks closed them? You know, no one answers all these questions.”
Film major Ian Callaghan-Kenna, who took the bus to the University of the Arts, was coping with bouts of severe anxiety – not least because the college had already received thousands of dollars of his federal aid for the fall semester. He has joined a potential class action lawsuit against the school.
He said he was most upset about how quickly it happened.
“The fact that they acted like everything was fine and that just a couple of weeks ago we were a thriving organization, and now they suddenly had $40 million in the tank and had to shut down,” he said, having kind of one Deficit Assessment: “This is very, very upsetting.”