Olivia Chieppo, a senior at Lesley University, arrived in Cambridge with a solid plan. She had transferred as a junior to the liberal arts school founded in 1909 to train teachers. The 22-year-old psychology major was drawn to the school’s arts therapy and photography programs.
“I was so excited to have any chance to mix the two,” she said.
By the time she enrolled, though, she says the photography program had been cut. “They gutted the program and they acted like I never signed up,” she said.
Then, she says, in her senior year, a required statistics course turned out to be taught by a part-time computer science adjunct professor.
“It was like a coding class,” she recalled. “It was so bizarre. My parents had never seen anything like it, nor had my peers. It made no sense.”
After she appealed, she was reassigned to another class. But a month later, the confusion continued when she got a notice saying she owed more than $3,000 to graduate.
“I was at work and I got a text while my kids were washing their hands for snack, and it was like, 'We know things get difficult, but you owe us money,'” she said. “And I was just like, 'What? OK, and so I screenshot it.”
She sent that screenshot to her father, Charlie Chieppo, a public policy analyst at the Pioneer Institute.
“When you get a screenshot from one of your kids, don’t read it,” he advised, laughing. “It’s never gonna be good. They’re often bills.”
Lesley declined to make any leaders available to comment for this story, but Diana Pisciotta, a spokesperson for the school, said “every single student experience matters greatly” and Lesley has invested in a model it believes is both “professionally-oriented” and “sustainable for the long term in a really complicated landscape for higher education.”
It’s no secret that small many liberal arts colleges like Lesley have been struggling with enrollment and cash flow. And in Massachusetts, some lesser-known schools have already closed or merged, out of time and money: Mount Ida, Newbury, Pine Manor and, most recently, Anna Maria College.
Last month, Hampshire College’s announcement that it would shut down surprised many who remember its role in re-shaping American higher education. With fewer college-aged students in the Northeast, rising operating costs, and a market that increasingly rewards scale, brand and selectivity, several other well-known schools are struggling on the margins, too.
The result is a widening divide. While elite institutions grow more competitive and better-resourced, regional public universities and tuition-dependent private colleges are trimming programs, cutting staff, and in some cases — like Hampshire — running out of wealthy donors to stay afloat.
Students and parents say staffing and program cuts are affecting the quality of education and undermining public trust in higher education, and they want college accreditors to do more to protect consumers and hold institutions accountable.
“I don’t know how much the state can do to get in and straighten all this stuff out unless they want to start funding all these private colleges,” said Chieppo, a longtime civil libertarian who now supports more oversight of these institutions as a consumer despite his political views. “I’m a phony, clearly,” he said, chuckling.
A recent analysis from the Huron Consulting Group predicts more than a quarter of private, nonprofit four-year colleges could be at risk of closing within the next decade. So are schools like Lesley, with a relatively healthy endowment, built to last?
“I’m not sure,” said Robert Kelchen, who teaches higher ed policy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “Will they hang on? I think most of them will.”.
Lesley’s enrollment has fallen by nearly half over the past decade, a decline that, Kelchen said, makes reinvention and transformation difficult.
“Many of these colleges are in areas where the population is declining,” he said. “And students are increasingly choosing to go to larger institutions.”
Survival, he added, may depend on recruiting students who hadn’t planned to attend college at all, or some of the 43 million Americans who tried to earn a degree but stopped out.
For Olivia Chieppo and her dad, they’re just relieved to be getting out of the system in time before any more consolidation, mergers and closures.
After her father intervened, the university waived Olivia’s balance. Now she is set to graduate this month, just as Lesley’s embattled president, Janet Steinmayer, prepares to step down with no permanent successor yet named.
To Larry Ladd, an advisor on university governance and finance, that timing is not unusual.
“As soon as a president announces publicly that they are leaving, the president loses all authority,” he said. “And you want a president to maintain their authority during their whole presidency.”
Ladd noted that Lesley’s enrollment has been shrinking for two decades, forcing administrators to make difficult choices, aligning costs with a contracting student body and doing so quickly.
“The number of students interested in enrolling at Lesley has gone down,” he said. “So the university has had to adjust its expenses to match the revenue that’s coming in.”
Even as Lesley administrators have described a path forward, there were more signs of trouble for the university. Last week, faculty and staff went on strike. Olivia Chieppo and a handful of other students joined them on the picket line outside the main building in Porter Square, holding handmade signs that said “Lesley students care. Why don’t you?” and “Job security for core faculty.”
“This is the third time they’ve gone on strike since I’ve been here,” Olivia said, exasperated to be missing her final classes.
Pisciotta said no classes were officially cancelled because academic leadership stepped in to maintain continuity.
“We recognize that it’s not ideal,” she said. “But we were prepared for this and have put steps in place to assure that students continue.”
As a parent and consumer, Charlie Chieppo said his daughter’s college experience has been disorienting. Colleges like Lesley, he said, can seem as if they are just scraping by in the shadow of places like Harvard nearby. But he’s reluctant to write them all off.
“It’s not like we live in Nebraska. These schools are central to Massachusetts’ economy,” he said. “To the whole state’s identity.”
What he sees instead is an effort to ride out and endure these rough times for the industry.
“The strategy of a lot of these schools is to say, 'Well, gee, let me see if I can hang on a couple more years when the herd can thin a little bit more,” he said.
And by then, many colleges hope they can just survive and be in a better position to pay their own bills and keep the lights on.
