Half of the Businesses in this Industry Will Be Gone in a Decade

What it means for your college-bound children

Ric Edelman: It's Thursday, June 29th. Another one bites the dust. I've been warning you about this for years, and now here's yet another example that I'm right once again. Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, founded 85 years ago, has closed. The university couldn't attract enough students, couldn't generate enough revenue from tuition and fees, and has now closed.

You know, there are 1.3 million fewer college students today than just three years ago. That's $60 billion in lost tuition revenue. And dozens of small private colleges can't cut it anymore. They don't have enough students. They're not generating enough revenue. They don't have enough money in their endowment to keep them going. And so they're closing. It's projected that over the next decade, half of the nation's colleges and universities will close.

So as your student is considering what college to attend, there's a new question you have to ask. Not merely does the kid like the location? Does the kid like the environment or rural versus urban, big versus small, Division One football or not? Does the university have the kind of a major that the student wants, and all that kind of routine questioning, you know, distance from your house, the cost of attending.

Now you've got a new question you've got to ask. What is the financial health of the college that your kids are planning to attend? What happens to the students at Cardinal Stritch University? Well, if they've graduated this past May, good for them. They've got their degree. The fact that the school no longer exists really doesn't matter to them.

But what if the students there were only freshmen, sophomores or juniors? Those students now have to try to get accepted to a new school. But that means they have to wait for the new enrollment period and the application process to begin. They just might lose a full semester, maybe even a whole year. And even if they do get accepted to another institution somewhere else, they lose all their friends that they've made over the past year or three because everybody's going to scatter to a variety of different schools and the life that they were building at CSU, that life is over and when they do go to a new school, will the new school accept all the college credits that the students had obtained at Cardinal Stritch University? Or will the students have to retake classes spending more time and more money to get the degree?

This is a rather unconscionable situation because colleges don't readily disclose their financial health. And yet this could factor very significantly into the decision of what school to attend. If the college planning decision wasn't complicated enough, just got more so raising important questions for students and their parents.

You know, every week my wife, Jean, produces her own podcast. It's available at selfcare with jean.com and her new podcast premieres each week every Thursday. Jean's new topic this week is I'm Hungry, but What Else is Going On? You can listen to Jean's podcast anytime you like, everywhere that you get your podcasts, subscribe at Self-care with Jean.com.

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