Dive Transient:
- Saint Leo College introduced a collection of sharp cuts Thursday, searching for to turn into extra environment friendly and concentrate on development areas after an audit of enrollment developments.
- The Catholic establishment in Florida will remove 111 school and workers positions, shut eight of 14 department places, shut down six of 23 sports activities groups, and finish three diploma applications.
- Plans for the cuts come lower than a yr after an try collapsed for Saint Leo to develop by buying Marymount California College. Saint Leo’s accreditor, the Southern Affiliation of Schools and Faculties Fee on Schools, did not again the deal amid considerations about Saint Leo’s budgeting.
Dive Perception:
Saint Leo’s new plans display the excessive ranges of uncertainty gripping even some schools that see themselves as patrons in larger schooling’s sizzling merger-and-acquisition market.
Saint Leo as soon as deliberate to have expanded to the West Coast by this time via an acquisition of Marymount California, which had a Los Angeles space campus enrolling greater than 500 college students. As a substitute, Saint Leo is shedding its personal branches, and the president who led it throughout the merger try is gone.
Initially, Saint Leo, which is predicated about 30 miles north of Tampa, deliberate to shut on its West Coast acquisition in January of this yr. Marymount California had been searching for a companion for years because it confronted enrollment declines. By way of the deal, the Florida college would even have taken on Marymount’s money owed.
However after the accreditor refused to log off, Marymount California stated it might shut down. In September, the College of California, Los Angeles introduced a deal to purchase two of the previous Marymount California campuses for $80 million.
The president who helmed Saint Leo when the merger was introduced, Jeffrey Senese, resigned lower than three months after acquisition talks fell aside. Senese was changed in July by Edward Dadez, who had been Saint Leo’s provost.
Saint Leo did not touch upon the explanation for the personnel change when it was introduced.
The establishment has skilled sharp enrollment declines within the final decade, in accordance with federal information, which reveals fall 2021 enrollment totaling 9,523 college students. That is down from 15,564 a decade earlier.
Saint Leo says its unduplicated headcount over a yr is greater than 15,300. Final fall it launched a world campus providing on-line diploma applications in Spanish in Latin America, which has enrolled over 1,000 college students up to now, it stated.
The college has suffered working losses in recent times, dropping nearly $7 million in fiscal 2022, $1.6 million in 2021 and $17.3 million in 2020, in accordance with audited monetary statements.
Now comes phrase of considerable cuts. Within the subsequent six months Saint Leo will shut schooling facilities it operates in 5 states: two in South Carolina, one in Mississippi, one in Texas and 4 in Florida. College students enrolled in these places can proceed their coursework on-line, the college stated.
Six athletics applications will finish when their seasons shut. Saint Leo did not instantly say which applications had been affected as a result of a number of groups had been touring and it deliberate to debate the modifications with them after they returned to campus. The establishment competes in NCAA Division II athletics.
Educational applications being shut down embody a bachelor’s diploma program in worldwide hospitality, a bachelor’s in human companies and a grasp’s in human companies. The establishment is transferring diploma applications in its present schooling and social companies faculty into different schools on the finish of the tutorial yr.
Of the 111 school and workers positions lower, 27% had been “not too long ago vacant,” in accordance with Saint Leo. Among the positions had been eradicated as of Thursday, whereas others will stay via the top of the tutorial yr, a spokesperson stated in an e-mail.
The establishment now intends to concentrate on development areas. They embody a bachelor’s program in nursing, applications inside a university protecting computing, synthetic intelligence, robotics and information science, {and professional} improvement for companies.
The called-off merger did not have an effect on Saint Leo’s present plans, that are a part of ongoing work to answer enrollment developments and turn into extra environment friendly, in accordance with the college’s spokesperson.
“We would have liked to proper measurement by chopping bills,” Saint Leo’s president, Dadez, stated in a press release. “We at the moment are in a a lot stronger monetary scenario. We’ll now attempt to hit our campus and on-line enrollment numbers; add tutorial applications that can improve enrollments; develop new income streams; and improve our college donor program. These methods will present stability and alternative for development.”
