Dive Temporary:
- Concordia College Ann Arbor plans to slash dozens of on-campus and on-line packages, in response to a current message to campus from Leah Dvorak, vp of teachers at Concordia.
- Beginning June 2025, the personal Lutheran establishment will provide simply 9 packages — all in medical-related fields — on its bodily campus. That’s down from 53 campus packages the college at present lists on its web site. It would provide one other seven on-line packages, largely in schooling fields, which is down from greater than 60 at present.
- College students selecting to stay of their packages can end them on-line or at Concordia’s Wisconsin campus, greater than 360 miles away. Dvorak famous that many of the college’s undergraduate choices are already out there on-line via the Wisconsin campus.
Dive Perception:
Concordia College Wisconsin acquired the Ann Arbor establishment in 2013, when the latter was struggling.
Ann Arbor’s largest lender, the Michigan Church Extension Fund, had been mulling whether or not the establishment may shut, and knew a potential consolidation with Concordia College Wisconsin was “in all probability the final likelihood that this faculty was going to have,” the fund’s board chair mentioned final yr in a historic dialogue concerning the merger.
Greater than a decade after the merger, the Ann Arbor campus remains to be struggling. Its deficit reached $9 million in the latest fiscal yr, and the board, along with an out of doors marketing consultant, decided that it couldn’t “generate sufficient auxiliary income to maintain its present value construction,” in response to an April message from Berg.
The board examined whether or not Ann Arbor could possibly be an autonomous college inside the Concordia system. However it decided in June that the Ann Arbor campus couldn’t function by itself, given governance challenges and its restricted monetary sources.
Earlier than this system cuts have been finalized, Concordia’s board of regents voted to “function with a fastidiously curated portfolio of educational packages” after its 2024-25 tutorial yr, Board Chair John Berg mentioned in a campus message earlier this month.
The board cited broader “unprecedented challenges” within the increased ed sector, amongst them demographic modifications, enrollment pressures and excessive inflation.
In contrast to many establishments going via painful restructurings proper now, enrollment has grown at Ann Arbor. Between 2017 and 2022, fall headcount grew by 11.3% to 1,203 college students on the campus, in response to federal knowledge. And that determine grew greater than 80% since 2010.
The Ann Arbor campus is working to forge teach-out partnerships with different establishments if college students elect to not end their packages via Concordia, in response to Dvorak.
