One of my college counseling friends just returned from a Road Scholar excursion to places where some of the most monumental events in American history took place. She traveled to Atlanta, Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham, all important locales in the Civil Rights movement. She found the trip powerfully moving and inspirational, and perhaps even a little miraculous when it stopped raining for the first time all day at the very moment she crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
My friend’s trip to Birmingham made me think back to my last visit there, just as memorable if not as inspirational. My daughter’s first job after graduating from college was at a Birmingham non-profit, and so I drove down with her to help her get settled. (It worked out perfectly because NACAC wanted me to speak at an event in D.C. the next day and paid for my flight.)
Driving west from Atlanta on I-20, maybe an hour from Birmingham, I suddenly noticed a huge, majestic bird fly out of the woods on the right side of the interstate. It was on a flight path that put it directly on a collision course with our car. I was certain it would pull up and clear the vehicle–until it didn’t. When we arrived in Birmingham my daughter’s gray RAV-4 sported some new purple splotches in a couple of spots.
I thought about Birmingham last week for a couple of other reasons.
The first was the beginning of March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament. I have always been a college basketball fan, and the first two days of the tournament are two of my favorite days of the whole year. As a new retiree, this year I could sit (in the spirit of full disclosure, I probably did more lying) on the couch watching games to my heart’s content.
Watching college basketball is less enjoyable now that the transfer portal has essentially turned into free agency. I have a former player currently playing at his fourth college in four years (after having originally committed to a fifth). He’s a good student, but I wonder about the quality of his college experience.
I always find myself rooting for the underdogs, and this year one of the popular choices for an upset was Samford, located in Birmingham (actually Homewood, a suburb of Birmingham). (The University of Alabama-Birmingham also made the tournament.) Samford was a popular upset choice because of its unique style of play, termed “Bucky Ball” after its coach, involving frenetic full-court pressing. Samford ended up losing its first-round game against traditional blue-blood Kansas after coming back from a 21-point deficit, and might have won but for a questionable foul call late in the game.
Birmingham has been even more on my mind since learning that Birmingham-Southern College will be closing at the end of the school year after having been in existence since 1856. The cause of death was failure to secure a $30 million loan from the state of Alabama to stay afloat, but the reality is that the venerable liberal-arts college has been seriously and chronically ill for some time.
None of my students have attended Birmingham-Southern, but I have been aware of it for more than fifty years, before I went to college myself. My minister was from a prominent Alabama family and was a B-SC alum. Birmingham-Southern also happens to be the alma mater of former U.S. Senator Howell Heflin and comedian Pat Buttram, best known for his portrayal of Mr. Haney on the 1960s sitcom Green Acres.
Last week’s announcement was sad. I feel for the students, faculty, and staff who have had their lives upended by the closure as well as the alumni who will lose connection to an important part of their past. It is one thing to know that Birmingham-Southern is endangered and quite another to receive the stark news that it is closing in two months.
There is also some irony in the announcement having come during March Madness, because one of the things that initially put Birmingham-Southern in some financial jeopardy was seeking Division One glory. B-SC had been a basketball powerhouse in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), winning two national championships during the 1990s, and like a number of smaller schools decided to make the jump to NCAA Division One in hopes of increasing name recognition and revenue through making the “Big Dance.” Birmingham-Southern never made the tournament during its four-year run in Division One, but had on-court success, winning nearly two-thirds of its games. In doing so it accumulated $6 million in debt.
It is hard to know whether Birmingham-Southern was a victim of bad decision-making or bad luck. It tried many of the strategies that other institutions have used to increase enrollment, but none of them worked. After moving back to Division 3 for athletics, it added football, a lever many small colleges have used to increase enrollment, particularly male enrollment. It went into further debt to upgrade and beautify the campus and add programs. It tried the tuition reset route, cutting its sticker price in half in 2017. Despite all of those efforts, enrollment dropped 37 percent since 2009, and its endowment declined by 23 percent.
What are the lessons from Birmingham-Southern’s demise? The obvious one ( command of the obvious is my specialty) is that colleges and universities are first and foremost businesses. I have certainly been guilty of criticizing higher education for acting too much like an industry, but colleges are businesses with employees and payrolls, and when they don’t have enough customers, they go out of business. That can happen even to places like Birmingham-Southern with track records of nearly 170 years and that are reputable enough to have earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa.
Birmingham-Southern also serves as a cautionary tale for small, tuition-driven, liberal-arts colleges. They are what Jeff Selingo refers to as “buyers,” in that they have to offer significant tuition discounts to make their class.
Overspending on financial-aid was another of the factors that put Birmingham-Southern into financial crisis. I worry that small colleges dependent on tuition revenue will be particularly impacted this spring by the FAFSA roll-out crisis.
Peter Pitts, a retired admissions officer at Monmouth College in Illinois, calls himself “the Small College guy.” He has done considerable internet research into small colleges and recently published a book that serves as a directory to some good places that aren’t as well known as they should be. The title is “333 Awesome Small Colleges (that just might save you money!)” and it’s available through Amazon. I’m glad to see a book that joins Loren Pope’s “Colleges That Change Lives” in giving attention to this group of schools, but of course Birmingham-Southern is featured in both.
Small colleges are an endangered species. Many of them are located in rural areas, and many have historically been focused on the humanities and sciences. Neither of those are particularly valued or desired in today’s marketplace.
And that’s unfortunate. The small residential college is both the backbone of American higher education and America’s foremost contribution to higher education.
I am far from unbiased, because I am a product of one of those colleges, but I worry that Birmingham-Southern may be the proverbial canary in the coal mine. I hope that’s not the case. I also hope that all of us will keep everyone in the Birmingham-Southern family in our thoughts and prayers as they grieve and deal with their unfortunate loss.