This is an unpublished response to “Opinion/Guest column: No more secrecy if college risks closing”
The grief and disruption felt by students, families, and staff at Anna Maria College is real, and no one should minimize it. But the op-ed calling for state regulation of college closure timelines, while well-intentioned, misidentifies both the problem and the solution. And in doing so, it lets the institutions with the most power largely off the hook, while absolving everyone else of any responsibility to look.
The piece claims families are making one of the biggest decisions of their lives “without clear visibility into a school’s financial health.” But that visibility exists. Every college in Massachusetts is required to maintain a consumer protection disclosure page, and every institution publishes an annual independent financial audit. The data is there. What’s largely absent is the habit, or the expectation, of looking for it.
This is not a criticism of families who didn’t know to search. Most people don’t. But that’s precisely the point: we have spent decades treating college enrollment like a lifestyle decision rather than a major financial transaction. We research cars, mortgages, and investment accounts. We read the fine print on far smaller purchases. Yet when it comes to committing four years and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars to an institution, the expectation has been to trust the campus tour and the feel of the place. That cultural norm needs to change as much as any regulation does.
But if we’re going to talk about what the state should do differently, let’s be precise about what’s actually broken, because it isn’t the notice period. It’s that by the time a school receives a formal financial risk flag, the outcome is almost certainly already sealed. Of the colleges in Massachusetts that have received that designation, nearly every one, (with only two narrow exceptions among very small, highly specialized institutions) has gone on to close. The flag isn’t a warning. It’s a verdict.
And here’s what the op-ed doesn’t ask: what happens in the years before that verdict? Because the financial distress that triggers a closure doesn’t appear overnight. It accumulates in enrollment trends, in audit findings, in deferred maintenance and shrinking reserves. The state has access to that data, as does the accreditor. And yet the model of oversight that exists is one of monitoring and eventual judgment, not early partnership or intervention. When a school begins showing the first signs of strain, where is the State then? It’s not stepping up to offer a lifeline. The State is not convening stakeholders. The State is not asking what it would take to stabilize the institution. The State arrives, in effect, only when it’s too late, and its arrival itself accelerates the collapse.
That’s because once a school is publicly flagged, the damage compounds immediately. Prospective students withdraw their applications. Enrolled students begin looking elsewhere. The enrollment numbers that a tuition-dependent institution depends on to survive begin to crater, not because the school has failed academically, not because students are being served poorly, but because fear is rational and no one wants to be the last one holding a ticket when the lights go out. The flag doesn’t just reflect a school’s precarious position. It hastens it.
If people want to get serious about protecting students, the question isn’t only how much notice a school should give before closing. It’s why the oversight system is structured as a damnation rather than a collaboration. Why isn’t there a meaningful intervention framework that engages struggling institutions years before crisis? One that brings together state agencies, accreditors, and institutional leadership to explore restructuring, mergers, or teach-out partnerships before the point of no return? Other sectors have this – banking regulators don’t simply wait for a bank to fail and then tell depositors they have three weeks – they intervene.
The accreditation system carries its own share of responsibility here. Accreditors have access to financial data that families never see. They conduct regular reviews and have the authority to place schools on warning or probation long before a state flag is issued. Those actions, if made more visible and actionable, could give families the early signal the op-ed says is missing, but only if the system is designed to inform rather than simply to adjudicate.
The op-ed also passes over what Anna Maria itself did in its final weeks. While simultaneously preparing for commencement, closing out the academic year, and honoring the students who had earned the right to walk across that stage, faculty, staff, and administrators were also working around the clock to help students find pathways forward, connecting them with transfer partners, facilitating conversations with coaches, writing recommendations on emergency timelines, checking in on their emotional needs, and advocating for those who had no one else in their corner. These were people grieving the loss of their own jobs and an institution they had devoted themselves to, while still showing up every day for the students in their care. Collapsing the institution and the people who served it into a single story of negligence does a disservice to both.
Small private colleges like Anna Maria have for decades served students who often don’t have the luxury of attending flagship universities: first-generation students, student athletes, students who needed a smaller community to thrive. The structural pressures bearing down on these institutions are not new, and they will not be solved by requiring 90 days’ notice instead of three weeks. Mandatory disclosure timelines will not fix a broken system.
If the goal is to protect the next group of students, the conversation has to go upstream: to accreditors who hold information the public never sees, to federal policies that have propped up institutions without demanding meaningful transparency, to a cultural expectation that families treat college enrollment with the due diligence they’d apply to any major financial decision, and to a state oversight model that asks not just how to manage a school’s death, but what it would have taken to keep it alive.
Anna Maria’s students deserved better, but so does the truth about how we got here.