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Too Many Colleges?
Closing Some Might Not Save State Any Money
Sunday February 9, 2003
By Tara Tuckwiller
Staff Writer
From The Sunday Gazette-Mail
Fourteen years ago, West Virginia was in a fix eerily similar to the one it's in now.
The state was strapped for cash. It had more colleges per capita than any state in the South, but young people were fleeing in
droves and employers were reluctant to locate here.
Lawmakers decided something should be done about the state's colleges, but they weren't sure what. They paid the
Carnegie Foundation of Pittsburgh $350,000 to thoroughly study the colleges, then advise them what to do.
Gov. Arch Moore was confident Carnegie would recommend that all seven of West Virginia's little colleges â Glenville,
Bluefield and all the rest â should merge into one big university.
It didn't.
Don't close any of the little colleges, Carnegie advised. Merge Marshall University and West Virginia University, instead.
That didn't happen. Neither did legislators follow the other advice Carnegie said would help save the state â merge all of
the underused community colleges with the underused vocational schools, privatize the West Virginia School of Osteopathic
Medicine or merge it with Marshall's med school.
Now, colleges are on the chopping block again, and legislators aren't bothering with a study this time.
A college in every corner
West Virginia still has more four-year colleges per capita than any Southern state.
And it needs them, said Glenville State College President Thomas Powell. The state's mountains and snaky roads make
travel arduous.
"I didn't have the appreciation until I lived here," Powell said. "It takes longer. You can't just look at the distance in
miles."
Many of the students at West Virginia's small colleges are the first in their family to attend college. Powell recalls a student
named Barbara, who came from rural Tyler County.
"I tell the students in orientation, 'If you're thinking about quitting, come knock on my door and tell me you're quitting,'" said
Powell, who knows many of the college's 2,200 students by name.
One day, Barbara knocked on his door. Tears were streaming down her face.
"'Dr. Powell,'" she said. "'Glenville is just too big a city for me.'"
"'What can we do to help you?'" Powell asked her in disbelief, knowing that the town of 1,500 could only be described as
sleepy.
"'Could my mom come and stay with me for two weeks?'" Barbara asked.
Powell arranged it. That was three years ago. Now, Barbara is finishing up her degree at Glenville.
If West Virginia shut down Glenville, "Tell me where some of these kids are going to go," Powell said. "I don't know."
College closures planned ... again
Glenville is No. 1 on the chopping block. Last month, the House of Delegates voted to close or merge at least two four-year
colleges by 2007.
Nobody has said which two schools should close, but Glenville, Bluefield State College and Potomac State College are the
names on everyone's lips.
This isn't the first time lawmakers have wanted to close colleges. Or the second. Or even the third or fourth.
In 1986, state senate candidate John McConihay ran on the platform of turning the osteopathic school and some other small
colleges into regional jails.
He lost.
In 1988, Gov. Arch Moore rolled out his "third university" idea. He shied away from closing any colleges, remembering his
effort of a few years before to consolidate Bluefield State and Concord colleges. "You would have thought I was trying to
resume the war between the states," he said at the time.
In 1993, Gov. Gaston Caperton called for a 10 percent cut in state government. The Senate Education Committee
considered closing colleges, but decided not to.
In 1997, Gov. Cecil Underwood's transition team warned that some colleges might have to close, because West Virginia
was losing traditional college-age population. Nothing happened.
West Virginia is still losing traditional college-age population. The U.S. Census estimates that the state will lose 18 percent of
its 18- to 24-year-olds by 2025.
A smaller loss happened in the 1990s. West Virginia lost 4 percent of its 18- to 24-year-olds, but college enrollment
dropped just one- half of 1 percent.
Two of the chopping-block colleges actually gained students during that time. Glenville's enrollment jumped 14 percent, and
Potomac State's rose 9 percent.
West Virginia might need to reorganize its colleges, Powell said.
"I think the way we have them organized, there's too many (colleges) right now," he said.
"Should there be access in every spot? Yes." But tailor the college to fit the region it serves, he said â Glenville concentrates
on training teachers for rural schools, foresters and surveyors to work in the local woodlands, "mini-MBAs" to run small
businesses, and human-service workers to help the poor and elderly people that populate the region.
Instead of shutting down colleges, Powell said, "I would be figuring out ways for colleges to merge together."
'It didn't seem to be a tremendous savings'
Two years ago, Powell tried to merge Glenville with West Virginia University. He saw the future: Merge or die.
It didn't work, though. WVU was ready to make Glenville a satellite campus, but with Marshall University left out in the
cold, legislative leadership nixed the deal.
Merging with WVU didn't stop West Virginia Tech or Parkersburg Community College from losing students over the past
decade. But Glenville isn't losing students. And merging colleges â not closing them â would save money on purchasing,
accounting and the like, Powell said.
Glenville and Fairmont State already are saving money by sharing a library director, he said.
"What would happen if every college got together and decided to purchase things together?" he said. "What if all our
bookstores were managed by the same company? We'd have some [purchasing] power that way."
Glenville's done something else that could save the whole state money if all colleges did it, Powell said. It has lowered all
bachelor's degrees to require no more than 128 hours of study, and all associate degrees to no more than 64 hours. When
Powell took over four years ago, some programs required more than 148 hours.
"What if, instead of writing a bill to close colleges, [House Education Chairman] Jerry Mezzatesta wrote a bill to save money
in other ways?" Powell asked. "How could he do that? He could do that by asking us."
In the wake of the House vote, nobody has analyzed exactly how much money the state would save by closing two
colleges.
Glenville State and Bluefield State each got $8 million from the state this year, and Potomac State got $5 million. Shutting
down two of those three colleges would save a maximum of 4 percent of the total state budget for higher education â and
that's not counting any new classrooms or new faculty the state might have to buy to absorb the students at other
colleges.
Nobody did a formal analysis 10 years ago, either, when Caperton's 10 percent budget cut was threatening to close
colleges.
But then-college Chancellor Paul Marion told the Senate that closing colleges wouldn't save much money. Either the state
would have to buy new staff or classrooms, or students simply would not travel to attend college.
"It didn't seem to be a tremendous savings," Marion said of college consolidation. "There hasn't been a compelling
advantage to doing it."
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