I mentioned last week that my alma mater (and former employer and one of the largest employers in my region), Green Mountain College, announced it will cease to exist in about six months’ time. In response, a group of alumni (myself included), current students, friends of the college, and parents declared our intention to #SaveGMC and began a fundraising effort to do so.
Green Mountain College is between $20 and $25 million in debt, and it runs on a deficit of about $5 million a year. Even if the college shrunk its faculty to just 18 members and its enrollment to just 300 students (a scenario the administration considered and dismissed), the college would still run a deficit of roughly $1 million a year. At this point in time, financially speaking, Green Mountain College (as a business) makes no sense.
Now, the biggest donation Green Mountain College has received from a living person is roughly $100,000. To buy the college out of its debt, the SaveGMC group will have to replicate that record-setting donation at least 250 times…in less than six months.
In addition, the group will have to convince at least some members of the staff and faculty to stop planning for their employer’s sure demise and focus instead on keeping it alive, against all of the odds and without the promise of future employment even if it stays alive.
And then there are the students. Where will they come from? A large part of the reason the college is closing is because of a lack of young people graduating from high school within 150 miles of the campus. Data shows that 58% of high-school graduates choose a school within 100 miles from home and that 72% choose a school within their state. In Vermont, however, 64% of high-school graduates elect to leave the state (the highest rate nationwide).
That’s not a number local colleges can afford. As Vermont’s governor made clear in his most recent inauguration speech, our public schools educate “about 30,000 fewer K-12 students than we [did] in 1997—that’s an average loss of three students a day for over 20 years. And that trend continues.”
So if not from our local schools, where will Green Mountain College’s future students come from? It doesn’t make sense for an educational consumer to risk tens of thousands of dollars on a college that has not only been detached from life support, but abandoned by its responsible parties. On top of that, why would an accreditation agency risk its reputation on a college whose economic future rests on a foundation of wishful thinking?
Saving Green Mountain College means overcoming a number of incredibly tremendous challenges and doing so in an incredibly short period of time.
I can’t help but notice the irony.
In the late nineties, following the best advice of scientists, philosophers, lawyers, and poets, Green Mountain College focused its entire curriculum on the existential threat that is human-caused climate change.
Despite the best advice of scientists, philosophers, lawyers, and poets, the rest of the world virtually ignored the threat, and each year, humanity (myself included) moved (and moves) closer and closer to our ecological extinction.
If we are to survive the already-here and still-oncoming storms of extensive prolonged droughts, death-creating cold snaps, lung-suffocating heat waves, massively raging wildfires, city-destroying floods, and throat-choking pollution, then humanity has to overcome a record-breaking number of incredibly tremendous challenges, and it has to overcome them in a very short period of time.
I don’t know that either of us — SaveGMC or humanity — can do it, but as a Poultney resident and a member of the human community, my continued existence requires giving it a shot.