Weekly Briefing: Will your college survive?

Experts have a new formula to figure out if your college will survive. [Weekly Briefing] By Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz Will your college survive? These experts are crunching numbers to find out. [Image] Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez We’re in the midst of what feels like a college apocalypse. You read about college closures, mergers, and dangerously low-enrollment numbers, and those signals can scream “the end is near!” even if your institution isn’t like the ones you read about in The Chronicle’s pages. ADVERTISEMENT [advertisement]( For years, businesspeople, pundits, and policy makers have speculated about the health of higher education, like one would for a traditional business or company. Those predictions were mostly just that: Speculation. It’s not as straightforward to assess the health of a college as it would be for a tennis-shoe company, for example. That’s because a college’s product is a diploma-clad student. How each student earns that diploma is unique and difficult to predict. Enter The College Stress Test. The book, by Robert Zemsky, Susan Shaman, and Susan Campbell Baldridge, will be published this month by Johns Hopkins University Press and includes a section on how to calculate the market stress of a private, public, or two-year college and figure out how endangered that college is. The formula is an analysis of an institution’s position in the market, not its finances. The experts behind the The College Stress Test are part of a wave of scholars who want to figure out the best ways to predict a college's future. Our Scott Carlson has reported on college closures, and he knows a thing or two about higher-ed books, and he even organized our office library of books about that topic. The College Stress Test shows us that we’re in a new era of higher education, Scott said. The industry once had predictions based only on gut instinct. This book presents a new formula to figure out how a college is doing or, inevitably, when a college will die. For their stress test, the scholars use four metrics, which vary depending on the type of institution they are analyzing, and an analysis of how those metrics are trending. Having this metric benchmark is helpful, especially for college administrators to take a step back and see where their institutions sit in the bigger landscape, Scott said. The formula is promising, but take it with a grain of salt. Predictions like these may not be the final word for colleges. There are examples of campuses on a downward spiral that found a new president or marketing team, and sure enough, everything changes. Read more about the book, and the controversy it’s already generated, in Scott’s story here. And be on the lookout for the rest of our 2020 Trends Report. Best of the rest. [Image] Noah Berger for The Chronicle - Walk onto many college campuses, and almost every part of the student experience is for sale. Corporations sponsor a university’s official banking, office supply, insurance, air travel, solar/alternative energy, or grocery store, to name a few. [Our Francie Diep reports]( on growing corporate sponsorships on college campuses. - On this campus, the Young Democrats and College Republicans chapters finally agreed on one thing: Ousting the university’s president. [Our Jonathan Custodio has the story](. Lagniappe. [Image] Sputnik via AP - Learn. Sorry to break this news as you literally read it on a screen, but screen reading is bad for your attention span. [Here are some remedies](. Maybe you should print out this email to read next week? - Read. This new email, [First Gen]( about the experiences and needs of first-generation college students, is well worth your time. And it’s written by a first-generation college student and former Chronicle intern. - Listen. If you like ’70s funk, or soul music, listen to the Texas-band Khruangbin. There are no lyrics in their album [Hasta El Cielo]( so you can listen while you work. - Watch. Though I’m a late adopter, the Netflix docuseries Cheer is as [gripping as it is heart-breaking](. Remember, I’m always taking feedback on anything in this newsletter or music recommendations. Cheers, –– Fernanda Subscribe Today The Chronicle’s award-winning journalism challenges conventional wisdom, holds academic leaders accountable, and empowers you to do your job better — and it’s your support that makes our work possible. [Subscribe Today]( This Week's Top Reads Finance [Welcome to the Sponsored Campus]( In the latest generation of company-campus partnerships, more parts of the college experience are up for sale than ever before, experts say. (PREMIUM) ADVERTISEMENT [advertisement]( Paid for and Created by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University [Cutting-Edge Research at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Advances Global Sustainability]( Pursuing innovative endeavors to pressing global issues, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University seeks to contribute to a better world, enhancing sustainability and smart city development. Students [One Thing Democrats and Republicans Can Agree On: This College President Has to Go]( At Northern Arizona University, students crossed party lines to campaign for her resignation. (PREMIUM) Paid for and Created by New Jersey Institute of Technology [Fabricating the Future in NJIT’s Newest Invention Hub]( The Makerspace at NJIT has been the birthplace of many ingenious devices, allowing students and local business alike to create prototypes and hone their ideas. 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