Closing Colleges

Briarcliff & Bennett go into bankruptcy

Last April Briarcliff College--a small, private and long financially troubled women's college near White Plains, N.Y. --sold its 55-acre campus out from under some 300 students. But rather than die outright or be absorbed by burgeoning Pace University, which had bought the facility for its nearby Westchester campus, homeless Briarcliff proposed a desperate sort of scholastic piggyback. It hoped to share its remaining faculty and students with yet another small, private and financially strapped women's college: Bennett, a two-year junior college with 230 students. Under the tentative plan, Briarcliff would attract many of its undergraduates to Bennett's underpopulated Millbrook, N.Y., campus; Bennett graduates could thereafter enroll in Briarcliff for their final two years, and both institutions might be saved.

But the scheme collapsed. Two weeks ago, after Briarcliff s efforts to lure enough students to the new site proved futile, the New York Board of Regents dissolved the 75-year-old school's charter. Bennett, which filed bankruptcy proceedings last spring, will almost surely close down this week too. Meanwhile, a standing deficit has forced a third private women's college in New York State, twelve-year-old Kirkland, to merge next year with coordinate Hamilton College, a 165-year-old, previously all-male college in Clinton.

Though many private colleges are having a hard time in the U.S. these days, the summer blackout rate for women's colleges seems confined to New York. The Women's College Coalition in Washington, D.C., which represents two-thirds of U.S. women's colleges, reports that financial headaches are no better or worse than has been usual of late among its 67 members.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.