Emerson College, the private liberal-arts college in Boston, has announced that it will be pursuing staff and faculty layoffs after student-enrollment numbers for the upcoming academic year turned out to be “significantly below” expectations. In a public statement announcing the planned cuts, the college attributed the reduced enrollment to “multiple factors, including national enrollment trends away from smaller private institutions, an enrollment deposit delay in response to the new FAFSA rollout, student protests targeting our yield events and campus tours, and negative press and social media generated from the demonstrations and arrests.”
The first two factors the college cited are obviously largely beyond its control. But the Department of Education’s botched handling of this year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) was a problem that all universities had to face, from Ivy League institutions and large state universities to small private colleges such as Emerson. Additionally, while it is true that some small private colleges have had to resort to drastic measures — in a few cases, merging with better-funded institutions or shutting their doors entirely — these have generally been lesser-known schools whose financial resources are far fewer than those of Emerson, which maintains a national reputation and has an endowment of more than a quarter-billion dollars.
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