Sweet Briar College, which announced last March that it was closing, has been rescued. After partial success in a court suit brought by the Amherst County, Virginia, attorney, a group of alumnae has agreed to a settlement that replaces the current leadership, keeps the school open, and requires the alumnae to come up with $12 million for operating expenses.

Whether this is a short-term reprieve or a new life for the school is debatable—and there’s plenty of discussion and debate on the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.

My takeaway today: I now begin to understand why there are only five or so college closings, on average, per year. It is very difficult to terminate a trust, and the legal issue in the Sweet Briar case seemed to be over whether the school (initially created by a single donor’s will) was a corporation or a trust.

Corporations die all the time; in fact, we call the process “creative destruction.” And we just saw a for-profit school, Corinthian, close (although whether that was due to its own flaws or an assault by the federal government is another question).

In the profit-making world, there is a “market for control” (discussed famously by Henry Manne in 1965). Efficient companies buy out inefficient ones and customers are better served as a result. But the market for control is virtually nonexistent in the nonprofit world, which dominates higher education. That fact keeps inefficient operations going, whether they are serving customers well or not, even after logic would conclude that they will eventually run out of money.