WASHINGTON, D.C. April 27 (DPI) — The announcement last month that Sweet Briar College will close due to “insurmountable financial challenges” triggered a backlash of lawsuits from faculty and alumni, but the consensus is that the 114-year-old women’s college won’t re-open in the fall – and its closure is likely the beginning of a harsh trend in higher education.

That view is confirmed not simply in chat rooms and comment boards but also increasingly in remarks by academic leaders.  Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, for instance, has been president of Purdue University the last two years. Over that time he has cut costs, frozen tuition and instructed counselors to advise students against taking on so much debt.

Today the education establishment is listening to what Daniels, once considered presidential timber,  has to say.

Talking to The Wall Street Journal recently, Daniels said:

“I don’t know what the rate of the shake out will be, but you can already see the front edges,” he says, referring to colleges that have begun shutting down. “A year or two ago, it was schools you hadn’t even heard of. This year it was Sweet Briar.”

Daniels went on to say that “the top 10 endowments have something like a third of all the money, and the top 40 have two thirds or close to it. If you’re outside that group, and you’re charging these tuitions, I hope you’ve got a Plan B.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-save-american-colleges-1429913861

Many reader comments focused on the arduous, bureaucratic and largely meaningless accreditation process for universities, colleges and junior colleges. Wrote one reader:

The entire accreditation process needs to be scrapped and replaced. Anybody who’s gone through the interminable paperwork generated by even a tiny community college in order to receive accreditation knows the futility involved. Forms are generated in such quantity that they are weighed, not read. Nobody could possibly read the mountains of departmental statistics–and nobody actually cares. It’s all just busy-work to look like something important happened. At the end of the day, the board announces the 10-year accreditation acceptance, there are party hats and streamers, smiles and backslaps–and the students are directed to pick up the new edition of a math textbook for only $225 (the former edition was superseded because its examples have been updated to include the price of an iWatch and three photos were changed, necessitating the new, clearly much advanced, edition). Good professors don’t even need a textbook–but the accreditation society demands it.