Dowling College — A Long Island College That Closed Three Days After It Said It Would

Summary

Dowling College, a private college in Oakdale on the south shore of Long Island, founded as a branch campus in 1955 and chartered as an independent institution in 1968, closed in the summer of 2016 after years of declining enrollment and roughly $54 million in debt it could no longer service. It granted its last degrees and ceased operations on August 31, 2016 — the day the Middle States Commission on Higher Education's withdrawal of accreditation took effect — and filed for bankruptcy three months later. Its closing was chaotic even by the standards of a college collapse: it announced its end, rescinded the announcement days later, and then closed for good a few weeks after that.

The arc was the familiar one of the small Northeastern regional college, compressed and accelerated. Dowling had once enrolled close to 6,746 students at its 1999 peak; by 2016 it was down to roughly 2,400, an enrollment that had fallen 53 percent in the four years before it defaulted on its bonds in July 2015. The college carried about $54 million in debt — including some $47 million in tax-exempt bonds issued through local industrial development agencies — against an endowment of under $2 million. There was no cushion. A college that thin cannot ride out a single bad year, and Dowling had strung together many.

Its survival strategy was to find a partner, and for a while it seemed to have one. In early 2016 Dowling reached an arrangement with Global University Systems, a for-profit international education company, that was meant to keep it open. On May 31, 2016, the college announced it would close in three days; on that same day, with talks reportedly revived, it rescinded the closure. The reprieve did not hold. On July 13 the board confirmed the Global deal had collapsed, and with Middle States set to revoke accreditation on August 31, the end was fixed.

Roughly 2,400 students had to find somewhere else to finish; the federal government's closed-school provisions and transfer arrangements caught some of them. Faculty and staff lost their jobs. The Oakdale campus — anchored by a Gilded Age mansion on the Connetquot River — emptied out and, in the years after, fell to vandalism and neglect, a grand and decaying monument to a college that ran out of both students and money at the same time.

Timeline

The College on the Vanderbilt Estate

Dowling came into being the way many suburban colleges did in the postwar decades: as an answer to a population that had outrun its institutions. Long Island's Suffolk County was filling with families, and in 1955 an extension program took root to serve them, becoming Adelphi Suffolk College in 1959 — the county's first four-year, degree-granting college. In 1968 it cut loose as an independent institution and took the name Dowling College, after the philanthropist Robert W. Dowling, settling onto a former Vanderbilt estate in Oakdale whose centerpiece was a grand mansion on the Connetquot River. It was a handsome home for a young, practical college.

For a generation it worked. Dowling built schools of arts and sciences, education, business, and aviation, and by the close of the 1990s it enrolled close to 6,746 students. But its model carried the structural weakness common to its kind: it lived on tuition, with almost nothing behind it. Its endowment never grew past a couple of million dollars — a rounding error at a wealthier institution — which meant Dowling had no reserve to draw on when the students stopped coming. As long as Suffolk County kept sending freshmen, the arrangement held. The premise was about to fail.

The Long Slide and the Bonds

The decline, when it came, was not a cliff but a landslide. Through the early 2010s Dowling's enrollment fell year over year — down 53 percent in the four years leading to 2015 — as the regional pool of students shrank and competition from public and private rivals intensified. Leadership churned; the strategy did not stabilize. And underneath the operating losses sat a debt load the shrinking college could not carry: roughly $54 million in all, including about $47 million in tax-exempt bonds issued through the Suffolk County and Town of Brookhaven industrial development agencies to finance the campus.

In July 2015 the math caught up. Dowling defaulted on the bonds, its credit rating collapsed to "Ca," and the rating agencies began estimating how much bondholders might recover — Moody's reckoned 35 to 65 percent. A college that has defaulted on its debt and has no endowment to speak of has, in practice, already failed; the only open question is the date. Dowling's trustees spent the next year searching for the partner or buyer that might convert a dying institution into a surviving one. The most concrete prospect was Global University Systems, a for-profit international education concern, with which Dowling reached an arrangement in early 2016 meant to keep the doors open.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The students bore the immediate cost. Roughly 2,400 were displaced; federal closed-school protections and transfer agreements with other colleges absorbed some, while others scrambled to salvage their credits and their financial aid. Faculty and staff lost their jobs after a decline they had watched coming for years. Long Island University took custody of the academic records so that a Dowling degree could still be verified, but the institution itself dissolved through bankruptcy.

The most visible legacy is physical. The Oakdale campus — the Vanderbilt-era mansion on the Connetquot and its grounds — was sold off in the bankruptcy and, in the years that followed, suffered extensive vandalism and neglect, a grand and crumbling reminder of a college that vanished. Dowling joined the lengthening roll of small Northeastern colleges claimed by the same forces in the same decade, but its particular signature was the chaos of its ending: the closure announced, withdrawn, and re-announced, a college unable to manage even the orderly fact of its own death.

Lessons

References

• Struggling Dowling College on Long Island Announces It Is Closing Down ABC7 New York
• Debt-Laden Dowling College Closing The Bond Buyer
• After Reversing Closure Plans, Dowling College to Lose Accreditation Long Island Press
• Dowling College Wikipedia