Sacred Heart University’s Advanced Craft Beverage Brewing class at Two Roads Brewery in Stratford, Connecticut. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte/Hechinger Report
Mills College, a small, well-regarded women’s college in Oakland will close by 2023. Another small private school, Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, south of San Francisco, will end its undergraduate programs this spring. Some graduate classes may survive.
Fighting for survival, liberal arts colleges are adding career credentials, reports Hechinger’s Jon Marcus. Debt-averse students want to know they’ll be able to earn a living. Colleges need to compete for students.
Liberal arts-focused Dominican University of California has teamed up with the coding bootcamp Make School so its students can minor in coding and software design. Fifteen U.S. universities in all entered into partnerships with bootcamps between 2019 and the third quarter of last year to offer coding, the education research firm Holon IQ reports.
Clarke University in Iowa, which has also traditionally concentrated on the liberal arts, last year added career courses in professional subjects including leadership, conflict management and data analysis.
“Only 26 percent of working U.S. adults who went to college strongly agree that the education they received is relevant to their work,” a Strada survey found, writes Marcus. “More than half of all Americans under 40 say they’ll need to learn new skills to advance their careers, a survey by the SkillUp Coalition and the Charles Koch Foundation found.”