The abrupt announcement that the 154-year-old University of the Arts will permanently close on Friday has stunned students, faculty, elected officials, and even the school’s own president and board chair, who said they “are struggling to make sense of the present moment.”
They haven’t fully detailed why they decided to shut the university down June 7, except to say that a bad financial situation quickly got much worse. “Significant, unanticipated expenses…came to light very suddenly,” chair Judson Aaron and president Kerry Walk said last Friday, and they “were unable to bridge the necessary gaps.”
The news has left students scrambling to figure out how they’ll continue their education. UArts said it’s building “seamless transfer pathways” to Drexel, Temple, Moore College of Art & Design, and other schools.
It’s the latest of several closures and consolidations of storied higher education programs in the region. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts said in January that it will stop granting degrees, Cabrini University just closed, and Delaware College of Art and Design announced last month that it’s shutting down.
Among the factors contributing to the continual reports of schools closing are small endowments, declining enrollment, heavy dependence on tuition revenue, the long-term effects of the pandemic, and high debt loads for construction and other projects, experts say.
Here’s more on what’s happening at University of the Arts and how it reached this point.
A “shameful” failure to notify the community
Students and faculty say they’re particularly angry over poor communication from the university administration.
Rather than alerting them to its financial problems, or formally announcing a decision to shut down, the school last Wednesday notified its accrediting organization, Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE), that it planned to close just nine days later.
MSCHE said the late notice and failure to plan violated its rules, and it immediately canceled UArts’ accreditation. Loss of accreditation threatens students’ access to financial aid, reduces the value of a UArts diploma, and typically forces a college to close.
Many students and staff only finally found out about the closure when the Inquirer broke the news Friday evening,
“The negligence is shameful, and the lack of communication is shameful,” Noah David Roberts, a third-year poetry major, told WHYY News. “University of the Arts admin has let down and disappointed every single person who has interacted with the school by hiding this information from all of us, until someone else shared it. It’s abhorrent how they’ve approached this shutdown.”
A faculty union, United Academics of Philadelphia AFT Local 9608 (UAP), noted that the university may be in violation of the WARN Act, which requires 60 days advance notice of mass layoffs. UArts has about 700 faculty and staff members.
A law firm, Edelson Lechtzin, is investigating and may file a class action lawsuit seeking damages from the university.
UAP says faculty could also bring collective legal charges. The union reached its first-ever contract with the university in February, and said it will start negotiating over the impact of the closure on Tuesday.
Many students are now trying to figure out if and where they’ll finish their degrees. Many universities closed applications for the fall months ago, but several local schools — including Temple, Drexel, Moore College of Art & Design, and The College of New Jersey — are saying they would welcome UArts undergraduates.
Drexel President John Fry said his university is expanding its 50% tuition discount program to UArts undergrads, while Temple’s provost reportedly said that more than 200 UArts students had already filled out interest forms, and promised they won’t end up paying more than they would have at UArts.
Moore, meanwhile, will be left as the only dedicated arts college in Philadelphia.
On a webpage set up for UArts students, it notes it “is financially healthy, thanks to an endowment per student that is ranked among the top 18% in the country [and] an annual budget surplus for the past 23 years.” It will honor UArts scholarships and waive application fees, and its admission counselors are planning to visit UArts soon.
Cash flow problems, or “colossal” mismanagement?
School president Kerry Walk, who started the job last year, became aware of a major cash flow problem in mid-May and later learned it was even bigger than she had realized, she told the Inquirer.
Some donations and grants never came in, and there were “unanticipated expenses” that diminished the school’s cash reserves, she said.
Union officials from UAP attributed the problems to a “colossal case of neglectful financial mismanagement.” In a message to union members, they said the university had expected to finish the last fiscal year with a $2 million loss, but instead had a $12 million loss.
“Multiple academic buildings are mortgaged beyond their appraised value to secure $40 million in debt, and we have learned that the one that isn’t, Terra Hall, has a multimillion-dollar structural issue,” the union said. “State and city elected leaders are investigating the closure and we hope to learn more in the days to come.”
UArts had $63 million in revenue in the previous fiscal year, the Inquirer reported, citing the school’s audited financial statement. Its endowment is reportedly about $60 million, compared to $214 million at California Institute for the Arts, $396 million at Rhode Island School of Design, and $21 billion at University of Pennsylvania.
Enrollment down, tuition up, a “foreboding sense”
UArts enrolled 1,149 students this past year, down from 2,038 a decade earlier.
Other colleges are struggling with similar declines. There’s a national trend of falling post-secondary enrollment, which fell to 24.9 million students in 2021-22, compared to 29.5 million in 2010-2011, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The number of high school graduates available to fill university slots has been relatively stable, but demographic data suggest it’s about to start declining. That is leading to widespread fears among those in higher education of a coming accelerated drop in applicants.
Like many universities, UArts depends heavily on tuition to fund its budget. In 2022, it reported $65 million from tuition and fees and $8 million from dorm and dining hall revenues, out of $100 million in total revenues, according to a tax filing.
With enrollment down and no large endowment to fall back on, UArts sharply hiked tuition last year, around the time Walk became president. Tuition was $54,010 this past year, up from $50,950 in 2022-2023, and was set to increase again this fall.
With housing and other expenses, the total cost per year to attend exceeds $70,000, although most students receive some form of financial aid.
While apparently no one in the UArts community knew the school was in danger of closing, many were aware it was struggling.
Doria Wohler, an adjunct creative writing instructor, said her department director warned in February that there would be “significantly” fewer courses in the coming year and no teacher would be assigned more than one course per semester.
“While I was shocked to find out the news of the school’s closure via Instagram, in general there was a foreboding sense of demise that left much of the faculty, in my department at least, with limited insights as to what exactly was going on with the school’s financials, and lots of uncertainty,” Wohler said Monday.
Trying to save a historic institution
UArts supporters are still holding out hope that the closure can be reversed. Some, like dance student Catherine Bauermann, are demanding that the school immediately appeal the MSCHE revocation of accreditation and gain time to fix its financial problems.
Councilmember Mark Squilla told the Inquirer he was trying to set up a meeting with university administrators and city officials to see if the city could help UArts figure out its finances or merge with another school.
“We cannot let creative institutions go down in smoke, people,” famed Philly-born musician Questlove wrote on Instagram. “This isn’t over @universityofthearts.”
If University of the Arts does close, it would signal the end of an institution with a history going back more than 150 years.
UArts has its roots in three institutions founded in the 1870s — Philadelphia Musical Academy, Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, and Philadelphia Conservatory of Music — as well as the Philadelphia Dance Academy, founded in 1947.
Over the decades they changed names, offered new educational programs and degrees, merged and in some cases split apart.
In 1985, two successor organizations, Philadelphia College of Art and Philadelphia College of Performing Arts, joined to become the Philadelphia Colleges of the Arts, which two years later got university status and was renamed University of the Arts.
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