When the Association shared its College Rating studies to the public in 2013, some higher learning institutions may not think that the rating matters at all. Therefore, they made a conscious decision not to make strategic moves or changed the way to manage their organizations. Perhaps, some may regret later. Had their utilized our research findings, changed the strategies, then they might be able to sustain their institutions.
Let us make a quick assessment how many students and their family, Colleges, Universities, American public & communities, and other interested agencies may have received the benefits from AAEA’s studies. Based on our random internet search, just in the state of TN, we found the following college closures on recent news:
- Hiwasee College in Madisonville, Tennessee, will close at the end of its spring semester on May 10 =====> AAEA’s Rating: ABA.
- Fountainhead College of Technology in Knoxville closed in October, 2018===> No rating, for no information is available at NCES data bases.
- Knoxville’s Virginia College campus closed in December, 2018 ===> No rating, because no information found in NCES data bases.
Perhaps, this site will give the readers a more completed list of college closures. While we cannot say for sure how accurate, it seems that our hypothesis stated in 2014 has happened. In 2015, the Association has repeated its concerns on the college closures due to inefficiency, imbalanced and mismatched of total revenue and expenses. These predictions are made based on the IRI approach that AAEA has proposed to be used to evaluate the strengths of higher ed institutions. Our predictions were repeated again in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. Based on this assessment, one might conclude that data never lied, and are the foundation and may help the college administrators to see what is coming their ways such that strategic decisions can be made to avoid such challenges.