A couple of weeks ago, Leo Charbonneau over at University Affairs wrote a nice little piece on Maritime universities and the trouble they’re having.  The basic message is that universities out there aren’t doomed – part of the “Don’t Panic” line that AUCC seems to be putting out these days.  The argument was essentially: hey, just nudge the participation rate a point or two, and improve retention a little bit, and those plucky little eastern universities will do just fine.

Allow me to demur a bit.  Once you break down the numbers to the provincial or institutional level, you realize that the picture out east is, in fact, by no means uniform; while the system as a whole is mostly holding steady, there are a few institutions that are in real trouble.

Let’s start by looking at the numbers by province.  In Prince Edward Island, UPEI has done a good job growing its enrolments.  Numbers are off slightly in the last couple of years, but overall they remain about 10% (or about 350 students) higher than they were a decade ago.  Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, on the other hand, both saw falling enrolments from roughly 2004 to 2008.  What’s interesting since that time is the divergence in fortunes between those two provinces.

Figure 1: Total Enrolments by Province, 2004/05-2013/14, Indexed to 2004

In Nova Scotia, the fall during the 04-08 period was concentrated at four universities: Acadia, Cape Breton, Mount Saint Vincent, and Saint Mary’s, all of which lost about 12% of their student body in those four years.  However, during the subsequent rebound, only Acadia actually recovered to any significant extent: most of the growth happened at Dalhousie, which was never hurting for students in the first place.  Nova Scotia as a whole has stayed constant, but what’s actually happened over the last decade is that Dal has grown from being 34% of the provincial system to being over 40%. Meanwhile, Cape Breton, the Mount, and SMU are all a lot more precarious than they used to be.

In New Brunswick, the biggest absolute loser has been the University of New Brunswick’s Fredericton campus, which now has roughly 16% fewer students than it did a decade ago (to all those folks who wonder along with AUNBT why UNB keeps getting rid of tenure lines: that’s why).  But in percentage terms, the real disasters are Moncton’s satellite campuses in Shippagan and Edmundston, where enrolments are down 37 and 49%, respectively, over a decade.

Figure 2: Total Enrolments at Universite de Moncton Satellite Campuses, 2004/05 to 2013/14

Some of you may have noticed last week that Sweet Briar College, a small women’s college in Virginia with an endowment of $100 million, and annual fees of $34,000 US, announced it would be closing because its enrolments and finances were unsustainable.  How many students did it have?  550 – about the same as Edmundston, and 100 more than Shippagan. Somehow, neither campus is losing too much money yet – both are losing about $150K on budgets in the $12 million range – but we’re getting close to the point where the viability of both has to come into question.  That will be hugely traumatic for both communities: having a post-secondary institution in town is a major part of both their survival plans.  But it’s hard to see how the provincial government and the Acadian community as a whole can avoid this discussion.

So, is post-secondary education as a whole in trouble in the Maritimes?  No.   But I count four institutions whose enrolments are already down over 10% from where they were a decade ago, plus the two catastrophic cases of Shippagan and Edmundston.  And there are further youth population declines to come.  Yeah, some of this can be offset by international students (though in the case of Saint Mary’s, they’re already at 30% international students, and *still* their overall numbers are down 10%), but I wouldn’t bet they all can.

In other words, don’t be distracted by the aggregate numbers.  There are some very tough decisions to be made at some of these schools.  My guess is one or two of them won’t be here a decade from now.