Dive Temporary:
- For-profit Metropolis Faculty, in Florida, is transferring to shut completely, the establishment introduced late this week in a transfer that reportedly shocked college students. The faculty didn’t disclose the rationale for its choice.
- The faculty — which focuses totally on healthcare profession applications — plans to cease enrolling new college students beginning with the autumn time period and can train out its present college students.
- Metropolis Faculty joins a handful of different career-focused establishments which have closed in latest months amid enrollment declines and different pressures bearing down on the upper ed sector.
Dive Perception:
Metropolis Faculty’s announcement adopted native media experiences of the establishment’s pending closure. Based on a South Florida NBC affiliate, the choice got here as a shock to college students, who struggled to get data.
“All of the sudden being knowledgeable three days in the past that the establishment is closing down, it was stunning, everybody was blindsided by this,” one pupil informed the station.
One other station, Native 10, which first reported on the closure on Wednesday, was ejected from the faculty’s property by an worker because the crew was attempting to collect details about the closure.
Metropolis Faculty officers didn’t reply to Greater Ed Dive’s requests for extra details about why it’s closing. Messages to greater than a dozen faculty workers and college members additionally went unreturned.
Metropolis Faculty opened its first location in 1984 in Fort Lauderdale. By 2017, it gained accreditation from the Accrediting Bureau of Well being Training Colleges and had grown to incorporate 5 Florida areas plus a web-based division.
Its web site at the moment lists simply two areas, in Altamonte Springs and Hollywood. Its areas in Gainesville, Fort Lauderdale and Miami have closed completely, in accordance with Google and Yelp enterprise opinions.
In fall 2022, Metropolis Faculty’s Hollywood location enrolled 257 college students — which was roughly flat in comparison with 5 years prior — and its Altamonte Springs location had 152 college students, down from 189 in 2017.
Because it closes its remaining campuses, the faculty mentioned it is going to help college students in graduating or proceed their research elsewhere and “will define a transparent pathway for them to earn their levels.” It additionally mentioned the transition can be guided by a proper teach-out plan.
The faculty added it might proceed to supply assist companies, together with advising, tutoring, switch help and placement companies.
“Metropolis Faculty understands the affect of this choice and has all the time prided itself on its dedication to its pupil physique: one which we’ve got each intention of sustaining via all steps of the teach-out section,” the faculty mentioned in its web site discover.
Metropolis Faculty is one in every of a number of career-oriented establishments to shutter in latest months, together with for-profits Northwestern Faculty in Illinois, North Coast Faculty in Ohio, Mountain State Faculty in West Virginia, and Triangle Tech in Pennsylvania, in addition to the non-public nonprofit Pittsburgh Technical Faculty.
