2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Did Bernie's wife commit a felony when she secured a loan for Burlington College? [View all]MADem
(135,425 posts)If you're going to spend thirty grand for room and board, and then more, of course, for books and materials and so forth, you'd be better off going to a good state school that is not on probation for financial resource issues.
Right now, with their probationary accreditation, I don't think even a "unique learner" would be smart to enroll there. It's like flushing money down the crapper. They are having serious trouble keeping students--they transfer out as fast as they enroll, and this is problematic for their future. The accept pretty much everyone who applies, and they have rolling admissions--it's small, but certainly not exclusive.
It would have been fine, for what it is, had management not gotten all Trump-Grandiose and tried to make it into something more than what it was established to be--a small, quirky place for students who often learn diferently, with "unusual" offerings for people with unique interests.
She wasn't "brave" at all (what a weird thing to say) --she wanted that 200K salary for what looked like an easy gig. She was familiar with academia, she worked at Goddard before this.
Had she stuck to a conservative growth agenda, instead of trying to buy up the Catholic Church's mess (they used that cash they got from that sale to pay abuse victims), that school would have been FINE. She broke it. If they fail and go under, it's on her head--and that is the truth no matter how much she tries to distance herself from the mess she made. She was a horrible steward of that place.
She wanted to turn a tract house into a mansion, in essence, and it didn't work.