How an education reporter broke the story about a college closing

By Olivia Cohen >>

Before joining the Hechinger Report, Meredith Kolodner worked at different New York daily newspapers on both business and education beats. But since arriving at the Report about ten years ago, she’s been immersed in in-depth education reporting. When Kolodner first arrived at the Report she covered kindergarten through 12th grade; she later moved over to covering higher education with an emphasis in investigative journalism. 

In May 2024, Kolodner published an investigation about how one college in Aurora, New York, abruptly closed leaving many in the dark, including students who were in the middle of finals week. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

Q: Can you walk me through how you went about reporting this story? 

A: The story came from a tip from somebody I trusted very much because of our past work together. So when she called and told me that there’s something wrong at Wells, I took it very seriously. At first it looked like it was just another school closing, but they announced the closing of the college the week of finals. 

It wasn’t just the situation this college was closing. It was the devastation it was going to mean for students, faculty and staff, and the people in the small community Wells was in. It was so last minute that it was difficult for anyone trying to get new jobs and for students who were trying to figure out where they were going to finish their education. What I wanted to find out was, why did it happen so last minute. There were a lot of theories going around and I really wanted to get the bottom of whether or not this could have been done any other way. Wells was a private institution, so a bunch of the information wasn’t public and I couldn’t FOIA it, but there were ways to get a lot of information. 

I started with regular sources, talking to professors. There were members of the Board of Trustee and the town mayor, and because it’s a private institution, it was one of the main employers of the town.

All colleges are accredited by nonprofit organizations called accreditors. They are responsible for ensuring the quality of education and fiscal health of the institutions they accredit. They make the findings public, so I could see that Wells had been put on probation several years before fiscal problems and I got some documentation through their audits. 

I was able to see they had created some transfer agreements in the fall just in case they closed, so their students would have somewhere to go even though they didn’t tell the students. I could see with some of the filings with the town that they were trying to change their land use permission from “institutional” to “mixed use,” setting up so they could sell off some of the real estate for non-educational purposes. 

There’s also 990 tax returns, with a lot of financial information, like salaries, bonuses, spending on buildings and donations. Often the colleges share information with alumni that might not be public. And if alumni are upset, they’re willing to share that kind of information. 

Q: Reporters often have to rely on 990s because public records typically aren’t available with private institutions. What else should reporters — specifically education reporters — look for when trying to report on these private institutions?

A: In addition to 990s, private institutions need to be audited. Like ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, they have the 990s there. But they also have audits because you have to hire an outside institution to make sure that your finances are in order. It’s another layer of oversight. 

Accreditors have to report every few years and visit the campus to go through all their paperwork, basically ensuring the quality of the education. Accreditors are also responsible for making sure the university is fiscally healthy, because if they’re not, they can lose federal funding. 

The best thing in the private colleges is the sources inside the college itself — administrators, people in the budget office, financial aid staff — often know what’s going on behind the scenes. If you can’t get the college to hand you paperwork, there are a lot of human beings that have access to that paperwork. A lot of people in higher education are there because they believe very strongly in the need for education. If they think something’s being done that’s not in the interest of students or faculty, they might be willing to share. 

Q: For finding sources, especially when it comes to administrators, long-time faculty or the Board of Trustees, how did you go about finding the right sources to fit in this story? 

I started in a few places. I wanted to make sure I had professors, staff, students and administrators, so I certainly allowed for people to speak anonymously and off-the-record in a case like this. Their futures and jobs were on the line. 

I went on social media to find students, because people were posting on social media about having suddenly been told their college was closing, so it was just a matter of checking whichever social media you think that the students are on. 

LinkedIn is a good way to find people who work at a particular place, because you can search by employer. And you can find people who used to work there because sometimes they’re more likely to speak on-the-record if they’ve left. 

Alumni networks were really important in this case, because the alumni were very upset about what was happening. The people who went to the school cared deeply about it, so I got connected with a lot of professors who were the most in-the-know. When you’re in a situation when people are upset, it’s not difficult to get people to talk.

It was just a question of making sure I had enough overlapping sources so even if people didn’t want to be on the record, I was confident about the reporting. As long as I had three anonymous sources who were giving me the information separately, I felt comfortable with it. There were certain things I know happened that I couldn’t put in the story because it would have exposed the sources, so not everything ended up in the story out of respect to people’s confidentiality. 

Q: I’m curious how you went about walking sources through what the story is about and trying to gently encourage them to go on the record if they can. How did you build a safety net for them? 

A: It really depended on the person. I asked them, “tell me what your concerns are about your name being out there,” and “what is it that you’re concerned that might happen?” In a lot of cases, they’re right. It could be a problem for them. In those cases, I wasn’t going to ask someone to risk their employment. It wasn’t that kind of story to put everything on the line. 

I showed compassion and understanding about what they could be risking, and the tough situation they were in. I asked them if there was anyone else who might talk on the record. Some of those people became very active behind the scenes, helping to put pieces together because they cared. 

I hope they could tell I cared too. I wasn’t just talking to them so I could get the story. It wasn’t only transactional. I genuinely did care what was going to happen to them and their families, and was not interested in doing something to put their livelihoods at risk. Just because they didn’t want their name used didn’t mean they didn’t care. 

Q: You mentioned Wells was put on probation. How often does that happen where a college is on probation?

A: It’s a major red flag because accreditors are not in the business of shutting down institutions. They understand that being on probation could impact enrollment and what a downward spiral that is. What was striking to me was the extent to which Wells was on probation, and got taken off when the financials still looked shaky. It takes a lot to be put on probation, so if reporters see that it’s certainly worth looking into, because that means there are significant problems. There’s a database of accreditors and their actions the federal government peeks at, called the Database of Accredited Secondary Institutions and Programs. There you can look up schools and see their accreditation records. 

There’s also something called “Heightened Cash Monitoring.” If a school is on that, there’s a significant financial concern. It might not give you tons of information but you can see a whole list, but it is published quarterly. Once you’re on Heightened Cash Monitoring, it’s bad. That’s not a great situation to be in, because it means the federal government is considering withholding federal funds.

Q: If a reporter wanted to look into a different institution in a similar way you did, what should they look for?

A: In addition to the 990s and the accreditors, see if the institution gets any kind of federal aid. If you’re a private college but you have any students who are on Pell Grants or are using federal loans, then the institution is taking federal aid. That means you’re a title for school, and you have to report a bunch of information to the federal government. Even if you’re not a title for school, there are still reporting requirements. 

There’s a federal database called IPEDS, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, that has an enormous amount of information, like graduation rate, enrollment, number of students and demographics. 

There’s also a financial health section. There you can see the change in net assets and the total operating revenues. All these details tend to lag by a year, but it has so much information in it. 

There’s also a database called College Scorecard, which has just an overwhelming amount of data in it, like the average debt a student graduates with, net price, average test scores, median earnings, employment records and so much more. If you can think of it, they’re probably collecting it. 

Q: After reporting about Wells College, do you suspect this is happening at other colleges? 

A: Absolutely, there’s no question. I did the Wells story, and then a month later it happened at three other colleges, but one of them got saved by the alumni. There’s a declining birth rate, so that’s part of what’s going on with college closures, but the cost of college is really the main thing. It’s so expensive, so fewer students can afford to go to these colleges. 

If you see a college where enrollment has been dropping a while — and it’s below a thousand students — that is certainly something. And if they’re discounting tuition, that would be something worth looking at more closely. 

We had a college closure crisis, and then COVID hit, making it worse. The federal government gave colleges money, so there was a rebound, and colleges stopped closing for a while, but the COVID money dried out, and that’s why you saw a big wave of closures last year. 

Olivia Cohen is a Midwest-based journalist and a frequent contributor to GJR.

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