Thursday's news that the College of Saint Rose in Albany will close leaves questions about what will happen to the neighborhood. But it’s not the first upstate private college to close in recent months.
In December 2022, the nearly 200-year-old Cazenovia College located just outside Syracuse, announced the spring 2023 semester was the last for students and faculty. Like Saint Rose, the college's financial problems had become insurmountable. Saint Rose has been struggling financially for the past few years and recently asked the city for $5 million in emergency funding. Officials at Cazenovia said COVID and rising inflation expedited its demise. The college failed when it could not refinance a $25 million debt that had come due.
Cazenovia Area Community Development Association Executive Director Lauren Lines says Albany should brace for trying times. "There was a lot of, definitely a lot of anxiety, you know, right after the announcement, and we held a couple of community forums for people to come and share ideas and we set up a website so that we could share information easily with the community. And then we decided to do a strategic plan for the campus where we don't really have necessarily a stake in who might ultimately purchase the properties. We thought that we could contribute positively to the planning process. So we were able to secure both a state and federal grant to do a strategic plan, which is currently underway. So that, you know, ultimately, might encourage a buyer once we see what types of uses are feasible. So we really, we right away after the announcement initiated community planning process," Lines said.
The College of New Rochelle in Westchester County ended a 115-year run in 2019, brought down by debt and unpaid taxes. Like Saint Rose, the college engaged in fundraising and sold some of its properties, but in the end it couldn't raise enough cash to avoid shuttering. After closing, the private Catholic college declared bankruptcy.
Mark Podgainy is managing director of Getzler Henrich & Associates LLC and was on hand to ease New Rochelle's shutdown. He says early steps for Saint Rose will likely entail monetizing assets, including real estate, equipment and artwork.
"One of the issues that you have with monetizing real estate is, you know, you have the community that has an interest in what happens to the real estate, you're trying to maximize the value of it," Podgainy said. "And, you know, and then there's the government, which has, you know, laws, like zoning laws. So to a certain extent, you know, you're limited in what you can't be limited in how you monetize a real estate by community pressure, the zoning laws and so on, so forth. And so typically, you'll hire a real estate broker, who will market, the real estate, and real estate could be sold in whole or parts, and, you know, depends on the best way to maximize value."
In Cazenovia, Lines says the economic blow of the college's collapse was considerably softened when, weeks after the final class graduated, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced that the campus would be put to use training state troopers. They're in the first year of a two-year commitment. Work continues on some of the college buildings and there is hope that local entities will eventually refurbish and move into others.
Saint Rose has 87 properties and roughly 2,700 students. Podgainy says that for Saint Rose, student welfare should be a priority.
"The most important thing is to do right by the students and to make sure that the students have a place to go to continue their education. And that's the primary concern that the trustees usually have," said Podgainy.
Speaking on WAMC's Roundtable Panel, Mayor Kathy Sheehan says Albany is bracing for whatever comes next. "We have the good fortune that our assembly woman who represents the district within which the College of Saint Rose is the chair of the Education Committee at the state level. And so I don't want to presume what that is. But I think it is important that we have that conversation, because this certainly is going to have an economic impact on the city of Albany. We have to strategize with our police department and our fire department about how are we going to protect this large campus that presumably will be empty at the end of June. We have to strategize and, and plan around those types of issues. That's a given. But I think it is important to advocate for this broader conversation about just when we need to be gearing up for trying to recruit more teachers, we've lost a resource for training them," Sheehan said.
