Dive Transient:
- For-profit Metropolis School, in Florida, is transferring to shut completely, the establishment introduced late this week in a transfer that reportedly shocked college students. The school didn’t disclose the explanation for its choice.
- The school — which focuses totally on healthcare profession applications — plans to cease enrolling new college students beginning with the autumn time period and can educate out its present college students.
- Metropolis School joins a handful of different career-focused establishments which have closed in current months amid enrollment declines and different pressures bearing down on the upper ed sector.
Dive Perception:
Metropolis School’s announcement adopted native media studies of the establishment’s pending closure. In response to a South Florida NBC affiliate, the choice got here as a shock to college students, who struggled to get data.
“Out of the blue being knowledgeable three days in the past that the establishment is closing down, it was stunning, everybody was blindsided by this,” one scholar advised the station.
One other station, Native 10, which first reported on the closure on Wednesday, was ejected from the school’s property by an worker because the crew was making an attempt to assemble details about the closure.
Metropolis School officers didn’t reply to Greater Ed Dive’s requests for extra details about why it’s closing. Messages to greater than a dozen school workers and college members additionally went unreturned.
Metropolis School opened its first location in 1984 in Fort Lauderdale. By 2017, it gained accreditation from the Accrediting Bureau of Well being Schooling Colleges and had grown to incorporate 5 Florida areas plus an internet division.
Its web site at present lists simply two areas, in Altamonte Springs and Hollywood. Its areas in Gainesville, Fort Lauderdale and Miami have closed completely, based on Google and Yelp enterprise opinions.
In fall 2022, Metropolis School’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 school stated it would help college students in graduating or proceed their research elsewhere and “will define a transparent pathway for them to earn their levels.” It additionally stated the transition could be guided by a proper teach-out plan.
The school added it will proceed to supply help companies, together with advising, tutoring, switch help and placement companies.
“Metropolis School understands the affect of this choice and has all the time prided itself on its dedication to its scholar physique: one which we now have each intention of sustaining by all steps of the teach-out part,” the school stated in its web site discover.
Metropolis School is one in every of a number of career-oriented establishments to shutter in current months, together with for-profits Northwestern School in Illinois, North Coast School in Ohio, Mountain State School in West Virginia, and Triangle Tech in Pennsylvania, in addition to the personal nonprofit Pittsburgh Technical School.
