Following all of this from afar with no more interest than idle curiosity I have come to the conclusion that this project is probably doomed to fail.
First of all, higher education is one of the most difficult things to be in these days, especially private higher education. Small colleges are collapsing and failing all across the country because the economics of private higher education just don't pencil out, even if you have all the advantages of 100 years of infrastructure, history, endowments, and alumni and a large church behind you. Here in the Portland area we have seen historic Catholic and Lutheran colleges collapse and close in the past few years that had FAR more history, infrastructure and resources than Sattler:
Concordia University (Lutheran):
https://www.opb.org/news/article/concor ... uri-synod/
Maryhurst University (Catholic):
https://www.opb.org/news/article/marylh ... se-oregon/
I have a friend who works in the administration of a public university and he says that their break-even point is about 75 students per class. Anything less than that and they are running in deficit. Small seminar classes with 10-20 students? Completely unsustainable. And that is for public universities that get state subsidies. It would be worse for private universities that receive no such subsidies. And it is worse for STEM areas that require lots of technology and infrastructure and labs. A mechanical engineering class or organic chemistry class might be 4-times more expensive to run than a foreign language, history, or literature class.
At Sattler, like other small private colleges, at some point the money is going to run out and then poof, it will all be gone. Sattler doesn't have a deep alumni network to fundraise from like older historic colleges, and doesn't have a large denomination behind it to do the same. It seems to be mostly just one guy. Who I'm guessing doesn't have infinitely deep pockets. Goshen College, for example, has an endowment of about $150 million that was raised through over a century of fundraising, legacies left by deceased alumni, etc. And even that only goes so far. The typical safe withdrawal rate for a college endowment is about 4% so that $150 million endowment is only kicking out about $6 million per year. And that is for a school with an annual budget of about $40 million if I'm reading the reports correctly. So there is a whole lot of money to make up with tuition payments and grants just to break even.
Secondly, all religious institutions are caught between a rock and hard place when it comes to finding their place on the conservative/liberal scale. You definitely see it in other more mainstream Anabaptist colleges like Goshen, EMU, Heston, Bethel, etc. No matter where the school comes down there are more conservative parents who pull out because the school is not conservative enough, and more liberal parents and students who pull out because it is not liberal enough. This still happened generations ago. Goshen actually closed for a year in the 1920s over this sort of battle. But I think it has gotten worse in recent decades as denominations have become more polarized. More and more religious schools are evolving into what are really more regional schools. For example, I think Goshen now has a minority of students from Anabaptist roots and is becoming more of just a small regional private college. It has no other choice really.
Thirdly, I think a conservative Anabaptist college in a big city with zero Anabaptist roots or heritage is an especially ill-conceived idea. Conservative Anabaptists very much trend rural not urban. And are also more tied to place and family than perhaps your typical middle class suburbanite. So a new college in Lancaster County or rural Ohio or someplace like that would have made more sense on a whole lot of levels. There is a market for politically conservative religious education. That is the sort of thing that places like Liberty University are doing. But I don't think the same sort of market exists for Conservative Anabaptist higher education in some distant non-Anabaptist big city. People have a LOT of choices when it comes to higher education and the actual yield rate for most small colleges is in more like the 10% range. So if a college wants a freshman class of say 100 students they may have to recruit and offer admission to over 1000. Because most students apply to multiple colleges but decide to attend only one. Or to not attend at all. So you have to cast a really big net to keep a college running. The math is probably less brutal for a very niche school like Sattler, but it is still there at some level.
Finally a small college founded by a small religious group that seems to have almost zero college age students of its own seems even more ill-considered. From what little I know of FOTW congregations, they are mostly younger homeschooling type families who don't, in fact, have college age students of their own to send to college. You can, of course, make it a very ecumenical sort of place which many religious colleges are doing. But that doesn't seem to be at all what Sattler is doing.
I'm happy to be proven wrong. I think more diversity of options in higher education is a good thing. And I'm just one guy with an opinion on the internet that is worth exactly what you paid for it. But those are my thoughts as someone who's third daughter is right in the middle of this process as we speak. And who teaches a lot of HS students who are going through the same college selection process as well.
