What's involved in actually closing a college?

With many private, non-profit colleges struggling currently across the country, there is much talk about some of these institutions actually closing.  In fact, only about 75 out of some 2700 have actually closed or merged in the past decade.  The failed effort of Virginia's Sweet Briar College to close in 2015, halted by a court action initiated by faculty, students and alumni, illustrated how hard committing suicide can be for even the weakest of schools.

This morning's edition of Inside Higher Ed includes a terrific article that describes the devil in the details of actually liquidating an institution that did indeed close its doors after graduating its class of 2014.

Most interesting to me is that Virginia Intermont College's 20+ acre campus ended up in the hands of a Chinese company intending to use it as a college once again.  The property went for $3.3 million, which sounds like a fire sale to me.  In fact, the transaction was handled by a bank, which had foreclosed on the property.  It took two years to get the deal done.

One reason that these closures are so difficult is that they are so relatively rare.  Few administrators and trustees have even been there and done that.  Consequently, there is an element of wheel reinvention when they do actually happen.  The for-profit world has its professional hatchet men, who specialize in down-sizing, foreclosures, bankruptcies and the like.  A similar cadre of experts has yet to emerge in higher ed to the best of my knowledge.  Would that we never needed them.  But that seems to be too much to hope.  Moody's predicts increasing closures in the future, and I don't disagree.