StormX
Banned
The National Labor College, an education venture for working adults supported by the AFL-CIO, will close next year because of financial difficulties school officials attribute in part to the construction of a conference center several years ago on the Silver Spring campus.
The college, with 599 online students this fall, announced Wednesday that its board of trustees voted this week to accept a closure plan. Word of the impending shutdown had been circulating since at least mid-November.
“We’re all very, very sad,” said Paula E. Peinovich, the college’s president. The college will offer courses through the spring semester and have its final commencement in April — 17 years after it became an independent, degree-granting institution.
Peinovich said the college was burdened by debt incurred in a major campus renovation that began in 2003, including the construction of a 72,000-square-foot conference center named for Lane Kirkland, the late AFL-CIO president. The center, dedicated in 2007, was unable to generate enough revenue to erase the debt, Peinovich said, and even failed to cover its own operating costs.
Peinovich said the college owed about $30 million when she took over as president in 2010.
“A lot of the challenges go back to the decision to build the Kirkland Center,” said Bob Bruno, a trustee of the college who is a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois. “This overhang of debt that was carried forward just became something [the college] couldn’t get out of.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...5b-a77187b716a3_story.html?wprss=rss_national
Nobody wants the union label....
The college, with 599 online students this fall, announced Wednesday that its board of trustees voted this week to accept a closure plan. Word of the impending shutdown had been circulating since at least mid-November.
“We’re all very, very sad,” said Paula E. Peinovich, the college’s president. The college will offer courses through the spring semester and have its final commencement in April — 17 years after it became an independent, degree-granting institution.
Peinovich said the college was burdened by debt incurred in a major campus renovation that began in 2003, including the construction of a 72,000-square-foot conference center named for Lane Kirkland, the late AFL-CIO president. The center, dedicated in 2007, was unable to generate enough revenue to erase the debt, Peinovich said, and even failed to cover its own operating costs.
Peinovich said the college owed about $30 million when she took over as president in 2010.
“A lot of the challenges go back to the decision to build the Kirkland Center,” said Bob Bruno, a trustee of the college who is a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois. “This overhang of debt that was carried forward just became something [the college] couldn’t get out of.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...5b-a77187b716a3_story.html?wprss=rss_national
Nobody wants the union label....