Suffolk Closeup: Local Colleges Defy Doubts as Enrollment Grows

“If you were to judge by public-opinion polling, you might reasonably conclude that Americans have broadly given up on the idea of going to college,” began an article this year in The Atlantic magazine. “In 2013, 70 percent of adults surveyed by Pew said that a college education was ‘very important.’ This year, only 35 percent did.”

But, the piece continued, “If you were to judge…by the choices Americans are actually making, you might draw a different conclusion. Despite the reported skepticism of higher education, enrollment is growing.”

And that is the situation in Suffolk County.

Meanwhile, there was the report, also this year, on National Public Radio headed: “More than a quarter of private colleges are at a risk of closing.”

That has also been true in Suffolk. Two private colleges here—Southampton College and Dowling College—have closed, as did Friends World College, then absorbed by Long Island University. However, doing well is another private school, St. Joseph’s University—Long Island.

The Atlantic piece said, “Even as Americans tell pollsters that college isn’t worth it, their behavior suggests that they still recognize the value of a degree….The college wage premium—the difference in earnings between people with only a high-school diploma and people with a four-year college degree—surged in the 1980s and ’90s and remained close to those historic highs for the past two decades.”

The basis for getting a degree shouldn’t be totally based on financial advantage. As someone who spent 47 years teaching at SUNY Old Westbury in neighboring Nassau, retiring last year as a full professor, I tried through the decades to encourage the thousands of students I taught, as professors do, to seek loftier goals: critical thinking, gaining knowledge, and in my subject area, doing good journalism. Making good money, of course, doesn’t hurt.

The first four-year college in Suffolk was Dowling College. It started in 1959 in Sayville as Adelphi-Suffolk College, an eastern extension of Adelphi University in Garden City. It became independent in 1986 and was renamed Dowling College in honor of benefactor Robert Dowling. It had a campus at the former William K. Vanderbilt estate in Oakdale. Financial problems ended it in 2016.

In 1959, too, Suffolk County Community College was founded. It has grown to now having 21,000 students and becoming the largest two-year community college in the 64-school SUNY system. It has three campuses: the original Ammerman Campus in Selden, the Michael J. Grant Campus in Brentwood, opened in 1974, and the Eastern Campus near Riverhead, opened in 1977.

Southampton College opened in 1963 and closed in 2005, with the Long Island University board, which oversaw it, citing financial problems. In addition to teaching at SUNY Old Westbury, I taught at Southampton. It was a bustling campus. In 2006, it became a branch of Stony Brook University and a shadow of what it had been. A private university that has thrived is St. Joseph’s University—Long Island, located in Patchogue. Opened in 1979, it now has over 2,000 students. It is linked with Brooklyn-based St. Joseph’s University. Of their “mission,” they say: “While proud of its Catholic tradition, St. Joseph's is independent and coeducational, offering an affordable private education.”

Meanwhile, Stony Brook University has become an educational dynamo. Describing itself as “New York’s flagship university,” it announced last year that “with 27,000 students” it had “achieved its highest enrollment to date.”