An Exploratory Study on Factors Affecting Private College Non-Viability in Korea

Korean private colleges, especially institutions which depend largely on tuition revenue, are in danger due to the decrease in the college-aged population affecting their student enrollment. Given that private institutions become nonviable at different points in time, this study examines the effects of covariates on the occurrence as well as the timing of private institutions first being nonviable under three domains: environmental context; institutional market characteristics; and institutional (finance and education) conditions and performance.;Utilizing Event History modeling, this study examines how and which factors are related to four-year private colleges' non-viability from the years 2007 to 2014. The non-viability of private institutions is defined as the opposite of viability with the two types of non-viability (finance and education) and the two models (narrow and wide) are constructed depending on the level of the criteria for measuring educational non-viability (mean and 75 th percentile).;The findings demonstrate that the odds of private colleges first becoming nonviable are the largest in the first year due to the accumulated effects of the previous years, and then steadily decrease, and that institutional failure occurs sparsely over time. The results also show that there is no significant relationship between environmental changes and college non-viability at the institution level within the eight years, and that school size and spending on books statistically significantly affect the odds of private colleges first being nonviable in the narrow and wide models. Concerning interactions, tuition significantly interacts with tuition dependency in both models. Age significantly interacts with school size in the narrow model, while age significantly interacts with scholarship rates and wealth interacts with school size in the wide model.;The results suggest that while institutional non-viability is rooted in the definition and scope of non-viability, many private colleges are stuck in a nonviable state due to the innate weaknesses that were present at their establishment prior to the advent of hostile environments. Strong options such as mergers and closures are imperative because it is difficult for private institutions to improve their unfavorable market characteristics in the short term. In this regard, the study findings have meaningful implications for research methods and college restructuring policy as well as for future research on factors affecting private colleges' non-viability.