Metro Business College to close barring surprise intervention

Barring an eleventh hour change in plans, Metro Business College will close by the end of the year.

Metro Business College has campuses in Cape Girardeau, Jefferson City and Rolla, all three of which will close according to MBC founder and president George Holske. He said declining enrollment and the cost of keeping classrooms open have forced him to make closure plans.

"I think we're down to about 30 students (in Cape Girardeau), and you can't survive on 30 students, no matter how much you cut the budget," Holske said in a telephone interview. "There is a point at which you can still survive by slashing overhead, but we've gone past that point."

Metro Business College opened its Cape Girardeau campus in 1981 when Holske, who was operating the Metro Training Center in St. Louis, acquired Cape Business College and moved it from Main Street to the 1400 block of North Kingshighway. The school moved to its current location in the 1700 block of North Kingshighway a few years later.

The St. Louis-based private college opened a second campus in Rolla in 1984 and a third campus the following year in Jefferson City.

With a curriculum that focused on training medical office personnel, administrative assistants, coding specialists and others, the Cape Girardeau location had an average enrollment of 125 students throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s. "Our peak enrollment in Cape Girardeau was about 190 students in 2009 during the big recession and then it started to slip after that," Holske said.

Declining enrollment and reduced revenue have resulted in an operating loss for the Metro Business College campuses for several years. "We've taught classes at a loss for the last seven years," Holske said. "I have put money back in to keep the schools funded for the last seven years and you can do that for just so long."

As part of the closure process, the school stopped admitting students earlier this year so that all currently-enrolled students can complete their coursework before MBC's current accreditation with the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools expires at the end of the year.

"Whenever a school feels it has to close because it doesn't have enough students to support the overhead of the institution, the first step is to stop taking new students because your primary goal it to be able to 'teach out' all of the students (currently) in your school," Holske said, adding that an "official announcement" of exactly when the three campuses will close could come within the next month or so.

"We're nationally accredited and our cycle of accreditation will end at the end of this year. The costs associated with going through reaccreditation are so great we can't afford to do it so there's no point in going on. When accreditation is up that's when we would lose the ability to get financial aid for our students," he said.

"To make an official announcement we will need to tell the state of Missouri, we need to tell our accrediting body and we need to tell the federal government," he said. "I have not wanted to do that yet, because I wanted to work with our students. That and taking care of our employees are our primary objectives."

According to the Metro Business College website, MBC has seven faculty and staff members at its Cape Girardeau location including campus director and longtime employee Jan Reimann. She directed all questions about the school's future to the school's president.

Holske said he believes several factors have played a part in the school's closure. "First, there are plenty of jobs," he said and explained that people who might otherwise enroll at MBC for job retraining are able to find work without additional education.

"Second, the younger generation has been told about all the problems with student loans and student loan debt," he continued. "And to get just about any postsecondary education, especially at a private school like ours, they have to take out student loans, and they don't want to do that."

Finally, Holske said, it has become economically impractical for students to train for jobs paying less than they can receive through government "safety net" programs. "There are still a lot of programs left over from the recession," he said and explained it is more financially viable for some students to receive government benefits "that in some cases amount to over $30,000 a year" rather than complete a medical assistant course qualifying them for starting pay in the $12 to $13 an hour range.

Although Holske said closure is almost a certainty, he still has a "slim" hope of finding a way to keep the MBC campuses open.

"I have talked with the (Cape Girardeau Area) chamber of commerce and I have asked them to see if there was anybody that might want to come in and work with us," he said. "I have also talked with a representative of our Congressman Jason Smith down there. We're still trying to see if there's anybody out there who can come in and work with us, but the chances are really slim."

When the doors close later this year, Holske said "people are going to be heartbroken. We've had three generations of families go through the school down there. I believe in what we do and I think we've done a good job of changing people's lives and that's what we're all about. The area is going to miss it. I tried, but I feel we've done as much as we could."

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