School Reborn

There were dark days on campus at the College of Santa Fe in 2009, as students and faculty prepared for their school to close permanently.

“I had a class where the structure is, you have to make three films,” said Kaylee Carson, a senior film major. “That semester, you only had to make one, because everyone was freaking out.”

“It was horrible,” said performing arts instructor Gail Springer. “Painful.”

“That last year was hell,” said David Scheinbaum, chairman of the photography department.

On the campus of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design today, it’s not that way. Two years after the college was taken over by international for-profit Laureate Education, the school has something it was missing in the months and years before: financial stability.

“We’re healthier financially because we have this backup, this whatever-billion-dollar corporation behind us,” Springer said. “Not that they just give us all this money. They still want us to support ourselves.”

Laureate won’t disclose its total value, but the company is a worldwide whale. Santa Fe University is Laureate’s fifth school in the U.S. There are 58 campuses in the entire Laureate network, including four in China, two in Australia, two in Spain and eight in Brazil.

“A lot has changed,” said Ariana Lombardi, a senior creative writing major. “Just the climate on campus is different. We have international students now. I went abroad, to Istanbul, in the spring, which I never could have done at College of Santa Fe. It was an amazing experience that changed my life. It was like ‘All right, this is the world. This is cool.’ ”

With a big-money backer, Lombardi said, opportunities for students are expanding.

“With the College of Santa Fe, there were these possibilities that never came to fruition,” she said. “Now, if you want something to happen, chances are that if you talk to the right people and get in there and keep going, it will happen. It’s more stable.”

Scheinbaum began teaching at the College of Santa Fe in the early 1980s. CSF, he said, was constantly relying on tuition to fill its coffers.

“So much of what we did every semester relied on enrollment,” he said. “When enrollment was down, everything was down.”

But lack of money, he said, “did not affect the education. It affected morale, but it did not affect education.”

Morale is up now, campus-wide, as Laureate has put its resources behind the school. Laureate had its eye on the College of Santa Fe well before the 11th-hour deal to keep it open in 2009. The company negotiated with creditors for several months in 2008, but talks broke off when they decided they’d rather take the school into bankruptcy and sell the property, said Larry Hinz, the university’s president.

“I spent a lot of time here and was in shock and disbelief the school would want to go into bankruptcy – that the people here would let that happen,” Hinz said.

Then-Gov. Bill Richardson and Santa Fe Mayor David Coss reached out to Laureate in 2009 and asked them back, to see if a deal could be worked out. Ultimately, one was: The city of Santa Fe bought the campus for $30 million, the state kicked in around $11 million, and Laureate agreed to lease the land and keep the school open.

“It’s a tremendous asset for a creative city like Santa Fe to have this university in place,” said Coss. “I think this was a remarkable deal to get done.”

The city is funding $15 million in maintenance upgrades, like a new roof on Greer Garson Theater and paving jobs on campus streets that had been put off for years. Over time, Laureate will pay off the cost of the bond used to make the purchase, Coss said, and there is a provision in the lease agreement allowing Laureate to some day buy the campus from Santa Fe.

About 150 students returned to the college when it reopened under Laureate in 2009. Today, there are more than 500 students on campus. Around 50 of those are exchange students from Laureate schools outside the U.S., and administrators expect the student population – including those imported for a semester or more at a time – to balloon over the coming years. “We have plans to increase enrollment responsibility,” said Hinz. “This campus will have several thousand students by 2015.”

Administrators, teachers and students all bristle at the notion that a for-profit institution would emphasize dollars over its mission. The average class size is about 15 students to every one teacher, Hinz said, and most studio classes have an 8-to-1 student-teacher ratio.

“We have a lot of one-on-one here,” said Springer, the performing arts teacher. “There’s new administrators who are not of this College-of-Santa-Fe mind,” said Lombardi. “They work for a corporation, Laureate, and they’re just doing their jobs. The staff that came back from the College of Santa Fe, though, they’ve invested in students and they want to make sure this place keeps that quirky character we’ve always had.”

Several of the old guard remain from the College of Santa Fe, including six of seven faculty chairs. University officials tout their instructors as assets – professionals who teach, rather than professional teachers. Gerry Snyder, the school’s vice president, is a painter whose psychedelic, cloud-like pieces are part of numerous permanent museum collections.

“We get this tag: ‘For profit,’ ” he said. “We’re doing the same thing we’ve always done, but what Laureate’s allowed us to do is take this really good idea and get to a place where we can actually be profitable, which is why the College of Santa Fe closed: It wasn’t profitable. We’re not a franchise.”

For-profit colleges around the country have been under fire, with critics saying aggressive recruitment campaigns often leave students deep in debt with little payoff in terms of job prospects.

But Laureate’s Santa Fe school is something different – an accredited four-year university, not like many other for-profit schools aimed first at attracting adults or nontraditional students who want to go back to school to improve their skill sets.

“We’re a traditional institution: four years, 120 credits for the degree,” said Snyder. “We have a curriculum that meets the standard of anybody.”

Tuition at the University of Art and Design runs almost $14,000 per semester, with a 25 percent discount for Santa Feans or a 20 percent discount for other New Mexicans.

What that buys, according to teachers and students at the school, is more than class instruction. Administrators say Santa Fe’s art galleries and museums are where their students find internship opportunities.

“Students do internships at every place in Santa Fe,” said Scheinbaum. “Every photographer in town at one time or another has been here talking with students, visiting with them. The whole town is part of this program.”

Film students have a particularly attractive classroom in the Greer Garson Studios, where, over the last few years, scenes from “True Grit,” “Iron Man 2,” “Cowboys & Aliens” and “No Country For Old Men” have been filmed. This year’s HBO film “The Sunset Limited” was filmed at the studio, and its apartment set remains for students to rework for their own projects.

The university negotiates with studios to allow students on set as interns.

“The reason I came here was because of the soundstages and knowing I’d have the chance to intern,” said Carson, the film student. “That fall, when I came back, it was like, ‘Yeah, there’s probably going to be only 30 people here, but we have a show coming. It’s directed by Tommy Lee Jones, and he’s starring in it with Samuel L. Jackson. Do you want to intern on it?’

“I was thrilled. This is why I came here, and, since then, I’ve continued to have those opportunities. I don’t think that would have happened if the school hadn’t remained.”

Two years after the College of Santa Fe almost shut down, the Santa Fe University of Art and Design is thriving under new management, Scheinbaum said. “With the faculty, the curriculum, the stability, the international global scope of it, I think we’re poised to be the place. I believe that.”