In recent years, several small and mostly private colleges have struggled financially to keep their doors open. The pandemic accelerated college administrators’ decisions about the futures of their institutions. Some administrators looked to mergers with more financially sound colleges, writes Douglas Belkin for the Wall Street Journal. In the past four years, there have been 95 college mergers, compared with 78 over the prior 18 years, writes Belkin. Among them, Mills College, a 170-year-old women’s school near Silicon Valley. The school recently merged with Boston-based Northeastern University, whose president during the pandemic looked for opportunities to acquire small schools in financial trouble. Northeastern follows a work-study model rather than the traditional way higher learning institutions are operated with schools organized around academic disciplines. It has been expanding in the past decade beyond its home base in Boston. The pandemic provided an opportunity for even more expansion, the school’s president, Joseph Aoun, told Belkin. “Everyone follows the same approach. … If the world is changing around you and you’re not changing, that is risky.”