West Virginians — particularly those still struggling to figure out how to proceed in the wake of Ohio Valley University’s bungled closure — may be experiencing deja vu as they read about Alderson Broaddus University’s reported plan to disband.

It is a very similar story: debt racked up at a small, private faith-based university to the point that hundreds of students — many of them out-of-staters or student-athletes who don’t have time to pivot — need to find another path forward. When the Alderson Broaddus Board of Trustees voted to develop a plan to disband, it came after the state Higher Education Policy Commission voted to revoke its ability to award degrees.

“While it is no secret that we’ve had challenges with AB being forthcoming with information and working with us, I can’t stress enough how critical it is right now for the leadership at AB to put their students first,” Commission Chancellor Sarah Armstrong Tucker said.

It appears as though the HEPC has learned some lessons after perhaps not demanding enough of OVU in its last days. Still, institutions struggling to the degree that Alderson Broaddus has been are not always communicative. The school defaulted on repayment of bonds totalling more than $36 million in 2015. It was placed on probation by the Higher Learning Commission, an accreditor, in 2017 (though that probation was lifted in 2019). It had $775,000 in utility debts alone, though it did make a payment of $67,000 to the city of Philippi to keep from having those utilities shut off recently. The U.S. Department of Agriculture tried to help by allowing the school to restructure a $27 million loan. It needed contributions from alumni this year to meet payroll.

And now, Tucker says that at the end, “frankly very little has been done by AB on its own to provide teach-out plans for students or to communicate to the campus community the dire situation the institution is in.”

Here’s hoping other schools in West Virginia are able to help many of those students. In the meantime, the collapse of OVU and Alderson Broaddus should serve as a reminder to those squawking about cost-cutting measures at West Virginia University that their leadership is doing exactly the right thing to preserve the institution and best serve students. Ignoring financial problems does not make them go away. They can destroy even the most cherished school.