The International Air and Hospitality Academy in Vancouver will close all affiliated schools and programs at the end of the year, CEO DJ Schmidt announced Tuesday.
Since opening nearly 45 years ago, the academy has trained thousands of students in airline hospitality. Founder Arch Miller opened the Northwest Culinary Institute in 2004 and the Northwest Renewable Energy Institute in 2009 in an effort to expand to new areas adjacent to airline work. Those schools will also be closing their doors at the end of the year.
Schmidt attributed the closures to “stifling” government regulations, declining enrollment and this year’s issues with the rollout of a new Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
“The ever-increasing regulatory burden makes it more difficult and costly each year to operate a small career school,” Schmidt said in an email Tuesday.
The closures are not expected to affect current students; all classes will continue to be offered as scheduled and the school’s final class will graduate Dec. 20, according to a news release.
Navigating turbulence
The school’s leadership hasn’t been strangers to bumps in the road. Major world events — namely 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic — presented massive challenges to the airline industry, which in turn limited short-term interest in the school’s programs.
Even the school’s opening year was chaotic. The “very first day of class” in January 1980 was put on hold by a snowstorm, according to the news release.
The school suffered a more recent blow in 2021 when Miller died following a decadelong battle with pulmonary disease.
Schmidt said recently established federal regulations, such as the gainful employment rule, greatly diminished the school’s financial viability.
The gainful employment rule — which was originally adopted in 2014, scrapped by the Trump administration in 2019 and then readopted by the Biden administration last year — requires for-profit schools to collect data on graduates’ employment rates after leaving the school or risk losing access to federal financial aid. The law, government officials said, was designed to protect the hundreds of thousands of students left unable to pay back loans after graduating.
“The constant drumbeat of negativity from the federal government about private career schools combined with the public and private grants received by community colleges creates a challenging competitive landscape,” Schmidt said.
This year, the school served about 300 to 325 students. Between 2018 and 2022, the average enrollment across all programs was about 490.
Schmidt said in the news release the school will be in direct communication with all students and community stakeholders as it works on the closure in the coming months.
