Barat College — The Sacred Heart Women’s College DePaul Bought, Subsidized, and Switched Off

Summary

Barat College, a Catholic women's college founded by the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1858 and seated on a wooded campus in Lake Forest, Illinois, ceased to exist in June 2005, when DePaul University — which had absorbed it four years earlier — closed the campus and let the name lapse. For most of a century and a half it had been the small, devout, arts-minded college that the Religious of the Sacred Heart built to educate young women north of Chicago. It ended not with a padlocked gate in mid-semester but with a final commencement, the diplomas of its last class issued under DePaul's seal, and a 100-year-old campus put up for sale. Barat did not merge into a partner that kept its name on the door, as Mills did with Northeastern; it was taken in, run at a loss for three years, and quietly dissolved.

The arithmetic that killed it was the familiar one — a tuition-dependent women's college, lightly endowed, watching the single-sex market evaporate — but Barat's particular ending was shaped by the institution that tried to save it. In February 2001 DePaul University, the large Vincentian university in Chicago, formed an educational alliance with the struggling college, making Barat College of DePaul University one of the university's campuses on the bet that DePaul's scale, name, and enrollment machine could fill Lake Forest's classrooms. Demand never materialized. After pouring more than $22 million into the venture and absorbing significant operating losses on a campus whose maintenance costs were prohibitive, DePaul's trustees voted in February 2004 to stop.

The closure took effect in June 2005, the earliest date the agreement between the two Roman Catholic institutions allowed, and the last class — roughly 150 graduates — crossed the stage that spring. Continuing students were folded into DePaul's Lincoln Park and Loop campuses in Chicago; the tenured and tenure-track faculty were absorbed into the university, many teaching there for years afterward. By the brutal standards of the closure wave this was a humane unwinding: a teach-out, honored degrees, people not abandoned. What ended was the place and the name.

What Barat represents is the absorbed college in its purest form — taken into a larger one, supported for a while, then switched off when the numbers refuse to turn. The casual observer in Lake Forest saw the same buildings, the same chapel, the same wooded acres until 2005; what had quietly happened was that an independent 1858 college had become a line item on a Chicago university's balance sheet, and line items get cut. The final grace note belongs to the campus itself, which after a developer's failed condominium scheme and a bank foreclosure was gifted, in 2012, to the Sacred Heart secondary school next door — reuniting the land with the order that had bought it in the first place.

Timeline

1858

An academy in Chicago

The Society of the Sacred Heart founds an academy for young women in Chicago, the root from which Barat would date its 147-year history; the institution honors St. Madeleine Sophie Barat, the order's French foundress.

1904

Removal to Lake Forest

The school relocates to a wooded campus in Lake Forest, Illinois, about thirty miles north of Chicago, sharing the great "Old Main" building with the academy that would later become Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart.

1918

A four-year college

The state of Illinois charters Barat as a four-year, degree-granting college, formalizing the academy's evolution into a Catholic liberal-arts college for women.

1969

Out of the order's hands

Governance passes from the Society of the Sacred Heart to an independent board of trustees, part of the broad mid-century shift of Catholic colleges to lay governance as the religious orders thinned.

1982

The doors open to men

Facing the same shrinking single-sex market that pressed every women's college, Barat becomes coeducational — the survival move, made early, that bought decades but not solvency.

Feb. 2001

DePaul takes it in

DePaul University forms an educational alliance with the financially strained college; Barat becomes Barat College of DePaul University, one of the university's campuses, its enrollment near 1,000.

2001–2004

Subsidy without growth

DePaul invests more than $22 million in the Lake Forest campus, but student demand fails to materialize, operating losses mount, and the upkeep of the century-old buildings proves prohibitive.

Feb. 2004

The trustees pull the plug

DePaul's board votes to discontinue Barat's operations and concentrate future investment on its Lincoln Park and Loop campuses, where it judges its mission better served.

Spring 2005

The last class

Barat holds its final commencement; roughly 150 students make up the last graduating class, their degrees conferred under DePaul.

June 2005

Closed

Operations cease in June 2005, the earliest date the closure agreement allowed; continuing students and tenured faculty are absorbed into DePaul's Chicago campuses.

2006

The campus on the market

DePaul sells the Lake Forest campus to a housing developer for condominium conversion of Old Main; the venture later stalls and the property falls into foreclosure, acquired by Harris Bank in 2010.

Dec. 12, 2012

Back to the Sacred Heart

Anonymous donors having purchased the foreclosed land, the 23-acre campus is gifted to the adjacent Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart, the transfer accepted on the birthday of St. Madeleine Sophie Barat.

The Sacred Heart on the North Shore

Barat belonged to a tradition older than the state of Illinois. The Society of the Sacred Heart — founded in post-Revolutionary France by Madeleine Sophie Barat to educate young women — had been planting schools across the American Midwest since the early nineteenth century, and the academy it opened in Chicago in 1858 was one of them. When the school moved north to Lake Forest in 1904, it settled into the kind of setting the order favored: a wooded, contemplative campus on the affluent North Shore, anchored by a great hall, Old Main, that it shared with the academy beside it. In 1918 the State of Illinois chartered the college as a four-year, degree-granting institution, and for the next half-century Barat was exactly what it set out to be — a small Catholic liberal-arts college for women, taught in large part by the sisters of the order, devoted to the arts and to the formation of its students in a faith-centered tradition.

That was the golden age, and it was a real one. A Sacred Heart women's college in the mid-twentieth century occupied a confident, well-defined niche: Catholic families across Chicago and its suburbs sent their daughters to a place that promised rigor, religion, and a community small enough that the faculty knew every student by name. The campus had a chapel at its heart and a religious order behind it; it did not need to explain what it was for, and its identity was as clear as Mills's on the opposite coast — a women's college wearing its foundress's name. The seed of what came later was that the order was already retreating from the work. By 1969 the Society of the Sacred Heart had handed governance to an independent lay board, part of the great mid-century unwinding in which Catholic orders, their ranks aging and thinning, stepped back from the colleges they had founded. The college kept its name and character; it lost the institutional muscle and subsidized labor that had built it.

The Slow Leak and the Larger Hand

What followed was the standard, grinding decline of the small single-sex Catholic college, lived out over three decades. As American women turned away from women's colleges through the 1960s and 1970s, Barat's applicant pool narrowed, and a tuition-dependent college with no great endowment felt every empty bed. In 1982 it did what most surviving women's colleges did sooner or later: it admitted men. Coeducation widened the market and bought time, but could not manufacture the reserves Barat had never built, and through the 1990s the college lived close to the edge — distinctive, beloved by its alumnae, and structurally fragile.

By the turn of the millennium Barat needed a partner with deeper pockets, and in February 2001 it found one. DePaul University, one of the country's biggest Catholic universities, formed an educational alliance with the struggling college, making it Barat College of DePaul University — one campus among several in the DePaul system. On paper the logic was sound: DePaul had the brand, the recruiting apparatus, and the administrative scale a thousand-student college could never assemble alone, while Barat had a charming North Shore campus and a Catholic pedigree DePaul could fold into its own. The bet was that DePaul's enrollment engine could fill Lake Forest's classrooms where Barat's could not.

The bet failed in the way these bets usually fail: the students did not come. Over the next three years DePaul invested more than $22 million in the campus, and the campus answered with operating losses. Demand never materialized at the level the merger had assumed, and the cost of maintaining a hundred-year-old plant proved prohibitive. A large university can absorb a money-losing campus for a while out of mission, sentiment, or inertia, but it also has the cold capacity to measure a venture against its alternatives — and by 2004 DePaul had made the measurement. The same scale that let it rescue Barat in 2001 let it dispose of Barat in 2004 with corporate dispatch.

The Quiet Switch-Off

In February 2004 DePaul's board of trustees voted to discontinue Barat's operations and concentrate future investment on the university's Lincoln Park and Loop campuses, where, it said, it could fulfill its mission more comprehensively and efficiently. The decision set the closure for June 2005 — the earliest date permitted under the agreement between the two Roman Catholic institutions, a clause that gave the standing students time to finish. There was no midnight padlock, no class stranded weeks from a degree. Barat held a final commencement in the spring of 2005, its last graduating class numbering roughly 150, the diplomas bearing DePaul's name. Continuing students were absorbed into DePaul's Chicago campuses; the tenured and tenure-track faculty, and some staff, were taken into the university, many teaching there for years.

This is what distinguishes the absorbed college from the abandoned one, and it is worth stating plainly: by the standards of the closure wave that would follow, Barat's people were treated decently. The students got a teach-out and a real degree; the faculty got jobs; nobody was left holding a worthless transcript at a chained gate. The grief here is not the sharp grief of betrayal but the duller ache of dissolution — a 147-year-old institution with its own name, its own foundress, and its own century-old campus quietly switched off, its identity emptied into a larger university that would carry forward neither the name nor the place. The Barat that closed in 2005 was no longer an independent college DePaul shut down; it was a DePaul campus DePaul stopped operating. The independent institution had, in truth, ended back in 2001. The 2005 closure merely turned off the lights.

The campus had a longer and stranger afterlife than the college. DePaul sold the Lake Forest property in 2006 to a housing developer who planned to convert the grand Old Main into condominiums while demolishing a 1920s wing that held the Sacred Heart chapel — a scheme that captured exactly what absorption does to a beloved place, preserving the salable shell and proposing to bulldoze the soul. The venture stalled, the property slid into foreclosure, and a bank took title in 2010. Then came the only ending in this file that reads like grace: anonymous donors bought the foreclosed land and, on December 12, 2012 — the birthday of St. Madeleine Sophie Barat herself — gifted the 23-acre campus to the Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart, the Catholic girls' high school next door that had shared Old Main from the beginning. The college's land returned to the order whose foundress it was named for, reunited with the school that grew from the same root.

The Five Factors

01

The lost order, the lost subsidy

Barat was built by the Society of the Sacred Heart on subsidized religious labor and institutional backing, and when the order withdrew governance in 1969 — as orders across Catholic higher education did — the college kept the mission but lost the muscle. A faith-founded college that outlives the active involvement of its founding order inherits the mission's costs without the cost-free labor that once made it affordable.

02

Tuition dependence in a shrinking single-sex market

Barat lived on tuition, held no endowment large enough to cushion a downturn, and sold a women's-college education to a market that emptied out across the 1960s and 1970s. Going coeducational in 1982 widened the pool but never built reserves; a lightly endowed college selling a fading product is on a countdown the moment enrollment dips below its fixed costs.

03

Rescue by a larger institution is a wager, not a guarantee

DePaul's 2001 alliance assumed a big university's brand and recruiting engine could fill a small campus's seats. They could not. Scale and a strong name do not automatically transfer enrollment to a satellite campus with a different identity in a different town; a merger premised on demand that never arrives simply relocates the deficit to a richer balance sheet.

04

The same scale that saves can dispose

A large university can carry a money-losing campus far longer than the campus could carry itself — and can also end it with a cold board vote the moment the venture underperforms its alternatives. Being absorbed by a strong partner buys time and a soft landing, but it transfers the institution's fate to trustees whose loyalty is to the whole, not the part.

05

Absorption dissolves the identity while preserving the appearance

Unlike a merger that keeps the acquired name on the door, absorption empties the institution into the parent and lets the name lapse. For years the Lake Forest campus looked unchanged; what had actually happened was that an 1858 college had become a DePaul line item, and line items are cut without ceremony. The sign comes down last, long after the institution behind it is gone.

Aftermath

The human aftermath was, by the standards of this archive, gentle. The closure agreement's June 2005 date functioned as a teach-out: the roughly 150 members of the final class graduated with DePaul-conferred degrees, and continuing students transferred into DePaul's Lincoln Park and Loop campuses without losing their progress. The tenured and tenure-track faculty, and some staff, were absorbed into the university, many teaching at DePaul for years afterward — a far cry from the mass career losses that mark an abrupt closure. The alumnae of an institution that ran for 147 years were left, as absorbed-college alumnae always are, to keep the memory and legacy alive themselves, since no successor carries the Barat name forward.

The campus told the longer story. DePaul sold the Lake Forest property in 2006 for a condominium conversion that would have demolished a chapel wing; the project collapsed, the land went to foreclosure, and a bank held it by 2010. The lasting mark is the reunification: in December 2012, on St. Madeleine Sophie Barat's birthday, donors gave the 23-acre campus to the adjoining Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart, returning the ground to the Sacred Heart family that founded it. The college is gone and its name with it, but the wooded campus on the North Shore is once again Sacred Heart land, and the great Old Main still stands. Barat's case is now a quiet reference point in higher education's long conversation about mergers — proof that being taken in by a stronger institution is a humane way to end, and still an ending.

Lessons

For a faith-founded college, plan for the day the founding order steps back: the mission survives the sisters, but the subsidized labor and institutional backing do not, and the endowment must be built before the order leaves, not after.
For trustees of a small tuition-dependent college, a merger negotiated early from a position of charm and assets beats a rescue begged for at the edge of insolvency — the partner that takes you in on its terms also reserves the right to switch you off on its terms.
For the acquiring institution, treat a satellite-campus merger as the speculative wager it is: a strong brand does not automatically generate demand in a different town, and the maintenance bill on a century-old campus is a permanent line item, not a one-time cost.
Distinguish absorption from a name-keeping merger before you sign: when an institution is folded into another and its name allowed to lapse, the identity is gone regardless of how the buildings look, and leaders owe their community honesty about which ending is on offer.
Treat absorption as a real death of the institution, not a rebranding — alumnae grief is legitimate even when the unwinding is humane and the campus survives, because independence, governance, and the name itself are lost for good.

References

Barat College Wikipedia
After 3 Years and $22-Million, DePaul U. Trustees Vote to Close Barat College The Chronicle of Higher Education
DePaul University trustees vote to close Barat College The Times of Northwest Indiana (AP)
Barat land gifted to Woodlands Academy Daily Herald
Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart Wikipedia