Marycrest International University — A Catholic Women’s College That Sold Its Name to Japan, Then Vanished
Summary
Marycrest International University, on a bluff above the Mississippi River in Davenport, Iowa, founded in 1939 as a Catholic women's college by the Congregation of the Humility of Mary, announced in December 2001 that it would close at the end of the spring 2002 semester, and shut its doors on June 30, 2002. By then the institution that had opened with 76 women and grown to 935 students at its 1961 peak was enrolling roughly 350 full-time and 300-some part-time students, too few to cover its operating costs, and had been placed on probation by its accreditor. President Pat DeLuca delivered the news in the campus gymnasium: the small college with six decades on the bluff was done.
The institution's last act was also the story of its undoing. In 1990, facing the slow demographic and financial pressures that squeezed every small private college, Marycrest had affiliated with the Teikyo Yamanashi Education and Welfare Foundation of Japan — a sprawling educational conglomerate then buying up American campuses — and renamed itself Teikyo Marycrest University, then Marycrest International University in 1996 to signal a global mission. The Japanese partnership brought capital and a recruiting pipeline of international students. But when Japan's economy slid into its long recession in the mid-1990s, the flow of students and support thinned, domestic enrollment kept falling, and the Teikyo network in the United States shrank from five colleges to two. Marycrest was the next to go.
What closed was a real college with a real mission. The Congregation of the Humility of Mary had built it to educate women in the liberal arts and the professions; it went coeducational in 1969, trained teachers and nurses and computer scientists, and was woven into the civic and Catholic life of the Quad Cities. Its closure was orderly rather than abrupt — a December announcement gave students and the 130 staff and 34 full-time faculty members roughly half a year's notice, and the college helped place its students at nearby institutions — but it was a closure all the same, ending a 63-year-old institution in a region that still had other colleges to absorb its students and its grief.
The campus, a handsome Collegiate Gothic and mid-century ensemble on the bluff, survived. Placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, it was converted beginning in 2006 into the Marycrest Senior Campus, an affordable-housing community for older adults in the former residence halls. The academic records went to the University of Iowa. The buildings endure as housing; the university does not.
Timeline
A Bluff-Top College for Women
Marycrest opened in 1939 as an act of the Congregation of the Humility of Mary, the Catholic sisters who answered Bishop Henry Rohlman's call for a women's college in Davenport and built one on a bluff with a long view of the Mississippi. It began small — 76 students — and grew through the postwar decades into a respectable Catholic liberal-arts college for women, reaching its high-water mark of about 935 students in 1961. Like the women's colleges founded by religious orders across the Midwest, Marycrest trained teachers and nurses, grounded its students in the liberal arts, and served the daughters of the region's Catholic families; the campus itself, a Collegiate Gothic and mid-century ensemble, became a landmark of the Davenport skyline.
The college modernized with its era. It went coeducational in 1969, admitting men as the market for single-sex Catholic women's colleges contracted, and it added professional and technical programs — including, by the late twentieth century, computer science and graduate offerings — to compete for a broadening student body. For most of its first half-century it was what it had been built to be: a small, sponsored Catholic college, dependent on tuition and on the sisters and the diocese behind it, doing solid regional work. The pressures that would close it were not yet visible, but the structure that made it vulnerable — a small, tuition-dependent college with a thin endowment in a crowded regional market — was already in place.
The Japanese Gamble
By the late 1980s Marycrest was feeling the squeeze common to every small private college: rising costs, flat or falling enrollment, and no endowment large enough to absorb a bad stretch. Its answer, in 1990, was bold and, in retrospect, fateful — affiliation with the Teikyo Yamanashi Education and Welfare Foundation of Japan, a large educational conglomerate then assembling a portfolio of American campuses. Renamed Teikyo Marycrest University, the college gained an infusion of capital and a pipeline of international students from Japan, and in 1996 it rebranded again as Marycrest International University to advertise a global identity. For a moment it looked like the rescue a struggling regional college dreams of: a deep-pocketed partner and a fresh source of enrollment.
The gamble's flaw was that it tied Marycrest's fortunes to an external economy it could not influence. When Japan's economy entered its long downturn in the mid-1990s, the supply of international students and the willingness of the Teikyo Foundation to subsidize American operations both contracted. Marycrest's domestic enrollment, meanwhile, kept eroding; full-time numbers fell to as few as 265 by the late 1990s. The Teikyo network in the United States, which had once spanned five colleges, dwindled toward two. Marycrest had traded one dependency — on a thin local market — for another, on a foreign benefactor whose own retrenchment would leave the college exposed. The international strategy had bought time, not a future.
The Orderly End on the Bluff
By 2001 the arithmetic was conclusive: enrollment was not enough to cover operating costs, and the North Central Association placed Marycrest on probation, faulting it for underinvesting in faculty development and campus infrastructure — the tell of an institution starving its core to survive. In December 2001, President Pat DeLuca gathered the campus in the gymnasium and announced that Marycrest would close on June 30, 2002. About 350 full-time and more than 300 part-time students would have to find another college; 130 staff and 34 full-time faculty members would have to find other work.
To its credit, Marycrest closed in a way that minimized the harm. The roughly six months between the December announcement and the June closing gave students and employees real time to plan, and the college actively helped place its students at nearby institutions — St. Ambrose University and Augustana College among them — and assisted its faculty and staff in their searches. This was a teach-out and a managed exit, not a midnight padlocking; in the densely collegiate Quad Cities, where several other institutions stood within a short drive, students had genuine options to finish their degrees. The contrast with a college that strands its students mid-semester is the difference between a dignified death and a betrayal, and Marycrest, for all that its strategy had failed, did not betray the people who depended on it.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
Marycrest's roughly 350 full-time and 300-plus part-time students dispersed into a region well supplied with colleges, transferring to nearby institutions such as St. Ambrose and Augustana with the college's help; the orderly timeline meant most could finish their degrees elsewhere without losing a year. The 130 staff and 34 full-time faculty members lost their jobs but had months to look, and the Quad Cities economy, with its other campuses and employers, absorbed the shock more gently than a single-college town could have. The institution's academic records were transferred to the University of Iowa, where former students can still retrieve their transcripts.
The campus on the bluff outlasted the university by a wide margin. Recognized for its architectural and historical value, the Marycrest College Historic District was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, and beginning in 2006 the former residence halls were converted into the Marycrest Senior Campus, an affordable-housing community for older adults that still operates today. The Collegiate Gothic buildings that the Sisters of the Humility of Mary raised in 1939 now shelter retirees rather than students — a quiet, useful second life for the architecture, even as the college that gave it meaning passed into the long roster of small Catholic institutions that the late twentieth century could not keep.
Lessons
- Recognize the small-college fragility early: a tuition-dependent regional college with a thin endowment is structurally exposed, and the time to diversify revenue is before enrollment falls, not after.
- Scrutinize a rescue partner before celebrating it; an affiliation that ties an institution's survival to a single foreign benefactor and economy substitutes one fatal dependency for another.
- Do not concentrate enrollment in one volatile pipeline — international recruitment from a single country can collapse with that country's economy, taking the college's lifeline with it.
- Treat an accreditor's probation over faculty and infrastructure underinvestment as proof that the institution is starving its own mission, a self-defeating economy that accelerates the decline it is meant to delay.
- When closure is unavoidable, do it the way Marycrest did: announce early, run a real teach-out, place the students at neighboring colleges, and help the faculty and staff land — orderly notice is the last duty a failing college owes the people who trusted it.
References
- Marycrest International U. Will Shut Down at End of Spring Semester The Chronicle of Higher Education
- Another Small College — Marycrest International U., in Iowa — Announces Plans to Close The Chronicle of Higher Education
- Marycrest International University to Close Dynamic Chiropractic
- Marycrest College Historic District Wikipedia
- Student Records for Closed Institutions of Higher Learning in Iowa Iowa Department of Education