St. Andrews University — Enrollment was rising; the parent ran out of money anyway

Summary

St. Andrews University, in Laurinburg, North Carolina, founded in 1958 as St. Andrews Presbyterian College and operating since 2011 as a branch campus of Florida's Webber International University, closed on May 5, 2025 — eleven days after its students and faculty learned, in a Friday-morning meeting, that the end was already scheduled. The closure stranded roughly 800 students and ended a 67-year history. What made it bitter was the timing: St. Andrews was not shrinking. Its enrollment had risen from about 635 students in 2013 to roughly 832 by 2023, one of the few small colleges in the region growing rather than fading. It closed anyway, because the institution that owned it had run out of money.

The college that closed was, by the end, two things at once. It was St. Andrews — a Presbyterian liberal-arts college born from the 1958 merger of Flora Macdonald College and Presbyterian Junior College, known for an unusual barrier-free campus built for students with disabilities and for a pioneering therapeutic-horsemanship program. And it was a line item on the books of Webber International University, the small Florida institution that had absorbed it in 2011 after St. Andrews lost accreditation as a standalone college. The 2011 merger was widely called St. Andrews's "saving grace": it bought fourteen more years, but it also bound the college's survival to a parent whose own finances were deteriorating.

The mechanics of the ending were as much about real estate as about enrollment. In 2011 St. Andrews had sold its 198-acre campus and leased it back, a move that converted a permanent asset into cash and a permanent obligation: by 2023 the lease cost roughly $780,705 a year. Webber, meanwhile, was carrying liabilities that exceeded its assets by more than $10 million as of mid-2023, against an endowment of well under $10 million. When the parent could no longer subsidize a branch that did not own its own land and could not cover its own rent, the calculation was cold and quick. In the weeks before the announcement, St. Andrews faculty received only about 85 percent of their pay; the president would later say the university was operating "with minus three cents in our pockets."

The closure was abrupt in the way that compounds harm. The announcement came on April 25, 2025; the campus would cease operations on May 5; the 127th and final commencement, on May 4, conferred more than a hundred diplomas from an institution that would not exist the next morning. More than a dozen schools offered to take transfers, and teach-out arrangements were assembled in the compressed window, but students who had chosen a growing college found themselves, with days' notice, choosing another. A college can do everything right on its own campus and still be closed by the institution above it.

Timeline

A Barrier-Free College Born of a Merger

St. Andrews was a merger from the start, and that origin shaped what it became. In 1958 two older Presbyterian institutions — Flora Macdonald College, dating to 1896, and Presbyterian Junior College, from 1928 — combined to form St. Andrews Presbyterian College, and in 1961 the new institution opened a purpose-built campus in Laurinburg with about 750 students. Its founders made a choice that distinguished it immediately: they built the campus barrier-free, with ramps and accessible buildings, at a time when accessibility was an afterthought almost everywhere else. For decades St. Andrews was a place where students who used wheelchairs could attend college on equal footing, and that early commitment became part of the institution's identity and its pride.

The college grew through the 1960s and into the 1970s, when enrollment crested above 900 — its strongest era, a small Presbyterian liberal-arts college with a regional draw and a distinctive mission. It layered on programs that set it apart: most notably, in 1996, a degree in therapeutic horsemanship, which made St. Andrews a recognized name in equestrian and therapeutic-riding education and gave a small college in rural Scotland County something genuinely uncommon to offer. For students drawn to that field, and for those who needed an accessible campus, St. Andrews was not interchangeable with the schools around it — and particularity is what makes a closure a loss rather than a statistic.

But the same forces that pressured every small, tuition-dependent liberal-arts college pressed on St. Andrews too, and by the early twenty-first century its independence was no longer secure. The decisive turn came in 2011, when the college faced an accreditation crisis as a standalone institution. Rather than close, it found a parent.

The Parent, the Lease, and the Slow Squeeze

The 2011 merger with Webber International University — a small private institution in Babson Park, Florida — was, by every contemporary account, what saved St. Andrews. Webber added St. Andrews as an additional instructional location, the college regained its footing under accreditation, and that September it rebranded as St. Andrews University, a branch campus of a Florida parent. The arrangement worked, in the sense that it kept the lights on for another fourteen years and let a college that would otherwise have closed in 2011 keep teaching into 2025. But it also restructured St. Andrews's survival around two vulnerabilities it did not fully control.

The first was the campus itself. In 2011 St. Andrews sold its 198-acre Laurinburg campus to Scotland Development Corporation and leased it back — the familiar sale-leaseback that turns a balance-sheet asset into immediate cash at the price of a permanent rent obligation. By 2023 that obligation ran to roughly $780,705 a year, a fixed cost that did not care whether enrollment rose or fell. A college that owns its campus can weather a lean year by deferring maintenance; a college that rents its campus must make the rent regardless, and St. Andrews had traded its cushion away.

The second vulnerability was the parent. Webber International was itself a small, financially strained institution: as of mid-2023 its liabilities exceeded its assets by more than $10 million, and its endowment was under $10 million — too thin to subsidize a struggling branch indefinitely. The cruel irony is that St. Andrews was doing the thing distressed colleges are told to do. It was growing: from about 635 students in 2013 to roughly 832 by 2023 and around 843 in early 2024. But a branch campus does not get to keep its own balance sheet. When the parent's finances failed and the branch could not generate enough surplus to cover its rent and its share of the whole, the rising enrollment became irrelevant. In April 2025 the cash ran out so completely that faculty received only about 85 percent of their paychecks, and the president would describe the university as operating "with minus three cents in our pockets."

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The roughly 800 students were dispersed into a hastily assembled network of transfer options. More than seventeen institutions offered to accept them, teach-out agreements were arranged in the narrow window before closure, and the administration pointed students toward landing spots — but the burden of transferring credits, securing aid, and choosing a new college on short notice fell, as it always does, on the students themselves. Most faculty and the president were laid off; a few staff remained to manage records, the teach-out, and the disposition of property, with proceeds meant to cover the salaries that had been only partly paid.

The 198-acre campus, owned since 2011 by Scotland Development Corporation rather than by St. Andrews, was never the college's to dispose of, and its future passed to its landlord and to Scotland County — one of North Carolina's poorer counties, for which St. Andrews had been a meaningful employer and civic presence. Laurinburg lost its university; the region lost the jobs, the cultural life, and the students who had filled the town. The therapeutic-horsemanship program, the barrier-free campus, the 67-year Presbyterian history — all of it ended not in a verdict on St. Andrews but in a decision made at a parent in Florida. The closure became a cautionary case in surviving by merging upward: the merger that saves a college can also be the entity that, years later, decides to let it go.

Lessons

References

• St. Andrews University Announces Sudden Closure Inside Higher Ed
• St. Andrews University announces abrupt closure Higher Ed Dive
• St. Andrews University to Close on May 5 The Assembly
• Students, alumni, faculty say goodbye to St. Andrews University Border Belt Independent
• St. Andrews University (North Carolina) Wikipedia