The King’s College — A Christian College That Closed Twice, the Second Time for Good

Summary

The King's College, an interdenominational Christian liberal-arts college that spent its last quarter-century in Lower Manhattan, was founded in 1938 and dissolved by the New York State Board of Regents on November 4, 2025 — though for any practical purpose it had already ended in the fall of 2023, when it stopped teaching. Its trustees made the closure official on July 14, 2025, conceding that a two-year campaign to gift the college to "likeminded evangelical Christians" and resurrect it had failed. It was the second time the institution had run out of money and stopped operating. The first time, in 1994, a benefactor revived it. The second time, no one did.

The college was an unusual creature: a small evangelical school, never more than a few hundred students, that had improbably planted itself first in the Empire State Building and then one block south of Wall Street, betting that a conservative Christian liberal-arts education delivered in the financial and media capital of the country would attract ambitious students and the donors who admired them. For a stretch in the 2010s, under presidents who courted the conservative intelligentsia, the bet seemed plausible. Enrollment reached the mid-500s in 2017. But the school had no endowment to speak of, leaned heavily on a handful of major donors, and operated on tuition revenue that could not cover the rent on prime Manhattan real estate once those donors aged out and the students stopped coming.

The decline was steep and the warning signs were ignored. Enrollment fell from 555 in fall 2017 to 326 in fall 2022. A 2023 emergency appeal sought $2.6 million and raised $178,000. The college stopped admitting students in spring 2023, canceled its fall 2023 classes, and watched the Middle States Commission on Higher Education withdraw its accreditation effective August 31, 2023 — the regulatory equivalent of a death certificate for an institution that lives on federal financial aid. What followed was a two-year limbo in which the trustees insisted the closure was not permanent and searched for a partner to take the charter, the name, and the debts. None came.

The students, mercifully, had largely been spared the worst by the timing: the college simply stopped enrolling before stranding a new cohort, and those mid-degree in 2023 scattered to other schools. What was lost was an institution and an idea — the notion that a tiny, undercapitalized evangelical college could survive on faith and Manhattan rent — and the careers of the faculty and staff who had built it.

Timeline

A Christian College That Chose the Hardest Address in America

The King's College was always a small institution with large ambitions, and for most of its life those ambitions were unremarkable. Founded in 1938 by the evangelist Percy Crawford, it spent its first half-century as a conventional Christian liberal-arts college, migrating from New Jersey to Delaware to the leafy suburb of Briarcliff Manor, New York, where it reached its enrollment peak of roughly 870 students in 1980. It was interdenominational by design — not bound to one church's subsidy or doctrine — which gave it breadth but also denied it the steady denominational backstop that sustained many of its peers. When it ran out of money in 1994, there was no synod or diocese obligated to catch it; it simply closed, and lost its campus.

The institution's distinctive identity was forged in its second life. Revived in 1999 with assets transferred from another Christian organization, the college made a daring bet: rather than rebuild in the suburbs, it would plant itself in Manhattan, leasing 45,000 square feet across three floors of the Empire State Building. The pitch was elegant — a conservative, intellectually serious Christian education delivered in the secular heart of American finance and media, training students to carry their faith into the country's most influential institutions. In 2012 it doubled down, moving to a building on Broadway one block south of Wall Street. Under high-profile presidents, most famously the conservative author Dinesh D'Souza from 2010 to 2012, the college punched far above its enrollment weight in the conservative intellectual world, and its golden moment arrived in the mid-2010s: a recognizable brand, a debate-team culture, ambitious graduates, and enrollment that climbed to 555 by the fall of 2017. For a school of its size and means, that was a genuine high-water mark — proof, briefly, that the audacious address could work.

The Arithmetic Beneath the Ambition

The address was also the problem. Manhattan rent is among the most expensive in the world, and The King's College paid it out of tuition, because it had almost nothing else. It carried no meaningful endowment, the cushion that lets a college absorb a bad year or a lost donor. Instead it depended on a handful of major patrons and on enrolling enough full-paying students each fall to meet the lease. That model has no margin for error, and the errors came. The college's most important benefactors, the DeVos family, provided a final gift through the estate of Richard and Helen DeVos around 2019 as the couple died; a partnership with the businessman Peter Chung, meant to expand online enrollment, dissolved when the online initiatives underperformed. The donors who had underwritten the experiment aged out, and the experiment had built nothing durable to replace them.

Then the students stopped coming. Enrollment fell from 555 in 2017 to 326 in 2022 — a 41 percent collapse in five years — driven by the same demographic and competitive pressures squeezing small private colleges everywhere, compounded by the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic and the simple fact that a tiny, expensive Christian college in Manhattan was a hard sell to a shrinking pool of applicants. With tuition revenue falling and fixed urban costs unmoved, the gap widened until it could not be bridged. The spring 2023 emergency appeal told the story in a single ratio: the college needed $2.6 million to survive and could raise only $178,000. An institution with no endowment, declining enrollment, and donors who had moved on had nothing left to convert into one more semester.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The students were, by the standards of a college closure, comparatively fortunate — not because they were well served, but because the timing spared them the cruelest outcome. By halting admissions in the spring of 2023 and canceling fall classes before a new cohort arrived, the college avoided stranding a full enrollment mid-degree the way an abrupt mid-semester collapse would have. The 326 students of the final 2022 year and those still mid-program scattered to other institutions in 2023, carrying transcripts from a college that would soon be unaccredited and, eventually, legally nonexistent. The faculty and staff who had built the Manhattan experiment lost their careers when the teaching stopped, and the small, distinctive intellectual community the college had assembled dispersed.

The institution itself entered a two-year purgatory. It held a charter, a name, and a debt load, and its trustees spent until July 2025 trying to give all three away. When the gift found no taker, the New York Board of Regents dissolved the corporation on November 4, 2025, ending the legal life of a college that had stopped teaching more than two years earlier. The King's College leaves behind an alumni diaspora scattered across the conservative and Christian institutions its graduates had been trained to enter, and a cautionary case study for evangelical higher education: that conviction and a prestigious address are not a balance sheet, and that a college which has been resurrected once should not assume it will be resurrected again.

Lessons

References

• The King's College to Close Permanently Inside Higher Ed
• The King's College closes after 2 years without classes Higher Ed Dive
• The King's College aims to reopen Inside Higher Ed
• King's College (New York City) Wikipedia