Hodges University — A career college that lost five-sixths of its students in a decade

Summary

Hodges University, a private nonprofit career college in Fort Myers, Florida, founded in 1990 as International College, announced in August 2023 that it would cease operations by the end of August 2024 — a year of warning for an institution that had spent the prior decade quietly emptying out. By the time the board acted, enrollment had fallen from roughly 2,800 students in 2013 to about 410, a collapse of more than four-fifths in ten years. The university taught its last classes in August 2024 and closed after 34 years. Unlike the abrupt-closure cautionary tales, Hodges gave its students a long runway; what it could not give them was a reason to stay.

The school was built for a specific kind of student: the working adult of Southwest Florida — the nurse retraining, the paralegal upgrading, the second-career accountant — taking evening, weekend, and online courses toward a practical degree. For two decades that model worked. The 2007 renaming, after a $12 million gift from Earl and Thelma Hodges, marked the high-water mark of ambition; the 2013 enrollment peak marked the high-water mark of students. After that, every line on the chart pointed down at once.

The causes compounded. The adult and online market that had been Hodges's niche became one of the most crowded corners of American higher education, as state universities, community colleges, and national online providers flooded into it with deeper pockets and lower prices. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the working-student population Hodges depended on, and Hurricane Ian, which devastated Southwest Florida in September 2022, struck the region — and the university's finances — at the worst possible moment. In December 2022 the regional accreditor placed Hodges on probation over governance and financial responsibility; by the next August the board concluded that no enrollment turnaround was coming.

What Hodges left behind was a managed exit rather than a wreck. Continuing students were given the year to finish or to transfer, academic records were preserved, and the Fort Myers campus was sold in April 2024 to the Evangelical Christian School of Fort Myers for $28.6 million — a private K-12 school, not another college. A university that had spent 34 years issuing practical credentials to Southwest Florida's working adults ended as a quietly vacated building, its name surviving mostly on the diplomas of the people it had managed to graduate before the students stopped coming.

Timeline

The College Built for the Working Adult

International College opened in 1990 with 85 students and a clear-eyed sense of its customer. Southwest Florida in the 1990s and 2000s was one of the fastest-growing regions in the country, full of adults who needed a credential to move up — into nursing, into management, into the professions — but who already had jobs, families, and mortgages and could not decamp to a residential campus. The college sold them flexibility: evening and weekend classes, accelerated terms, and eventually online programs, all aimed at the degree as a means to a better job. It was unglamorous, practical, and for a long stretch it worked.

The 2007 renaming was the institution's coming-of-age. Earl and Thelma Hodges, longtime local benefactors, gave $12 million, and International College became Hodges University — a name change that announced a regional university's ambitions: graduate programs, a wider portfolio, a permanent place in the civic furniture of Naples and Fort Myers. For a few years the ambition was matched by the numbers. Enrollment climbed toward its 2013 peak of roughly 2,800 students, the campus expanded across two cities, and Hodges looked like a school that had found a durable niche serving people the big residential universities largely ignored. It had health sciences and nursing, business and accounting, criminal justice and paralegal studies, information technology — the kind of practical menu that fills a working adult's résumé. At its height it was exactly the right size for the market it had built itself around.

That market, it turned out, was the problem disguised as the opportunity. A niche defined by convenience and price is a niche anyone can enter, and in the 2010s everyone did. The structural fragility was the same one that has felled small private colleges across the country: Hodges lived on tuition, served a price-sensitive population, and had no great endowment to ride out a bad stretch. As long as the students kept arriving, none of that mattered. They were about to stop.

The Slow Emptying

What happened to Hodges after 2013 was not a crash but a leak — a steady, year-after-year loss of students that the institution could not plug. The adult and online education market that had been Hodges's home became the most contested ground in higher education. Public universities launched online divisions; community colleges undercut its prices; and national online providers with enormous marketing budgets and recognizable brands competed for exactly the working-adult students Hodges had quietly served for two decades. A small regional university with thin reserves had the least pricing power and the weakest brand in a fight that had suddenly turned national. Enrollment slid from 2,800 toward the low four figures, then lower still.

Then came two shocks the institution could not have planned for. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the lives of the working adults Hodges depended on — the very students who juggle a job, a family, and a part-time degree are the first to drop the degree when the job or the household is in crisis. And in September 2022, Hurricane Ian made landfall in Southwest Florida as a catastrophic Category 4 storm, devastating Fort Myers and the surrounding region. For a university whose entire student body and donor base lived in the disaster zone, the timing could hardly have been worse: a region rebuilding its homes and businesses had little attention or money to spare for a struggling local college. By the fall of 2023, enrollment had fallen to roughly 410 students — about a seventh of the peak — far too few to sustain the faculty, facilities, and accreditation of a university.

In December 2022, SACSCOC, the regional accreditor, placed Hodges on probation, citing failures to meet benchmarks for board governance and financial responsibility — the formal acknowledgment that the institution's finances and oversight had deteriorated past the warning line. Probation is not a death sentence, but for a tuition-dependent school already bleeding students it narrowed the runway to almost nothing. A turnaround would have required new enrollment that the market was not going to deliver. The board read the chart correctly.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

For Hodges's roughly 410 remaining students, the long timeline was the saving grace: most had a path to finish in place or to transfer, and the university preserved academic records so that nobody's completed coursework simply vanished. The faculty — 17 full-time and 84 adjunct — and the staff lost their positions, a small dispersal of people who had specialized in teaching the non-traditional student. The specialized, working-adult niche Hodges occupied passed, by default, to the public universities and community colleges of Southwest Florida that had helped empty it out.

The Fort Myers campus did not sit idle. Sold for $28.6 million to the Evangelical Christian School of Fort Myers in April 2024, the buildings were repurposed for K-12 education rather than absorbed by another college — a clean real-estate transaction that returned the property to use while ending Hodges as an academic institution entirely. The university leaves behind no successor and no scandal, only a textbook illustration of the slow death: a school that found a genuine market in 1990, rode it to a 2,800-student peak in 2013, and then watched a decade of competition and bad luck drain it to a tenth of that before its board, to its credit, called the end early enough to spare the last students the worst of it.

Lessons

References

• Hodges University to close by August 2024 Higher Ed Dive
• Hodges University announces school's closure after 33 years WGCU (PBS/NPR for Southwest Florida)
• Hodges University permanently closing next year Gulfshore Business
• Hodges University Wikipedia