On May 22, 2025, the Board of Trustees of the Pennsylvania State University voted 25 to 8 to close seven of its nineteen Commonwealth Campuses — DuBois, Fayette, Mont Alto, New Kensington, Shenango, Wilkes-Barre, and York — after the spring of the 2026-27 academic year. The oldest of them, Mont Alto, traces to 1903, when it opened as the Pennsylvania State Forest Academy; the seven together had educated generations of Pennsylvanians who could not, or would not, leave their counties to attend the flagship at University Park. Their last students will walk across borrowed stages in spring 2027, and the campuses that gave a land-grant university its statewide reach will go dark.
This is not the familiar story of a small private college that ran out of cash overnight. Penn State is one of the largest universities in the country, financially formidable, and it is not closing — it is amputating. The seven campuses collectively enrolled slightly over 3,000 students in 2025, about 3.6 percent of the system’s total, and had together lost roughly 43 percent of their enrollment over the preceding decade. President Neeli Bendapudi framed the cuts as triage: a restructuring meant to concentrate dwindling regional demand at thirteen surviving campuses rather than let nineteen bleed slowly together. The board agreed, over the objections of trustees, students, faculty, and several towns for whom the local Penn State was a civic anchor.
Because the closures were announced almost two years ahead of the final term, current students were promised a path to finish — at a closing campus while it lasts, or through a transfer to a surviving Penn State location under the system’s “2+2” structure. That is the orderly version of a closure, the opposite of the six-weeks’-notice collapses that define this register. But orderly is not painless. The campuses being closed sit disproportionately in rural and post-industrial Pennsylvania — DuBois in the northern tier, Fayette and Shenango in the southwest’s faded coal-and-steel country, Wilkes-Barre in the anthracite northeast — places where a four-year degree within commuting distance was the whole point.
What Penn State is confronting in public is the demographic arithmetic that every regional public system faces in private: the “enrollment cliff,” a shrinking cohort of traditional-age students, and a flagship brand that increasingly pulls the few remaining applicants toward University Park and away from the branches. The seven campuses are the first large-scale casualty of a public university deciding, deliberately and with notice, that it can no longer be everywhere. The lasting question is what a land-grant institution owes the parts of its state that the math no longer favors.
Sterling College, the tiny environmental work college in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, founded in 1958, held its final commencement on May 16, 2026 and concluded its degree programs at the end of that spring semester. It was one of the smallest accredited colleges in the United States and one of only a handful of federally recognized work colleges — institutions where every enrolled student labors a set number of hours each term as a graded, integral part of the education, not merely to defray costs. Sterling’s closure leaves eight federally recognized work colleges in the country. The board announced the decision on November 13, 2025, citing what president Scott Thomas called persistent financial and enrollment challenges, and the New England Commission of Higher Education accepted the closure notice and teach-out plan before the year was out.
Sterling began in 1958 as the Sterling School, a college-preparatory institution, and evolved over decades into something singular: in 1974 its faculty built a post-secondary program modeled on the experiential ethos of Outward Bound, it achieved four-year degree-granting status by 1997, and it joined the Work Colleges Consortium in 1999. On 130 acres in Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom, it organized its entire curriculum around ecology — Environmental Studies with concentrations in ecology, environmental humanities, outdoor education, and sustainable agriculture and food systems — under the motto “Ecological Thinking and Action.” Students worked the farm, the kitchen, the woodlot, and the grounds, then studied the systems they were living inside. It was a coherent, beloved, and deliberately small place.
Smallness was the entire design, and it was also the vulnerability. Sterling capped enrollment at roughly 125 students, but for years it ran below 100, and the floor kept dropping: enrollment fell more than 38 percent between 2021 and 2023, to 78, and by fall 2025 it stood below 40. A college that small has almost no margin — Sterling’s net tuition revenue fell to roughly $836,000 and its endowment sat around $1.2 million, figures that cannot sustain a faculty, a working farm, and an accredited degree program indefinitely. There was no fraud here, no concealment, no villainy; there was an institution whose mission required it to stay small and whose economics could not survive being that small in the demographic decline of the 2020s.
What Sterling did in its closing was the dignified version. It announced with a full academic year of runway, taught out its remaining students through to a final commencement, and arranged transfer agreements with regional peers — Champlain College, the Community College of Vermont, and College of the Atlantic — that would honor credits and financial-aid packages without forcing students through the ordinary application gauntlet. Its faculty and a board chaired by Vermont Creamery co-founder Allison Hooper steered the wind-down rather than a collapse. Sterling closed the way a small college should close if it must: in the open, on a schedule, with its students carried to the far side. What ended was not just a college but one of the last working laboratories of a particular American idea — that learning and labor and land belong together.
Labouré College of Healthcare, a Catholic nursing and health-sciences college in Milton, Massachusetts, traced to 1892 and the Carney Hospital Training School for Nurses founded by the Daughters of Charity, announced in February 2026 that it would cease academic operations on August 31, 2026 — and that its nursing programs had been acquired by nearby Curry College. After 134 years of training nurses for Boston, the institution will not graduate another class under its own name. It will instead survive as a memory and a unit on someone else’s campus: the Labouré Center for Advancing Healthcare Opportunity at Curry College, about four miles away.
What closed is, in the best reading of a hard story, a relatively gentle ending. This was not an abrupt cash-crisis shutdown that stranded students with weeks of notice. It was a planned, negotiated wind-down in which the central asset — the nursing programs, the faculty who taught them, the diverse adult students who relied on them — was handed to a willing successor before the doors shut. Curry College agreed to hire roughly 15 of Labouré’s nursing faculty and about 20 staff, to let current nursing students continue in the fall with their credits intact and tuition held at Labouré’s announced 2026-27 rate, and to inherit the college’s $9.4 million endowment, pledged to the new nursing center. As college closures go in this decade, it is closer to a transplant than a death.
But it is still a closure, and the arithmetic behind it is the arithmetic killing small specialized colleges across the country. Labouré served a particular and admirable population — working adults, English-language learners, current healthcare workers, students whose average age was around 31 — through part-time, commuter, evening study. That model is hard to scale and harder to cushion. Enrollment, which crested near 1,188 students in the fall of 2020, fell to about 530 by the fall of 2024, a decline of more than half in four years. President Lily Hsu named the cause plainly: “persistent financial and enrollment challenges and regulatory hurdles.” A college with no large endowment, almost no residential revenue, and a falling head count had run out of room to maneuver. The mission was worth preserving; the institution, by 2026, was not viable enough to preserve it alone.
Anna Maria College, the Catholic liberal-arts college in Paxton, Massachusetts, founded in 1946 by the Sisters of Saint Anne, announced on April 23, 2026 that it would cease academic operations after the spring semester and wind down fully by year’s end — ending eighty years on a 190-acre campus in the hills west of Worcester. The final commencement followed within weeks, and operations ceased on May 10, 2026. A college that had taught generations of teachers, nurses, social workers, musicians, and — through a regionally dominant program — firefighters, simply ran out of the money to continue.
The proximate cause was clinical and unambiguous. A recent audit raised “substantial doubt” about the institution’s ability to continue as a going concern, the auditor’s phrase that functions as a death certificate in higher education. The board, in board chair David P. Trainor’s words, “reached this decision only after pursuing every realistic alternative,” and reached it “heartbroken.” Massachusetts higher-education officials had warned on April 10 that the college lacked sufficient resources; the public announcement came less than two weeks later. There was no abrupt mid-semester collapse and no stranding of a graduating class — students walked across the stage before the doors closed — but eighty years ended in a span of weeks all the same.
What makes Anna Maria’s closure so representative of its moment is that the college had, by its own account, done much of what the playbook prescribes and still lost. It had cut more than $2 million in staffing and operating costs. It had grown spring enrollment 7.5 percent. It had improved fundraising and landed a $5 million anonymous gift. Fall 2024 enrollment of about 1,202 students was respectable for a college of its kind. And none of it was enough: the structural gap between what a small, tuition-dependent Catholic college costs to run and what its students can pay had grown wider than a good year or a generous donor could close. President Sean J. Ryan kept the focus where it belonged — “ensuring every one of them has a clear pathway to complete their education” — while the institution behind that promise dissolved.
Trinity Christian College, the Reformed-tradition liberal-arts college in Palos Heights, Illinois, founded in 1959 by Chicago-area families who wanted a college rooted in Reformed Christian higher education, announced on November 5, 2025 that it would close at the end of the 2025-26 academic year. It held its final commencement on May 8, 2026, after sixty-six years on a wooded suburban campus that had once been a golf course. A college that opened with five faculty and roughly thirty-six students, and that for two generations supplied teachers, nurses, and church leaders to the Christian Reformed community of the upper Midwest, simply could not make the arithmetic work any longer.
The college’s own diagnosis was honest and uncolored by villainy. The board, having voted to close on November 3, cited “post-COVID financial losses, persistent operating deficits, a decline in college enrollment, increased competition for students, and shifting donor giving.” Those are the standard riders of the small-college obituary in this decade, and Trinity wore all of them. It had operated at a loss in eight of its last ten fiscal years. Its total assets had fallen 14 percent between fiscal 2020 and 2024 to $72.3 million, and its cash had dropped by roughly $8 million to about $5 million. In June 2025 it failed to meet its bond covenants — the technical default that, for a college already bleeding cash, usually marks the beginning of the end.
What was lost was not enormous in scale but specific in character. Trinity was a confessional college: education “rooted in Reformed theology,” as its board put it, and woven into the life of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, whose synod it had hosted more than once. Enrollment had peaked near 1,068 in the fall of 2019 and slipped to about 854 by the fall of 2024 — a roughly 22 percent decline across the enrollment cliff. Acting president Jeanine Mozie’s conclusion was the kind that small-college boards reach with grief rather than relief: “there is no sustainable path forward for our beloved institution.” The closure cost the college’s roughly 100-plus employees their jobs and the Reformed community of Chicago’s southwest suburbs an institution it had built deliberately, family by family, in 1959.
Siena Heights University, in Adrian, Michigan, founded in 1919 by the Adrian Dominican Sisters as St. Joseph’s College, announced on June 30, 2025 that it would close at the end of the 2025–2026 academic year, and held its final commencement on May 9, 2026. The institution that ended was a 107-year-old Catholic university of the ordinary, durable kind — a women’s college that had gone coeducational, a college that had become a university, a teaching and nursing school threaded through the life of a small southeastern-Michigan city. There was no scandal and no abrupt cash crisis; there was only the long subtraction of students that has emptied small private colleges across the upper Midwest, and a balance sheet that finally could not carry the same buildings on a third fewer tuition payers.
The closure was not abrupt — and that is its small mercy. Leadership announced it nearly a year before the doors shut, pledged to run a full and normal final year, and built teach-out agreements and transfer pathways so that students could finish. The university stayed open through one last season of athletics, residential life, and campus events; its 22-year-old final graduate, nursing major Rollan Mattson, crossed the fieldhouse stage on May 9 as the last name on a list a century long. The contrast that defines Siena Heights is gentler than most: not a betrayal, but a wind-down handled with the deliberateness its founders would have recognized.
Behind the orderliness was an unforgiving trend line. Enrollment had peaked near 2,707 students in 2015, slid to roughly 2,300 by the 2023–2024 year, and fallen by about a third over the decade — even as the university enrolled its largest incoming class in history, 445 students, in the fall of 2024. A late surge of freshmen could not refill a shrinking upper-class base or close the gap between costs that kept rising and a net tuition that kept thinning. President Douglas Palmer, who announced the closure, described the familiar perfect storm: demographic change, rising operating costs, and the competition of trade schools, against which a small tuition-dependent college with a modest endowment and no public subsidy is structurally the weakest party at the table.
What was lost in Adrian was not a failing diploma mill but a working Catholic university with a real mission — Dominican, art-and-teaching-centered, and woven into its town for more than a century. It closed the way it had lived: quietly, on time, and with its students seen to the door.
Fontbonne University, a Catholic institution in Clayton, just west of St. Louis, Missouri, chartered in 1917 and opened to its first students as Fontbonne College in 1923, announced on March 11, 2024 that its board of trustees had declared financial exigency and would close the university after the summer 2025 term. It was the kind of closure higher education had, by 2024, learned to recognize on sight: a small, tuition-dependent, lightly endowed religious college, founded to serve a region and a faith, ground down over fifteen years by a shrinking pool of students and a deficit that would not close. The institution had run in the red for roughly a decade. It celebrated its centennial in 2023 and announced its own ending a few months later.
Fontbonne was founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, a congregation with roots in St. Louis since 1836, and it carried their mission in its bones — service, access, and a particular care for students the larger universities overlooked. It built strengths in special education and, notably, in deaf education, a partnership with the St. Joseph Institute for the Deaf that made it one of the few places in the country preparing teachers for deaf and hard-of-hearing children. At its 2011 peak it enrolled roughly 2,293 students. By the autumn of 2023 it counted 874, against a deficit reported at $5.2 million, and a board that had spent years cutting costs, launching programs, and adding athletics found none of it had moved the line.
The closure was declared with more than a year’s runway, which made it kinder than many. Fontbonne admitted no freshman class for fall 2024 and taught its remaining students through the summer of 2025, drawing roughly $9 million from its endowment to fund scholarships so current undergraduates could finish. Washington University in St. Louis agreed to buy the 16-acre Clayton campus and leased it back to Fontbonne for the final year. What ended was not a scandal but a century of diverse Catholic education in St. Louis — a college that had taught generations of the city’s first-generation students, special educators, and dietitians, dissolving on schedule because the arithmetic of small religious colleges had finally caught it.
Jamestown Business College was a small for-profit business school in Jamestown, New York, founded in 1886 — seven months after Jamestown became a city — and closed in early 2025, ceasing instruction on February 28 after 139 years. It is the rare entry in the Borrower Defense family that earns no villain. There was no fraud, no inflated placement rate, no predatory loan book. There was a tiny, long-lived, accredited proprietary college that concluded it had grown too small to bear the rising cost of compliance, and chose to close on its own terms rather than be ground down.
The school’s longevity was remarkable. E.J. Coburn, of Sugar Grove, Pennsylvania, founded it in 1886, and for well over a century it did one thing: it trained the Jamestown region’s bookkeepers, secretaries, and office workers, and later its business graduates. By the twenty-first century it offered a two-year Associate in Applied Science, a four-year Bachelor of Business Administration, and an MBA delivered in partnership with Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education from 2001, and in its better recent years it enrolled a little over 300 students, taught by some two dozen faculty.
The reason the family gives for the closure is unusually candid and points at the regulatory environment rather than itself. In February 2024 the college announced it would stop enrolling new students and wind down, citing “the college’s size and the expanding government regulations.” For a school of a few hundred students, the fixed compliance burden of operating as a Title IV–eligible, accredited, state-registered for-profit — gainful-employment reporting, the 90/10 federal-revenue rule, financial-responsibility tests, and the rest — had grown heavy enough that the math of staying open no longer worked. The college taught out its remaining students, held a final commencement, and let its accreditation lapse.
Because Jamestown chose an orderly wind-down, its students were protected in the way the for-profit norm so often fails to protect them. The school kept teaching until its current students could finish, held a last commencement in March 2025, and arranged for Bryant & Stratton College to become the custodian of its academic transcripts so that 139 years of records would survive the institution. It is the dignified version of an ending — a small school closing carefully — and a useful counterpoint to the chains that vanished overnight.
Wells College, a small liberal-arts college in the village of Aurora, New York, on the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake, founded in 1868 by Wells Fargo and American Express co-founder Henry Wells, told its students on April 29, 2024 that it would close at the end of that spring semester. After 156 years — most of them as a women’s college, the last two decades coeducational — the institution announced it could not continue, and it ceased operations on June 30, 2024. Roughly 350 students and 38 faculty members were affected.
The cause was the demographic and financial vise that has crushed dozens of small colleges: an enrollment cliff that left Wells with too few tuition-paying students to sustain itself. The college’s enrollment had peaked at 574 in 2007, two years after it admitted men, and had fallen to about 350 by its final year. A small college this size, tuition-dependent and carrying a modest endowment of roughly $29 million, has almost no room to absorb that kind of shrinkage. In the year before the closure, Wells posted a net loss of about $3.2 million, the latest in a string of operating deficits stretching back years.
There had been warnings. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education placed Wells on probation in 2019 over concerns about its financial and human resources; the college clawed its way off probation in 2021 when its finances briefly improved, but the reprieve proved temporary. The leadership blamed the familiar litany — the pandemic, the shrinking national pool of undergraduates, inflation, and a souring public sentiment toward higher education — and for once each item on the list was a real contributor.
What stung the Wells community was not only the closure but the speed of it: about a month’s notice, mid-spring, for a 156-year-old institution. Students mid-degree scrambled to transfer; faculty and staff lost their careers; the village of Aurora, which had grown up around the college, faced the loss of its anchor. A teach-out plan eventually steered a large majority of students to other colleges, and in early 2026 the 127-acre lakeside campus found an unexpected second life as the home of a new tribal college — but the institution that Henry Wells built was gone.
Goddard College, the famously experimental progressive college in Plainfield, Vermont, was chartered in 1938 — on the older root of an institution dating to 1863 — and announced on April 9, 2024 that it would close at the end of that spring semester, after 86 years. Few small colleges have left a larger mark relative to their size. Goddard pioneered the low-residency degree, a model since copied across American higher education, and built a faculty that at times included writers such as David Mamet and the poet Louise Glück; its alumni run from Mamet and the actor William H. Macy to the members of the band Phish. What it could not do, in the end, was find enough students to pay for itself. Enrollment had fallen from a peak near 1,900 in the early 1970s to roughly 220 by 2024, and the board, facing what it called looming financial insolvency, judged closure the only responsible choice.
Goddard was the work of Royce “Tim” Pitkin, a student of progressive education at Columbia’s Teachers College in the tradition of John Dewey, who founded the college in 1938 as an experiment in self-directed, democratic learning — partly as a bulwark, as he saw it, against the authoritarianism then rising in the world. Students designed their own curricula and received written narrative evaluations instead of grades. In 1963 Goddard developed the intensive low-residency model for its MFA in creative writing — short, concentrated on-campus residencies bracketing long stretches of independent study at a distance — and that innovation rippled outward into MFA and adult-education programs nationwide.
The same independence that made Goddard influential left it financially exposed. It was tiny, tuition-dependent, lightly endowed, and built on a model that, ironically, made physical enrollment optional. By the 2020s roughly 70 percent of its students were choosing the fully virtual path over the in-person residencies, eroding the residency revenue the model assumed and accelerating an enrollment decline already decades old. The college had been placed on accreditation probation in 2018 (lifted in 2020), and in early 2024 it shifted entirely online before concluding that even that could not save it.
The closure stranded about 220 students and eliminated roughly 90 jobs. To soften the landing, Goddard arranged for students to continue at Prescott College in Arizona — a kindred progressive institution — at their current tuition rate, backed by a transition scholarship fund. It was a more graceful exit than many closing colleges manage. But the institution itself was gone: an 86-year-old laboratory of progressive education, whose ideas outran its enrollment, closing in the Vermont hills where it had taught generations to design their own learning.
Oak Point University, a private non-profit health-sciences university in Oak Brook, Illinois — with its main campus in Chicago’s Wicker Park — traced its lineage to 1914 and closed at the end of the spring 2024 semester on April 19, 2024, having warned its students barely three weeks earlier. For a school that existed to produce nurses and health-care professionals, the manner of its ending was a bitter irony: an institution that taught care gave its own students almost none, announcing on March 28, 2024 that it would not survive the term.
The university was one of the oldest nursing schools in the Chicago area, born in 1914 as the West Suburban Hospital School for Nurses and evolving across a century through a string of names and owners — a hospital diploma program, then a degree-granting college of nursing, then, after Resurrection Health Care bought it in 2004, Resurrection University in 2010. In 2021 it became independent and rebranded as Oak Point University, opening a second campus in Oak Brook to complement its Wicker Park home at Saint Elizabeth’s. At its high-water mark around 2017 it enrolled roughly 914 students across nursing, imaging technology, and health-sciences programs, a small but specialized institution with deep roots in the region’s hospitals.
The collapse was a textbook case of pandemic-era enrollment loss compounded by accreditation trouble. Enrollment fell from 860 students in the fall of 2019 to 429 by the fall of 2022 — a drop of roughly half in three years — and the university posted an operating loss of about $2.4 million in fiscal 2022. Meanwhile its nursing programs stumbled on the metric that mattered most: pass rates on the NCLEX licensing exam fell below the 75 percent threshold Illinois requires, bottoming at 62 percent in 2021, and the Higher Learning Commission placed Oak Point on probation. A nursing school that cannot reliably get its graduates licensed has lost its reason to exist.
When the end came it came fast. Lewis University, whose own Oak Brook campus sat a few blocks from Oak Point’s, stepped in with a teach-out agreement, accepting Oak Point’s students with full credit transfer at honored tuition rates and agreeing to safeguard the university’s academic records. That arrangement spared many students the worst, but it could not undo the shock of three weeks’ notice for people deep into clinical programs. After 110 years, one of Chicago’s oldest nursing pipelines simply switched off.
Delaware College of Art and Design, a small private non-profit art school in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, founded in 1997, announced on May 23, 2024 that it would wind down and close permanently by July 31, 2024 — leaving the state without an independent art-and-design college for the first time in more than a quarter-century. It was a modest institution that ended in a modest way, but it earned an outsized footnote in higher-education history: DCAD appears to have been the first American college to explicitly blame its closure, in part, on the botched federal rollout of the new FAFSA.
DCAD was born of civic ambition rather than religious mission or private fortune. The Wilmington Renaissance Corporation created it in 1997, in partnership with Pratt Institute and the Corcoran College of Art and Design, as an anchor for the revitalization of downtown Wilmington. Housed in the Art Deco Delmarva Power & Light Building on North Market Street, it offered two-year associate degrees in art and design — a feeder that prepared students to transfer into four-year programs at partner institutions — and at its peak around 2011 enrolled roughly 250 students. It was never large, but for more than two decades it gave Delaware a foothold in arts education and a stake in the life of its downtown.
The decline was the familiar slow squeeze of a tiny, tuition-dependent college, then a sudden federal accelerant. Enrollment fell from its 2011 peak of about 250 to roughly 160 by 2017 and to just 107 by 2024 — a drop of more than half — even as costs rose and the college’s aging Market Street facilities strained its finances; it had already sold off its residence and dining halls. Into that fragility came the 2024-25 FAFSA debacle, a delayed and error-plagued overhaul of the federal student-aid form that left colleges nationwide unable to package aid and admit classes on schedule. For a school of 107 students living term to term on tuition, a single broken admissions cycle was enough.
The college closed with a teach-out: Moore College of Art and Design and Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, both in nearby Pennsylvania, agreed to accept DCAD’s incoming and continuing students. The arrangement gave students a path forward, but it sent them across state lines, and it could not replace what Delaware lost — its only independent art college, an arts anchor in a downtown that had built itself partly around the school. DCAD’s epitaph is a cautionary one: that a federal form, mishandled, can be the last straw for an institution already living on the margin.
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.
The College of Saint Rose, a private nonprofit college in the Pine Hills neighborhood of Albany, New York, founded in 1920 by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, voted itself out of existence on November 30, 2023, and held its last classes in June 2024 after 104 years. It had once enrolled more than 4,500 students at its 2013 peak; by the closure announcement it was down to roughly 2,800, facing a projected $11.3 million deficit it could not cover, and carrying a debt load — much of it borrowed to buy and renovate a neighborhood’s worth of buildings — that it could not service against a shrinking tuition base. The board concluded the college lacked the resources to operate even one more full year. In October 2024 it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Founded as a Catholic women’s college to train teachers, Saint Rose grew over a century into a coeducational, largely secular regional institution known for its schools of education, music, and communications. It went co-ed in 1969–1970 and became independently governed soon after, a familiar arc for a mid-sized Catholic college. For most of the twentieth century it was a fixture of Albany’s Pine Hills, a residential college woven physically into the streets around it — and that physical entanglement, more than its mission, is what shaped its end.
Between roughly 1999 and 2015, Saint Rose pursued an aggressive campus-expansion strategy, acquiring dozens of properties in the surrounding neighborhood and spending on the order of $100 million to acquire and upgrade them. The bet was on growth: a bigger, more residential campus to attract a bigger student body. When the enrollment cliff arrived in the Northeast instead, the college was left with a sprawling physical plant and the debt that built it, both sized for 4,500 students it no longer had. By October 2023 its bonds had been cut to junk; by November the board was out of options.
What closed was a genuine pillar of the Capital Region — a leading producer of teachers and music educators for upstate New York, an anchor of a city neighborhood, and the academic home of about 2,800 students and hundreds of faculty and staff. The Sisters’ founding mission had long since become a regional public good. In March 2025 the 27-acre campus — 71 buildings, roughly 950,000 square feet, the very real estate the college had spent itself into the ground assembling — was sold for $35 million to an Albany County land authority for redevelopment. A college that had bought a neighborhood to grow ended by handing that neighborhood back, in bankruptcy, to the county.
Notre Dame College, a Catholic institution in South Euclid, Ohio, founded in 1922 by the Sisters of Notre Dame, announced on February 29, 2024 that it would close at the end of that spring semester, ending a 102-year history. (It is no relation to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana; the shared name is coincidence, and the confusion is one small indignity of its closing.) The college had grown from a women’s college into a coeducational institution that doubled its enrollment in the 2000s, then watched that enrollment fall by more than a third in a decade. By the end it carried significant debt it could not refinance, and a last-ditch effort to merge with nearby Cleveland State University failed. On May 2, 2024, the college closed for good.
The diagnosis the board offered was a familiar one for a small Catholic college in the 2020s: declining enrollment, a shrinking pool of college-aged students, rising costs, and a heavy debt load. Total fall enrollment had peaked around 2,300 in 2014 and slid to roughly 1,440 by 2022 — a decline of nearly 37 percent — while the costs of running a residential campus stayed fixed. The Sisters of Notre Dame, whose own dwindling numbers had made it impossible to sustain their leadership, had ended their sponsorship of the college in 2023, removing the founding order from the institution it had built. When fundraising, refinancing, and federal pandemic relief all proved insufficient to satisfy the college’s debt obligations, and the Cleveland State merger collapsed, the board concluded there was no path forward.
Unlike the era’s most brutal closures, Notre Dame did not strand its students without recourse. It arranged teach-out and transfer agreements with nine other institutions, guaranteeing admission and comparable tuition for students who had completed enough credits, and held a partner-college fair to help them move. Still, roughly 1,400 students had to leave the college they had chosen, some 370 employees lost their jobs, and a Division II athletics program — including a football team that had just signed its 2024 recruiting class three weeks before the announcement — was dissolved overnight. The campus that the Sisters built in suburban Cleveland would later go to auction, the final page of a century-old Catholic college undone by the arithmetic of debt and demography.
Clarks Summit University, a private Baptist institution in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, founded in 1932 as the Baptist Bible Seminary, announced its closure on July 1, 2024, and stopped teaching after the summer term — ending ninety-two years of training pastors, missionaries, and Bible teachers for the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches. The end came fast: the university furloughed its entire staff on June 5, 2024, and roughly four weeks later the board of trustees declared that it had “exhausted every viable solution to bridge a significant financial gap” and would close. There would be no fall 2024 semester.
The institution was, by tradition and requirement, a Bible school first. Founded in Johnson City, New York, where it operated out of a Baptist church’s facilities for its first thirty-six years, it relocated in 1968 to Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, with help from Governor William Scranton, and built a 141-acre suburban campus with seventeen major buildings. Every bachelor’s-degree graduate was required to complete a major in Biblical Studies alongside any other field of study — a mark of how thoroughly the school’s identity was bound to its denominational mission. It carried several names over the decades — Baptist Bible College of Pennsylvania, then Summit University in 2015, then Clarks Summit University in 2016 — but its purpose held steady even as its market dissolved beneath it.
That market was the problem. Enrollment had been cut roughly in half in a single decade, falling from about 1,107 students in the fall of 2012 to 552 in the fall of 2022, and continued sliding toward the low 500s. The decline mirrored a broader collapse in demand for residential Bible-college education, compounded by the demographic enrollment cliff bearing down on every small private college in the Northeast. By fiscal 2023 the university faced a budget shortfall of nearly $1.9 million, a small number in absolute terms but a fatal one for an institution with no endowment cushion and a tuition base in free-fall. When the gap could not be closed, the school furloughed its people and closed within the month.
What was lost was not a scandal but a vocation. Clarks Summit arranged teach-out agreements with Liberty University and Cairn University so its students could finish their degrees, and its president and administrators worked without pay through the furlough — a dignified end to a school whose finances had simply run out. The faculty and staff lost their careers, the denomination lost one of its principal training schools, and the Scranton region lost a 92-year institution and employer.
Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, a tiny independent Catholic great-books college in Warner, New Hampshire, founded in 1973, announced in November 2023 that it would close after the spring semester and held its final term in May 2024 — ending fifty-one years as the smallest college in the state. It enrolled only about sixty students at the end, a figure consistent with its entire history: the institution never exceeded roughly ninety students, by design as much as by circumstance. Its leaders cited “financial challenges,” the unsurprising condition of an institution whose tuition revenue rested on a few dozen enrollments.
The college was a particular kind of place — a deliberately small community of Socratic seminars built around the great books of the Western tradition, rooted in Catholic education. Founded by three Catholic laymen, Francis Boucher, John Meehan, and Peter V. Sampo, it began in Bedford, New Hampshire, and moved in 1991 to a rural campus in Warner, where it occupied roughly 135 acres anchored by the Our Lady Queen of Apostles Chapel. Students read Plato and Aquinas in small discussion classes, could earn an Apostolic Catechetical Diploma alongside a degree in liberal studies, and overwhelmingly shared the college’s faith — by one count in 2015, ninety-five percent identified as Catholic. It was a college built to be intimate, and intimacy was both its mission and its economic trap.
The closure was not the product of any scandal or sudden shock but of arithmetic that had always been precarious and finally became impossible. A college of sixty students has almost no tuition revenue to work with, no economies of scale, and — in Magdalen’s case — no endowment large enough to bridge a shortfall. As the demographic enrollment cliff thinned the national applicant pool and the cost of operating even a small rural campus rose, the gap between what sixty students could pay and what the institution cost to run widened past closing. The leadership chose an orderly exit, announcing the decision six months in advance so that students and faculty could plan.
What was lost was small in headcount and outsized in character: a distinctive experiment in classical Catholic education, a community where students and faculty knew one another by name, and the careers of a faculty who had chosen a vocation over a salary. The campus, at least, found a fitting second life — the Diocese of Manchester purchased the property, chapel and all, to carry on the work of the Catholic Church on the ground where Magdalen had stood.
Lincoln Christian University, in the small central-Illinois town of Lincoln, was founded in 1944 as Lincoln Bible Institute to train preachers for the Restoration Movement, and it ceased academic operations on May 31, 2024, eighty years almost to the season after it opened. It was not killed by scandal, fraud, or a creditor’s lawsuit. It was killed by arithmetic: an enrollment that fell from a peak of 1,066 students in the fall of 2012 to just 258 a decade later, a roughly 76 percent collapse that no amount of cost-cutting could outrun. The board chose to close while it still could choose anything at all.
The school was a creature of the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, a wing of the Restoration Movement that prizes plainness, local-church autonomy, and a Bible-centered ministry. Lincoln existed to supply that movement with educated leaders — pastors, ministers, missionaries, worship leaders, and the seminary-trained clergy the region’s churches said they lacked. For decades it did exactly that, growing from a wartime preacher-training institute into Lincoln Christian College in 1962 and, finally, Lincoln Christian University in 2009. At its height it enrolled more than a thousand students across undergraduate, seminary, and graduate programs, and its alumni filled pulpits across the Midwest.
What distinguishes Lincoln from most of the closures cataloged here is the manner of its ending. Faced with the same demographic and financial pressures that have shuttered scores of small religious colleges, Lincoln’s leadership chose not to gamble on one more recruiting cycle. Instead, over several years, it paid down a debt that had peaked near $9 million, arranged a real teach-out, transferred its seminary and its $3.8 million scholarship endowment to a sister institution in Missouri, sold its campus to a local church, and closed debt-free. The institution still ended; its students still had to finish their degrees somewhere else; eighty years of identity still dissolved. But the wind-down was orderly, the obligations were met, and the mission was handed on rather than abandoned — a rare dignity in a field defined by abrupt collapse.
Medaille University, a small private college in Buffalo, New York, founded in 1875 by the Sisters of St. Joseph as an institute to train teachers, closed on August 31, 2023, after a planned acquisition by neighboring Trocaire College collapsed in its final weeks. For 148 years it had been a fixture of Western New York higher education — a teacher-preparation institute that became Mount Saint Joseph College in 1937, the secular and coeducational Medaille College in 1968, and finally Medaille University in 2021, just two years before it ceased to exist. Its students, roughly 1,600 in the end, were mostly first-generation and place-bound, drawn from Buffalo and Southern Ontario; the closure took the most accessible degree many of them would ever have a shot at.
The arithmetic underneath the closure was familiar and unforgiving. Medaille was tuition-dependent, lightly endowed — about $2 million against the kind of obligations a university accumulates — and carrying roughly $22 million in debt, including more than $1 million a year in interest payments tied in part to a lease for a $7.5 million sports complex that faculty and staff had openly questioned. Enrollment had slid from about 2,390 in the fall of 2013 to roughly 1,814 by the fall of 2021, a 24 percent decline over the very years a college needs to be growing to service its debt. By 2022 the survival plan was an exit: an acquisition by Trocaire College, a fellow Catholic-rooted institution across town, announced that August.
The deal was the soft landing — until it wasn’t. In May 2023, after months of due diligence, Trocaire walked away, reportedly over concern that Medaille had claimed roughly $5 million in pandemic-era federal tax credits to which it may not have been entitled. Whatever the precise legal merits, the prospective buyer’s accountants saw a liability they would not assume. With the acquisition dead and no other rescue in reach, Medaille’s board voted to close. The university held its final commencement on May 5, 2023, told the rest of its community days later, and shut its doors at the end of that August.
What followed was, by the standards of this era, comparatively orderly. New York law requires a closing college to name a legacy institution for its records, and Niagara University stepped in as both records-keeper and teach-out partner, taking on more than 320 graduate students in counseling and education and honoring their credits and aid. But teach-outs do not rebuild a 148-year-old institution. The campus on Buffalo’s Olmsted-designed Agassiz Circle was sold off; the faculty scattered; and a college that had spent nearly a century and a half handing first-generation students a credential disappeared into the same statistical column as Mount Ida and dozens of others.
Cardinal Stritch University, a Catholic institution in the Milwaukee suburbs of Fox Point and Glendale, founded in 1937 by the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi, announced on April 10, 2023 that it would close at the end of that spring semester, winding down on May 22 after a final commencement the day before. It was, at its height, one of the largest Franciscan universities in the United States — a regional powerhouse in teacher education and adult degree completion that had enrolled more than 5,000 students at its 2011 peak. Twelve years later it enrolled barely a quarter of that, and the arithmetic that had carried it for 86 years no longer closed.
The institution had begun as St. Clare College, a teacher-training school founded by the Franciscan sisters to educate members of their own order. It was renamed in 1946 for Cardinal Samuel Stritch, the Archbishop of Milwaukee, became coeducational, and grew steadily into a comprehensive university — granted university status in 1997 — with a national reputation in education and a large, lucrative adult and graduate market. That market was its strength and, in the end, its exposure. When enrollment in education programs and adult degree completion softened across the 2010s, Cardinal Stritch had built its scale on exactly the segment that was contracting fastest. Enrollment fell from more than 5,000 in 2011 to 2,345 in 2019–20 and to 1,365 by the fall of 2021 — a decline of roughly three-quarters in a decade.
President Dan Scholz, announcing the closure, called it a “no-win situation,” citing fiscal realities, downward enrollment, the pandemic, the need for more resources, and mounting operational and facility costs. The Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi, who had founded the university and still sponsored it, accepted the board’s recommendation to close. Cardinal Stritch arranged a robust set of teach-out agreements — with Alverno, Mount Mary, Carroll, Marquette, and others — that guaranteed admission and full credit transfer so students could finish on time and at comparable cost. What ended was not a small struggling college but the flagship of Franciscan higher education in the upper Midwest, hollowed out so quickly that its closure came as a shock to a city that had assumed it too big to fail.
Presentation College, in Aberdeen, South Dakota, was founded in 1951 by the Presentation Sisters as a Catholic college on the northern plains, and it ceased educational operations on October 31, 2023, after 72 years, having announced its closure the previous January. It was a small, faith-based institution best known for its health-sciences and nursing programs, and it closed for the most ordinary and most fatal of reasons in contemporary higher education: it could not enroll enough students, and it could not afford the ones it had. Enrollment fell from 821 in the fall of 2016 to 577 by the fall of 2021, and to fill even those seats the college had been discounting tuition so heavily — forgoing 36 cents of every sticker-price dollar by 2021 — that each additional student deepened the hole.
The college was an instrument of the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a Catholic order whose founding charism, traceable to the Irish educator Nano Nagle, centered on educating the poor and caring for the sick. Presentation College expressed that charism in a remote agricultural region: it trained nurses, radiologic technologists, and other health-care workers for a part of the country that has always struggled to staff its hospitals and clinics. For seven decades it was a fixture of Aberdeen, a city of about 28,000, serving as both a Catholic educational mission and a significant local employer. Its location, though, was also a structural liability — a remote campus far from population centers and hard for out-of-state students to reach.
Presentation’s closing was an orderly one rather than an abrupt collapse. President Paula Langteau and the board announced the decision in January 2023, giving students and faculty most of a year, and the college arranged an unusually broad set of teach-out agreements — reportedly with 36 colleges and universities — so that students could finish their degrees. Among the streamlined transfer partners were the University of Mary in North Dakota, Olivet College in Michigan, St. Ambrose University in Iowa, and, close to home, Northern State University in Aberdeen itself. Its signature online nursing program found a permanent home at St. Ambrose, reborn as the Nano Nagle Online School of Nursing. The campus, owned by the Sisters, has since begun a second life: on February 5, 2024, the City of Aberdeen approved a $1.75 million purchase of part of the property, including its athletic dome and the Strode Center, for community and educational use.
Lincoln College, a small private college in the rural central-Illinois town of Lincoln, was founded in 1865 — its cornerstone laid on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday that February, while the president for whom it was named was still alive — and it closed for good on May 13, 2022, after 157 years. By the end it had become a predominantly Black institution recognized as such by the U.S. Department of Education, serving a heavily first-generation, lower-income student body. It died of two compounding wounds: the enrollment and revenue damage of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a December 2021 ransomware attack that crippled the very systems it needed to recruit its way out of the hole. Lincoln became the first U.S. college whose closure was attributed, in part, to a cyberattack.
The financial pressure was already severe. Like most tuition-dependent small colleges, Lincoln depended on each incoming class to fund the year, and the pandemic hammered both recruitment and the auxiliary revenue — housing, dining, events — that a residential college relies on. Enrollment had crested near 1,330 in the mid-2000s; by the pandemic the college was working to keep numbers from sliding further. It was wounded but not yet fatally so. Then, on December 19, 2021, came the ransomware.
The attack, which the college traced to Iran, locked Lincoln out of the systems that ran admissions, recruitment, retention, and fundraising for more than a month. The timing could hardly have been worse: this was precisely the window in which a college recruits and confirms its next fall class. Lincoln paid a ransom — under $100,000 — and regained access in March 2022, but by then it had lost the recruiting cycle and could not see its own enrollment pipeline. When the data came back online, the picture was grim: projections for fall 2022 fell “woefully short” of what the college needed to survive, and leadership estimated it would take as much as $50 million, or a transformational partnership, to keep the doors open.
There was no $50 million and no rescuer. President David Gerlach told staff the institution would close on May 13, 2022, and a GoFundMe appeal raised only a few thousand dollars against a far larger need. The closure stranded a student body that small colleges like Lincoln exist precisely to serve — first-generation students, many of them Black, in a part of Illinois with few alternatives nearby — and emptied a campus that had stood since the Civil War. A college named for the president who saved the Union outlasted him by 157 years and was finished, in the end, by a virus and a hacker.
Judson College, in Marion, Alabama, founded in 1838 by Alabama Baptists as the Judson Female Institute and grown into the fifth-oldest women’s college in the United States, voted on May 6, 2021 to close, and suspended academic operations on July 31, 2021. After 183 years — through the Civil War that nearly took the town, through fires that consumed Jewett Hall three times, through Depression-era and 1960s flirtations with merger that the trustees each time declined — the small Baptist college for women in a fading Black Belt town ran out of students and out of credit at the same moment. Roughly 145 students were enrolled when the board voted; only about 80 were expected to return and 12 had committed for the fall.
The institution that closed was a particular and increasingly rare kind of place: a four-year residential women’s college, founded the year after Mount Holyoke, named for Ann Hasseltine Judson, the first American woman to serve as a foreign missionary to Burma, and built to give young women the education then reserved for the young men of Harvard and Yale. Its first principal, the Vermont theologian Milo Parker Jewett, would leave Marion to found Vassar; the model he refined in Alabama traveled north and outlived the school that originated it. Judson stayed small and stayed local, affiliated since 1843 with what is now the Alabama Baptist State Convention, its Carnegie library housing the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame.
The decline was long and the ending was quick. Enrollment had fallen for nearly two decades; by 2019 the college counted only about 250 students, and the operating math no longer worked. In December 2020 the leadership asked for $500,000 in emergency gifts to make it through the spring; alumnae and Baptists answered with $1.3 million, and then $2.53 million across the year — but the turnaround the trustees commissioned concluded the college needed at least $40 million over five years, a sum no women’s college in Perry County, Alabama was going to raise. Two days before the May board meeting, a creditor called a note that was due and would not renew it. The board voted to close and to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
What was lost was not a struggling diploma mill but one of the oldest women’s colleges in the country, and, for Marion, the loss compounded a long municipal grief: a Black Belt town that had once held three colleges watched another of them go dark. Judson did at least close the way a 183-year-old institution should — with a teach-out, transfer help, and donors released from their pledges — even as the bankruptcy and the eventual sale of the historic campus dragged on for years after the last student left.
MacMurray College, a small liberal-arts college in Jacksonville, Illinois, founded in 1846 and for most of its life a women’s college, told its students on March 27, 2020 that it would close at the end of that spring semester. After 174 years — through four name changes, a century as a women’s institution, and a postwar shift to coeducation — its Board of Trustees voted unanimously that the college had no viable financial path forward. Roughly 500 students were enrolled at the end; about 101 faculty and staff would lose their jobs, with no severance, by their final workday on May 25.
The cause was not a single catastrophe but a long arithmetic. MacMurray was tuition-dependent with a small endowment, and it had been running deficits; the closure year would have been its third consecutive year in the red. Its enrollment had fallen by roughly two-thirds from a high-water mark above 1,500 to under 600 in its final stretch, leaving too few tuition-paying students to cover rising costs in a brutally competitive market for traditional-age undergraduates in the Midwest. The board spent more than a year hunting for new capital — a partner, a donor, a lifeline — and found none.
The timing made the diagnosis murky to outsiders, because the announcement came in the first chaotic weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. But MacMurray’s leadership was careful to say the virus was not the cause; it was, at most, the last weight on a structure already failing. The college had flunked the U.S. Department of Education’s financial-responsibility test years earlier, in 2011, 2012 and 2013 — an early, documented warning that the books would not balance forever.
What was lost was a fixture of small-town Illinois. Jacksonville is a town of some 18,000, and MacMurray had been part of it since before the Civil War, educating generations of women teachers, nurses and social workers. The students were steered toward transfers at seven regional colleges; the campus was carved into parcels and sold at auction that November, raising barely enough to pay down a sliver of the college’s debt. A 174-year-old institution closed quietly, in a season when the whole country was distracted, and left a town with one fewer reason to exist.
Memphis College of Art, the independent art school in the leafy heart of Memphis’s Overton Park, opened its doors in 1936 and shut them for good on May 9, 2020, after eighty-four years — one of the few American colleges of its era that announced its own death years in advance and then spent those years keeping its promises. The institution that began as the Memphis Academy of Art, took the name Memphis College of Art in 1985, and built a graduate school in 2010, told the world in October 2017 that it would stop admitting students and close once its last class had graduated. It did exactly that. The closure was not a crash. It was a wake the school threw for itself, in slow motion, with the lights on.
The diagnosis was unsentimental and the board said so plainly. Enrollment in traditional fine arts was falling nationally, and MCA’s curriculum — drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking — sat squarely in the part of the field students were abandoning for digital and design work. Admissions had dropped roughly 35 percent in a single year, the student body had slipped to a little over 300, and the college was carrying real-estate debt against an endowment far too small to absorb it. By the school’s own math, it would have taken a $30 million endowment gift to keep the place alive. No such gift was coming, and the trustees declined to gamble the students’ time on the hope that it would.
So they chose the orderly route that so many other colleges did not. MCA accepted no new students after fall 2017 and ran what one observer called “an extraordinarily long teach-out,” funding the final years partly by selling its real estate so that every enrolled student could finish the degree they had started. The last class — fifty graduates — crossed no stage; the May 2020 commencement was a Facebook Live ceremony, the world having shut down around it for the coronavirus pandemic in the school’s final weeks. It was a strange, muted end for a place that had spent eight decades teaching people to make things by hand.
What closed in Memphis was not only a college but a pipeline. As interim president Laura Hines warned, the loss meant the city would no longer have the steady supply of trained visual artists who had quietly enriched its galleries, its classrooms, and its murals for generations. The campus survives — Rust Hall, the award-winning mid-century building, is being reborn as a metal-arts center — but the institution that filled it is gone, remembered, fittingly, in a museum exhibition titled “An Enduring Legacy.”
Holy Family College, a small Catholic college in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, founded in 1885 by the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity, announced in May 2020 that it would cease operations at the end of that summer term, closing for good on August 29, 2020. It had carried the Holy Family name for less than a year. For most of its modern life the institution had been known as Silver Lake College of the Holy Family, the name it took in 1972; in September 2019 it had returned, with some ceremony, to its founding identity — a restoration meant to signal renewal. Eight months later it was gone.
The college was always small and always tuition-dependent. It had begun as an academy and a teacher-training school for the Franciscan sisters, opened its doors to lay women in 1957, became coeducational in 1969, and settled into the role of a regional Catholic college on a 36-acre campus serving roughly 350 to 450 students across about two dozen undergraduate and a few graduate programs. By the spring of 2020 it enrolled around 360 students, the kind of figure that leaves no room for a bad year. The decline in traditional-age students across the upper Midwest had been pressing on it for a decade; the institution survived on the margin, year to year, with little endowment to absorb a shock.
The shock came in the form of a pandemic. The Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity Sponsored Ministries, which governed the college, cited rising operating costs, persistent enrollment and fundraising difficulties, and — decisively — the effects of COVID-19 on its already fragile recruiting. Sister Natalie Binversie acknowledged that the president had made progress on the older financial problems, but that the tough challenges had been made tougher by the outbreak. The college arranged a teach-out: Lakeland University in nearby Sheboygan County signed an agreement to admit students entering their final year and to take transfers from the rest, at the same cost or less. What closed in Manitowoc was not a scandal or a collapse but a 135-year-old community institution that ran out of the one thing it had never had a cushion of — students — at the exact moment a virus made students harder to find.
Urbana University, in the small city of Urbana, Ohio, founded in 1850 by followers of the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, announced in April 2020 that it would cease operations at the end of that spring semester. It was 170 years old. It did not close as an independent institution making its own last decision; it closed as a line item — a branch campus of Franklin University, a Columbus institution that had acquired Urbana’s assets in 2014 and folded it into its own accreditation as a branch campus in 2017. When Franklin’s leadership looked at a campus that had been losing money and students for years and then watched the coronavirus pandemic arrive, the math resolved itself, and the oldest Swedenborgian college in America was switched off by a board that sat seventy miles away.
The institution that closed had begun as one of the more unusual experiments in nineteenth-century American higher education. The New Church — the Swedenborgian denomination, also called the Church of the New Jerusalem — chartered Urbana College in 1850 to build a school around Swedenborg’s theology and philosophy, and it became, after Oberlin, the second institution of higher learning in Ohio to admit women alongside men. Its founding folklore is the kind most colleges would invent if they could: the land was secured with the help of John Chapman, the Swedenborgian missionary the country remembers as Johnny Appleseed, who persuaded a friend to donate the acreage southwest of town. The college suspended operations during the Civil War, reopened, ran for a century as a small junior college, became a four-year institution in 1968, and took the name Urbana University in 1975.
By the time it closed, the religious mission was a heritage line in the catalog rather than a living subsidy, and the college was simply a small, tuition-dependent institution in a part of the country with too many of them. Of the roughly 1,254 students enrolled at the end, only about a quarter — some 350 residential and commuter students — were the traditional undergraduates a campus closure most disrupts; the majority were in off-site and online programs that Franklin could continue without the Urbana campus at all. That fact is the whole diagnosis. A college whose remaining value to its owner lived in programs that did not require the campus did not need the campus. About 111 employees lost their jobs.
Nebraska Christian College, founded in 1944 in Norfolk, Nebraska as a Bible college of the Restoration Movement and relocated in 2006 to a new campus in Papillion outside Omaha, closed at the end of the spring 2020 semester. The closure was announced on April 2, 2020 not by Nebraska Christian’s own leadership but by the president of Hope International University in Fullerton, California — because four years earlier, in 2016, the financially struggling Nebraska school had merged into HIU and become its branch campus. The merger had been the rescue. When the rescue did not take, the parent simply closed the branch.
For most of its life Nebraska Christian was exactly what its name said: a small Bible college affiliated with the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, founded by fifteen people who met in Wymore in October 1944 to train ministers and church workers for northeastern Nebraska. It opened in a converted apartment house in Norfolk, moved to 85 acres on the edge of that city in the 1970s, and in 2006 completed a years-long fundraising push to build a fresh campus near Omaha. Over its 76 years it granted degrees to more than a thousand students. It was never large, and after the move it was never financially comfortable.
By the mid-2010s the college was struggling enough that independence was no longer viable, and in 2016 it merged into Hope International University, a larger Restoration-Movement institution in California. The deal promised scale: shared accreditation, intercollegiate athletics, and an expanded menu of online programs meant to grow the student body. For a moment it seemed to work — post-merger enrollment rose about 27 percent to roughly 140. Then it reversed. By the spring of 2020 the Papillion campus enrolled just 85 students, a thirty-year low, about half of them already taking their courses online, and the branch was losing money it could not justify.
The decision, when it came, was undramatic and bloodless in the way of a parent closing an underperforming unit. HIU President Paul Alexander explained that the students were already HIU students by virtue of the merger and would remain so — they could move to the Fullerton campus or finish online, at the same tuition and aid. There was, in that sense, a genuine landing place for the students, which is more than many closures offer. But the institution itself — the Nebraska Bible college that had taught ministers for three-quarters of a century — was gone, its name retired and its Papillion campus emptied.
Newbury College, a private career-focused college in Brookline, Massachusetts, founded in 1962, announced on December 14, 2018 that it would close at the end of the 2018–19 academic year, and shut its doors after that spring. It was a relatively young institution by New England standards — fifty-seven years old — and a practical one, built to put students into careers rather than to chase prestige. It had once been substantial. In 1996 Newbury enrolled roughly 5,384 students. By 2016 that figure had fallen to 751, and by the fall of 2018 it stood at about 627 — a decline of more than 86 percent in two decades. A college does not survive losing that many students; it simply takes a while to admit it.
The mechanism was the enrollment cliff in its purest form, with no fraud, no scandal, and no single villain to blame. Newbury was tuition-dependent and thinly endowed — its endowment of roughly $2 million was described as tiny even for a school its size — which left it no buffer as the Northeastern student pool shrank and competition for the survivors sharpened. President Joseph Chillo named the cause plainly: the weighty financial challenges pressing on liberal-arts colleges across the country, driven by major changes in demographics and costs. In June 2018 the regional accreditor placed Newbury on probation over its finances; by December the board concluded there was no path forward and chose to close while it could still wind down on its own terms.
Newbury did at least plan the end. Rather than strand students with weeks’ notice, it announced the closure two semesters out and arranged for students to continue elsewhere, with nearby Lasell University serving as the institution of record for transcripts and enrollment verification after the college was gone. The final commencement came in spring 2019, and the winding-down proceeded in an orderly fashion through the year.
The campus told the rest of the story. Newbury’s roughly eight-acre site on Fisher Hill — bought decades earlier from a former Catholic women’s college — was put up for sale, reviewed by the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, and sold in September 2019 for $34 million to Welltower, a senior-housing developer, to become a luxury retirement community. The proceeds more than covered the college’s debt. A campus built to start young people’s careers would spend its next life housing the end of other people’s. What closed was not a famous institution but a workmanlike one, and its death said something quieter and more general than scandal ever could: that a small, tuition-dependent college can be perfectly honest, perfectly useful, and still run out of students.
Southern Vermont College, a small liberal-arts college near Bennington, Vermont, with roots reaching to 1926, announced on March 4, 2019 that it would close at the end of that academic year, and ceased operations after the spring semester. It was a college defined by whom it served. A large share of its students were first-generation and Pell-eligible — young people for whom Southern Vermont, perched on the 371-acre former Everett estate above Bennington, was an academic home they might not have found anywhere else. That is what made its closure sting more than the numbers alone: the institution most exposed to the demographic collapse was also the one serving the students with the least margin to absorb a disruption.
The decline was steep and the finances were thin. Enrollment, which had peaked around 500 in 2012, fell to roughly 330 by 2019, and the college projected the next class would be smaller still — internal forecasts cut expected enrollment from 365 to 275. Southern Vermont carried a roughly $2 million deficit and had spent years recovering from earlier financial setbacks, including the lingering damage of an embezzlement episode and the loss of accreditation for its nursing program. As a tuition-dependent college with no real endowment cushion, it had no way to absorb a shrinking class on top of standing debt.
The decisive blow was accreditation. In January 2019 the New England Commission of Higher Education caught the college off guard, voting to require Southern Vermont to show cause why its accreditation should not be withdrawn or it be placed on probation — over the financial-resources standard the college could no longer meet. A show-cause hearing followed in late February. The day after, the trustees concluded there was no way forward and voted to close. President David Rees Evans called it devastating: a great institution whose kind of greatness had become very difficult to keep going fiscally.
The college arranged teach-out partners — among them Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Castleton University, and Norwich University — so its roughly 330 students could finish their degrees elsewhere. Bennington lost an employer and a point of access to higher education for its first-generation families. NECHE formally withdrew the college’s accreditation effective August 31, 2019, the bureaucratic full stop on a 93-year institution. What closed was not a failing diploma mill but a mission-driven college doing demanding work with the students who most needed it — proof that in the enrollment-cliff era, serving the vulnerable and being financially fragile are too often the same condition.
Marygrove College, a Catholic institution on the northwest side of Detroit, founded in 1905 by the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and rooted on its Detroit campus since 1927, announced on June 12, 2019 that it would close at the end of that fall semester. It had served the city for 92 years. The closure was the second act of a slow withdrawal: in 2017 the college had already eliminated all 35 of its undergraduate programs in a last attempt at survival, betting that a leaner graduate-only institution could endure. By June 2019 that bet had failed — only 305 students remained across seven graduate programs, and just two new students had enrolled for the coming fall — and the IHM Sisters and the board concluded that there was no path to the roughly 700 students the college would have needed to sustain itself.
What distinguishes Marygrove from the rest of the closure roster is not how it died but what its campus was already becoming as it died. Marygrove had a particular place in Detroit’s history. It admitted its first African American student in 1938 and, in 1968, in the aftermath of the city’s upheaval, launched a “68 for ’68” campaign that brought 68 Black students onto campus; for generations it was a place where Black Detroiters, many of them the first in their families, earned degrees. As the college failed, the IHM Sisters chose to plant something in its place rather than simply sell the grounds. In 2018 the Kresge Foundation committed $50 million to convert the 53-acre site into a “P-20” campus — cradle-to-career education in one place — and the Sisters deeded the property to a new entity, the Marygrove Conservancy, established to steward it.
So the institution closed, but the educational vocation of the ground did not. The University of Michigan, Detroit Public Schools, the Kresge Foundation, and the City of Detroit built a continuum on the campus: an early-childhood center, The School at Marygrove (a public high school, later K–12), and a U-M teacher-residency program modeled on medical residencies. Marygrove College, a 92-year-old Catholic college that educated Detroit’s underserved, ran out of students and money in 2019 — and is the rare entry on this roster whose campus was not emptied but re-consecrated to teaching the moment the degrees stopped.
Marylhurst University, a Catholic institution on a wooded campus south of Portland, Oregon, chartered in 1893 by the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, announced in May 2018 that it would close at the end of the year. It was Oregon’s oldest Catholic university and the first liberal-arts college for women in the Pacific Northwest, and it had spent the last half of its life as something rarer still: a pioneer of adult and online education, built for the working student returning to finish a degree. The board of trustees voted unanimously to close on May 17, 2018, ending a 125-year history and dispersing its remaining students, the great majority of them well past traditional college age.
The cause was enrollment, and the irony is that Marylhurst was undone by the very market it had helped invent. Having reoriented itself in 1974 toward adult learners — older students, online and evening classes, flexible terms — it had been decades ahead of an idea that the rest of higher education eventually seized. When the recession of 2008 sent working adults back to school in search of credentials, Marylhurst’s enrollment swelled toward 2,000. When the economy recovered, those students stopped coming, and the larger, richer universities that had finally embraced online education arrived with marketing budgets Marylhurst could not match. Its president put it plainly: everyone caught up to us. Enrollment fell from 1,409 in the fall of 2013 to 743 four years later — nearly cut in half — and the board concluded the institution could not be rescued.
The closure was, by the standards of this family, comparatively gentle. The university counted just over 400 students at the end; some 81 could graduate that summer, and the institution committed to helping the remaining few hundred transfer. The 50-acre campus reverted to the Sisters of the Holy Names, the religious order that had founded the college and could now decide its future. What Marylhurst lost was not, mostly, stranded undergraduates, but an institutional identity: a small Catholic university that had bet its second century on a model the giants of higher education would eventually take, scale, and dominate.
Grace University, an evangelical Christian institution in Omaha, Nebraska, founded in 1943 as Grace Bible Institute, announced on October 3, 2017 that it would shut down at the end of the 2017–18 academic year, and held its final commencement in May 2018 before dissolving that July. It had begun as a prayer meeting — ten ministers gathered in Omaha on June 1, 1943 to plan a college that would be “fundamental in doctrine, vitally spiritual in emphasis, and interdenominational in scope” — and it ended seventy-five years later the way many small faith schools end, with too few students paying too little tuition to keep the lights on.
The school was never large. It grew from twenty-three students in 1943 to a few hundred by the 1950s, became Grace College of the Bible, and in May 1995 reorganized as Grace University, a small evangelical campus on South Ninth Street that trained pastors, missionaries, teachers, and counselors. Its enrollment hovered around five hundred at its strongest in the early 2010s. By the fall of 2017 it had collapsed to 293 students, with an entering freshman class of just 33. An institution needs a renewing pipeline of new students; Grace’s had narrowed to a trickle.
The finances followed the enrollment down. Grace lost roughly $1.1 million in 2013–14 and nearly $2.1 million in 2014–15 on revenue of about $11–12 million, carried some $7.5 million in debt against an endowment of only $2.4 million, and was placed on probation by its accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, in the summer of 2017 for financial distress. Leadership calculated that survival required recruiting 100 to 120 net-new students every year for three years just to reach break-even in year four — a number the school had no realistic way to hit. A late gambit to relocate to the former Dana College campus in Blair, Nebraska could not be made to work, and the board chose an orderly wind-down over a slow bleed.
What closed was a modest, sincere little college that had outlived its market. There was no scandal, no looted endowment, no for-profit predation — only the arithmetic of a Bible school in an age when fewer students enroll in residential Christian higher education and fewer still can pay sticker price. Grace announced the closure with seven months’ notice, prepared a teach-out, and arranged for the University of Nebraska–Lincoln to keep its records so that no graduate’s degree would vanish with the institution. It was a quiet death, handled about as decently as a closure can be.
Tennessee Temple University, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, founded on July 3, 1946 by the pastor Lee Roberson to train workers for the Independent Baptist movement, voted on March 3, 2015 to dissolve and fold its remaining operations into Piedmont International University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, effective April 30, 2015. The institution that ended that spring was not the one that had once dominated American fundamentalism. At its height in the 1970s and early 1980s, Temple drew more than four thousand students — some accounts put the 1970s figure above five thousand — onto a fifty-five-acre campus laced into the city’s Highland Park neighborhood, and fed a national network of pastors, evangelists, missionaries, and Christian-school teachers. By its last semester it counted roughly 300 to 650 students depending on how the online rolls were tallied, and it could no longer afford a campus built for ten times that number.
For most of the twentieth century Temple was less a college than the academic engine of a movement. It was wedded to Highland Park Baptist Church, which under Roberson became one of the early American megachurches, and to a sprawling apparatus of branch churches, a seminary, an academy, and a bus ministry that carried thousands into the pews each Sunday. Temple’s graduates planted churches and ran Christian schools across the South and beyond; Jerry Falwell would cite the Temple-and-Highland-Park model as a template when he built Liberty University. To be at Tennessee Temple in 1975 was to be at the center of separatist fundamentalism in America.
What followed was a long, quiet subtraction. Roberson retired in 1983, the Independent Baptist movement fractured and aged, the cultural energy that had filled Temple’s dormitories drained away, and enrollment fell year after year — down by roughly three thousand between the early 1980s and 1991, and then down further still. By 2013 the school had “just over” 400 students rattling around a campus it could no longer maintain. In February 2014 it agreed to sell most of the Highland Park buildings to a local congregation and to relocate; the move proved financially impossible, and the relocation became, instead, a merger.
The end, when it came, was gentler than most in this archive. Temple did not strand its students or vanish overnight. It had a sister school — Piedmont, founded a year apart by a friend of Roberson’s, under what the men called a “gentleman’s agreement” that if either faltered the two would reunite — and that agreement was honored. Online programs transferred whole; residential students who moved to Winston-Salem got a tuition cut; the Temple Baptist Seminary survived as a program inside the larger university; and a perpetual scholarship was created for Temple alumni and their descendants. But the name, the campus, and the independent institution were gone. Piedmont itself would later rename to Carolina University, and Tennessee Temple became a line in another school’s history.
Marian Court College, in Swampscott, Massachusetts, founded in 1964 by the Sisters of Mercy as a two-year secretarial school for women, announced in mid-June 2015 that it would close at the end of that month, and shut its doors on June 30, 2015, after fifty-one years. It was a small institution by any measure — roughly 266 students at its recent peak, a final graduating class of 67, a staff of 61, and an endowment of just $413,000 — and it never pretended otherwise. What it offered was access: an inexpensive, Catholic, entirely commuter college on the North Shore where working adults could earn a credential at night, the only school in the area where a full-time student could go entirely after dark.
The college sat on six acres of oceanfront that gave its modest mission an outsized backdrop. Its main building was White Court, a twenty-eight-room 1895 mansion that had served as President Calvin Coolidge’s summer White House in 1925. A secretarial school in a president’s summer home was a fitting emblem of the institution: serious, unpretentious, and improbable. Marian Court grew slowly into its ambitions — a junior college of business by 1980, associate degrees by 1984, the name Marian Court College in 1994, and finally, in 2012, its first four-year bachelor’s programs in business and criminal justice.
The four-year leap came too late to outrun the arithmetic. Marian Court was, in its president’s words, “a highly tuition-dependent educational institution,” and tuition dependence without scale is a slow strangulation. The college had posted three consecutive years of losses; in its last full year, expenses exceeded revenue by roughly $500,000 against gross receipts of just $2.8 million, and the endowment that might have cushioned the gap was a rounding error. Declining enrollment over the prior decade left too few students paying $16,500 a year to keep the lights on. The trustees called the challenges “insurmountable,” and they were.
The closing was orderly and humane in the way the smallest closures sometimes can be. There was no fraud, no stranded mid-degree cohort — only a board that ran out of road. Students were given transfer paths to Salem State University and North Shore Community College, with credits honored as closely as possible; the final class of 67 walked first, 41 of them collecting the school’s first four-year degrees just weeks before the doors shut. A late effort by students and faculty to win a reprieve was declined. The oceanfront campus was later sold and the historic mansion demolished, its façade re-created to wrap a development of age-restricted condominiums — the seaside, in the end, worth far more than the school had ever been.
Victory University, in Memphis, Tennessee, traced its origins to 1941 and closed in May 2014, seventy-three years later, after a single announcement in early March that the spring semester then underway would be its last. The school that closed was the third name worn by the same institution: it began as a Bible study class, became Mid-South Bible College, spent a quarter-century as Crichton College, and ended as Victory University — the name it took in 2010 after a California company bought the financially troubled Christian college in 2009 and converted it into a for-profit business. By March 2014 roughly 1,600 students were enrolled. They were given a few weeks’ notice that the institution would not exist by summer.
The cause was the plainest in higher education: not enough students, and not enough money. Victory had pushed enrollment toward a peak of about 1,970 by expanding online classes and adding athletics, but the for-profit model its new owner had layered onto a small Christian college never found stable footing. The financial troubles that had prompted the 2009 sale never resolved; they followed the school under its new name and new owner, and in March 2014 the owner, Significant Education, simply decided the spring term would be the end. There was no slow accreditation battle and no fraud case — just the quiet arithmetic of a small religious college that could not enroll its way to solvency, now run by a company that could choose to stop.
The closure stranded students mid-degree, but Memphis-area institutions stepped in. Union University — a fellow Christian school — held an information session within weeks and committed to building transfer plans that would honor as much of the Victory coursework as possible, with more than fifty students expressing interest in transferring to Union’s campuses in Germantown, Jackson, and Hendersonville. The abruptness still hurt: athletic teams folded mid-season, with a baseball squad playing on while its coach went unpaid and the program fundraised to finish.
A note on the file: this dossier sits in the Sacred Ground family for the institution’s Christian heritage, but at closing Victory University was, in legal fact, a for-profit corporation owned by Significant Education — a distinction that matters, because the decision to close was a corporate one, made by an owner that had bought the college’s mission as a business and could write it off as one.
Chester College of New England, a small private arts college in Chester, New Hampshire, founded in 1965 as White Pines College, announced on May 20, 2012 that its board of trustees had voted to close at the end of that academic year. The 47-year-old college had disclosed in April that it was carrying an operating deficit of roughly $750,000 and that it could no longer sustain itself; enrollment had fallen to about 144 students, well below what the campus needed to survive. After a frantic, weeks-long effort by students and faculty to raise money and save it, the board concluded the math was final.
Unlike many of its peers in the closure wave, Chester did not strand its students. The college arranged an orderly teach-out: it reached an agreement with nearby New England College under which every currently enrolled or admitted Chester student could transfer at their existing tuition rate, with all Chester credits recognized, and four Chester faculty members were hired for one-year appointments to ease the transition. The New Hampshire Institute of Art offered similar terms for arts students and hired the heads of Chester’s creative writing and photography programs. The institution died; its students were given a real path to finish.
The deeper story is one of a college that reinvented itself into the danger zone. For its first three and a half decades it was White Pines College, a two-year institution founded by Faith Preston that admitted its first class in 1967. In 2002, under its third president, William Nevious, it took a bold turn: it renamed itself Chester College of New England and expanded into a four-year, arts-focused liberal arts college, building majors in creative writing, photography, media arts, graphic design, fine arts, and interdisciplinary arts. It was a distinctive and admirable identity — a tiny dedicated arts college in rural New Hampshire — and a financially perilous one.
The 2008 recession finished what the model started. A four-year arts college needs scale to spread its fixed costs, and Chester never reached it; the downturn left it with fewer than 150 students and a structural deficit it could not close. A devoted community of students and faculty could rally affection but not the millions the college needed. When the board voted to close in May 2012, it ended a 47-year history — and, more pointedly, a ten-year experiment in whether a small two-year school could remake itself into a four-year arts college and survive.
Cascade College, a Churches of Christ liberal-arts college in northeast Portland, Oregon, was closed by its parent institution at the end of the spring 2009 semester after fifteen years as a satellite campus of Oklahoma Christian University. The Oklahoma Christian Board of Trustees announced the decision on October 27, 2008, citing the obvious arithmetic: after fifteen years of effort and roughly four million dollars in subsidy, the Portland branch had never come close to the enrollment it needed to pay for itself. Some 280 students and about 45 full-time faculty and staff were given the spring to wind down. The final commencement, on May 2, 2009, sent out a class of 69.
The institution that closed in 2009 was younger than its name suggested. The Cascade College that held its last graduation was opened in the fall of 1994, when Oklahoma Christian University — a Churches of Christ school 1,500 miles away in Oklahoma City — agreed to take over a struggling Portland campus and run it as a branch. That campus had belonged to Columbia Christian College, a fellow Churches of Christ institution founded in 1956 that lost its regional accreditation and closed in 1993. Oklahoma Christian revived the old, resonant name of an earlier Portland school — the original Cascade College, which had run from 1918 to 1969 before merging into Seattle Pacific — and reopened the doors with 143 students that first semester. It was, in effect, a third attempt to sustain a four-year Christian college in Portland on the same ground. Like the two before it, it did not last.
The cause was not scandal or fraud but a simple structural mismatch between cost and scale. A residential four-year college with a faculty, a campus, and a sports program needs hundreds of full-paying students to break even; Cascade ran, by its board chairman’s own estimate, in the 300 range against a break-even closer to 500 to 700. Oklahoma Christian covered the gap year after year out of its own budget, and when the 2008 economy turned and the path to growth disappeared, the parent decided it could no longer justify subsidizing a branch that would not become self-supporting. The closure was orderly by the standards of the genre — more than a semester’s notice, a teach-out offer, an open door at the Oklahoma City campus — but the offer’s geography told the story: students could finish their degrees, fifteen hundred miles from home. About 65 made the move.
What was lost was small in headcount and large in meaning: a Christian liberal-arts foothold in the Pacific Northwest, a tight community of a few hundred, the careers of 45 employees in a recession, and a name — Cascade — that had now been buried twice in the same city.
Notre Dame College, in Manchester, New Hampshire, founded in 1950 by the Sisters of Holy Cross as a college to train Catholic women to teach, announced in November 2001 that it would close at the end of that academic year, and graduated its final class in May 2002. It had lasted fifty-two years. The institution that closed was not in free fall — roughly 1,100 students still held degree candidacies, and the college had no scandal, no fraud, no creditor at the gate. What it had was the quietest and most common of higher-education ailments: a small, tuition-dependent college with a thin endowment, in a small city, watching a cheaper public competitor offer the same degrees down the road.
Notre Dame grew out of a Teacher Training Institute the Sisters of Holy Cross of Montreal had opened in Manchester in 1945, and for its first decades it did one thing well: it turned out schoolteachers, mostly women, for the parochial and public classrooms of southern New Hampshire. Over the second half of the century it broadened — adding liberal arts and sciences, business, fine arts, communications, and health sciences — and in 1985 it went fully coeducational, having already opened its graduate and evening programs to men in the 1970s. By the mid-1990s it reached its high-water mark of about 1,350 students, a comfortable size for a college of its kind. It never went much higher.
The decline was gradual and, in hindsight, structural. Enrollment drifted from roughly 1,200 to about 1,025 by the fall of 2001, with barely four hundred full-time undergraduates — the students who actually paid the bills — propping up a campus scattered across eight acres of a residential neighborhood, with no land to consolidate or expand. The endowment sat under two million dollars; the last capital campaign, five years earlier, had raised only about three million. And a few miles away, the University of New Hampshire’s Manchester branch offered comparable programs at public-college prices. President Anthony J. De Conciliis, a Holy Cross priest who had taken the job in July 2000, said the college had explored every alternative — cut the undergraduate side and grow the graduate side, or the reverse — and found no version of the arithmetic that worked.
When Notre Dame closed, it did so with more grace than many. Five of its education programs and a portion of its library went to Southern New Hampshire University, the rising Manchester institution then transforming itself from a business school into the online giant it would become; students within a year of graduating could finish at member schools of the New Hampshire College and University Council. But seventy-five full-time faculty lost their careers, and a fifty-two-year-old college — the alma mater of generations of New Hampshire teachers — simply switched off.
Trinity College of Vermont, in Burlington, founded in September 1925 by the Sisters of Mercy of Vermont as New England’s second Catholic women’s college, voted to close on July 7, 2000, after seventy-five years. The decision came from the college’s board of trustees together with the executive council of the Vermont Sisters of Mercy — the founders pulling the plug on their own creation — and it was driven by a combination as old as small private colleges: too few students paying tuition, and too much debt against the revenue that remained. The college’s last full year operated in 1999–2000; a skeleton teach-out ran into 2001 so that a handful of seniors could finish, which is why some accounts date the closure to 2001. The closures-by-year reckoning here uses the year of the decision and the final full operation: 2000.
For three-quarters of a century, Trinity did what the Sisters of Mercy had built it to do — educate women in a state where, in 1925, women’s higher education was scarce. Its curriculum began in the liberal arts — English, French, religion, mathematics, the classics, and practical business skills — and over the decades it added graduate programs and, in its last twenty years, adult and coeducational offerings in undergraduate and graduate study. Across its lifetime it educated roughly five thousand students. But the traditional women’s undergraduate college, its historic core, was shrinking against the tide that thinned single-sex Catholic colleges across the country, and Trinity could not refill the seats.
The numbers at the end were grim and specific. Over its final four years the college accumulated an operating deficit of about $2.7 million, and it carried long-term debt of roughly $5.6 million. It had set a goal of 120 new freshmen and transfer students and was struggling to reach half of that. Its continuing-education enrollment, once a reliable cushion, had collapsed from 673 students in 1990 to 304 by 2000. With about 225 returning undergraduates and 210 graduate students, and no realistic path to grow either, the trustees and the Sisters concluded that closing on their own terms was better than continuing toward insolvency.
What followed was, by the grim standards of college closures, comparatively humane — and it had an unusual second act. The University of Vermont, whose campus sits directly across Colchester Avenue, bought Trinity’s entire campus for $14.3 million, instantly giving the property a future. Trinity taught out its remaining seniors, arranged transfers with five other colleges, and seeded a successor nonprofit, Mercy Connections, to carry the Sisters’ mission forward. The college died; the work, in fragments, lived.