Westmar University, in Le Mars, Iowa — a Methodist-rooted liberal-arts college that dated itself from 1890 — announced on October 9, 1997 that, barring a last-minute merger, it would close on November 21. No merger came. Final classes met on the 21st, a last commencement was held on November 22, and by that evening an institution that had taught the farm towns of northwest Iowa for 107 years no longer existed. Several hundred students were left in the middle of an academic year to find new colleges, and Le Mars — a town of fewer than nine thousand people that had, in a final act of civic devotion, bought the college outright the year before — was left holding a 22-building campus with no one to teach in it.
The college that died in 1997 was the fourth name on one continuous institution. It began as a normal school for prairie schoolteachers — the college counted its founding from 1890, though Wikipedia and county historians trace a predecessor, the Northwestern Normal School and Business College, to 1887 — and became Western Union College when the United Evangelical Church took ownership in 1900. Renamed Westmar College in 1948 and merged with York College of Nebraska in 1954, it grew into the only college west of the Mississippi River affiliated with the Evangelical United Brethren Church, and in its mid-1960s golden age it enrolled more than a thousand students on a campus that doubled as the civic pride of its town.
The decline was demographic before it was desperate. By 1982 enrollment had fallen to 319, and debt accumulated through the decade. Then came the era’s strangest rescue: a March 1990 merger with Japan’s Teikyo University, which promised to send 500 Japanese students at $15,000 apiece and add $4 million for debt reduction. The United Methodist Church — successor to the founding denomination — severed its century-old ties within two months. The Japanese students arrived, but almost none were proficient in English, and the academic integration largely failed. The North Central Association put the school on probation in 1994; Teikyo sold out to a California investor in 1995; the investor gave way to the city of Le Mars itself in 1996, first with a $40,000 loan and then with an outright purchase. Each rescue was briefer than the last, and none produced the only thing that mattered: students.
What was lost does not register on national ledgers — a small church college that for a century carried a town’s identity, supplied its teachers, and filled its pews and ballfields. A community campaign to revive Westmar, chronicled by The Chronicle of Higher Education that December, came to nothing. The campus was sold and razed piecemeal over the following quarter century; the YMCA moved into the gymnasium, apartments into the cafeteria, and in 2025 the wreckers were still at work.
Highland Park Community College, a public two-year college in Highland Park, Michigan — the small city completely surrounded by Detroit — was founded in 1918 as Highland Park Junior College and closed in 1996, when the collapsing city and school district that owned it could no longer pay for it. The end was not one announcement but a slow strangulation: the college missed two consecutive annual audits, Governor John Engler began withholding its state aid, and in February 1995 he announced its funding would be stripped from the budget entirely. By December 1995 the college had run out of money and shut its doors mid-year, stranding students — some a single semester from graduation — and the state’s registrars recorded the formal closure in August 1996.
It was one of Michigan’s oldest junior colleges, born in the same building as the high school of the original company town of the automobile age. Highland Park was where Henry Ford’s Model T plant invented the moving assembly line and the five-dollar day; the city grew from 4,100 people in 1910 to 46,500 by 1920, and the junior college that opened in 1918 with 35 students was the boomtown’s promise to its workers’ children. It survived the Depression by referendum, swelled from 117 students to 1,800 on the GI Bill, and by the 1980s enrolled 2,000 to 3,000 students a year — by then a predominantly Black student body in a city 83 percent Black by the 1980 census and getting poorer as the industry that built it left.
The diagnosis is unusually clean: this was not a college that failed its market but a tax base that failed its college. Ford moved production out in 1927 and its headquarters out in 1930; Chrysler, founded in Highland Park in 1925, announced in September 1992 that it too was leaving, moving 7,000 jobs to suburban Auburn Hills. By 1989 the college carried a $1.4 million deficit, the “worst facilities of any community college in the state” per state investigators, and books too disordered to complete the audits its state aid depended on. When the state cut the cord, there was nothing underneath.
What was lost was the only college in one of the poorest cities in America — an open door that had stood 78 years for a state senator, a celebrated labor organizer, writers, artists, and thousands of nurses and technicians. No teach-out softened the landing; many stranded students simply never finished. The building that had housed the college since 1918 burned, piece by piece, into the next century.
Jordan College, a small private college headquartered in Cedar Springs, Michigan, opened its first building in 1967 and closed for good on June 30, 1995, when its last two campuses — Cedar Springs and Detroit — shut down after the federal aid that sustained the whole enterprise stopped arriving on time. The cause was a slow federal strangulation: default rates the U.S. Education Department put at 57 percent in 1990 and as high as 45 percent in 1992, funds withheld from 1993, a program review that found $93,080 improperly disbursed, and a default judgment, issued eighteen days before the end, ordering $91,767 repaid to a tribunal the college had stopped answering.
It was a strange, briefly visionary institution. Founded by DeWayne and Lexie Coxon out of the Wesleyan Bible Institute, a United Holiness Church affiliate, the college roofed its chapel with planks salvaged from local barns, severed its church ties in 1980, and recast its mission as serving needy students — expanding to eight sites across Michigan and enrolling low-income, largely minority students in the state’s biggest and poorest cities. Its Jordan Energy Institute granted some of America’s earliest renewable-energy degrees in the era Washington was pulling solar panels off the White House roof.
The same expansion made Jordan a creature of Title IV. Its students borrowed to attend; the college lived on their aid; and when half of them could not repay, the Education Department’s default-rate machinery classified Jordan with the worst actors in American higher education and cut off the oxygen. The college insisted the numbers were inflated and the diagnosis unjust — hard times, not fraud, ran a 1994 New York Times letter in its defense. The record, read precisely, splits the difference. No court ever convicted Jordan College of fraud. The federal program review found improper disbursements in the tens of thousands, not millions; the one criminal conviction in the college’s orbit — former trustee James Moored’s guilty plea to wire fraud — concerned his own falsified loan applications to private lenders, not the college’s aid office.
By the end the faculty were already gone — all 40 full-timers laid off in spring 1994 — and the remaining students scattered. The campus tells the epilogue: the Pine Street property now houses Creative Technologies Academy, a K-12 charter school the Coxons helped found in 1998 — funded by the state, with no loans involved.
Upsala College, in East Orange, New Jersey — founded in Brooklyn in 1893 by the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Augustana Synod — closed on May 31, 1995, the day its accreditation expired, and filed for bankruptcy the following month. The college that had averaged some 1,300 students for seven decades and crested near 2,000 in the 1950s ended with 435 students, $12.5 million in debt, and roughly 200 faculty and staff jobs extinguished. Its final commencement fell on Mother’s Day, May 14, 1995, and an East Orange councilwoman who attended described it as being “like a funeral.” The motto on the seal read Vincit Omnia Veritas — truth conquers all. The truth, in the end, was arithmetic.
It was a quintessentially American immigrant institution. Sixteen students gathered in the basement of the Swedish Evangelical Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Brooklyn on October 3, 1893; their president, Lars Herman Beck, was a Swedish immigrant with a Yale doctorate who had turned down a Yale teaching post to take the job. The college was named for Uppsala, seat of Swedish Lutheranism — the 1593 synod held there had fixed the faith exactly three centuries before the founding. Upsala moved to Kenilworth, New Jersey, in 1897 and then, in 1924, to a 45-acre campus assembled from three estates in what was then affluent, leafy East Orange. There it became a proper liberal-arts college: roughly 2,000 students at the postwar peak, 30 majors, 70 full-time faculty, a 150,000-volume library, and Vikings on the scoreboard.
Its fate was braided to its city’s. After the 1967 Newark riots accelerated East Orange’s economic decline, the college’s applicant pool, donor base, and surroundings deteriorated together; enrollment slid from about 1,600 in 1969 to 475 by 1990. Offered an exit — a donated 240-acre second campus in rural Wantage Township — Upsala debated leaving and chose, deliberately, to remain in East Orange as a Christian witness to its community, enrolling hundreds of Black students through the Timothy J. Still scholarship program and becoming the only Lutheran college in America with a majority of minority students. The mission was kept; the financing never followed it. Debt passed $12 million, an internal 1990 projection put insolvency at mid-1992, and a genuine turnaround — enrollment rebuilt to 882 by 1992 — arrived years too late to outrun the interest.
In June 1994 the college warned employees it could no longer guarantee their pay; the Middle States Association moved to withdraw accreditation, and enrollment collapsed by two-thirds; in March 1995 the trustees voted to close on May 31, when the accreditation lapsed. The wind-down was supervised by Upsala’s ninth and last president, a Price Waterhouse partner hired explicitly to dissolve the college. What remains today: a public high school on the East Campus, housing on the West — and, improbably, WFMU, the college radio station that bought its own license on the eve of the collapse and outlived its parent.
Morristown College, on a 52-acre hilltop in Morristown, Tennessee, was founded on July 2, 1881 by the Freedmen’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church to educate the children and grandchildren of enslaved people in Appalachian East Tennessee. It survived fire, debt, and Jim Crow for more than a century; it did not survive the 1990s. Absorbed in 1989 as the satellite campus of Knoxville College — a fellow historically Black institution that was itself failing — the Morristown campus was closed in 1994, so quietly that published histories disagree about the final date. The buildings its own students had raised from half a million handmade bricks then stood empty for two decades — stripped, vandalized, twice burned — until the city bought the hill and cleared it in 2017 for a public park with a replica of the college’s colonnade. Of the campus itself, nothing remains standing.
What was lost had few equals in its region. Before the civil rights movement, Morristown College was one of only two institutions of higher learning open to Black students in all of East Tennessee — the other was Knoxville College, its eventual rescuer and undertaker. Its first president, Judson S. Hill, a 27-year-old Methodist pastor from Trenton, New Jersey, arrived in October 1881 and stayed fifty years. Because the school and its students were poor, the students built the college themselves, firing bricks in campus kilns and milling lumber — some 500,000 bricks and 240,000 feet of timber by 1921. Enrollment peaked at 435 in the 1940s under Miller W. Boyd, the college’s first alumnus president; by one count more than 15,000 students passed through, among them nearly half the Black Methodist ministers of the East Tennessee conference.
The mechanism of death was the cruel paradox that stalked many small HBCUs after desegregation: the justice the college existed to advance dissolved the captive enrollment that segregation had imposed. Once Tennessee’s public campuses opened, an under-endowed private junior college could not compete with subsidized tuition. Enrollment fell to about 200 by 1963 and 112 by 1981–82; a reported 64 percent loan-default rate in 1979 endangered the federal aid it ran on; and in December 1986 the Southern Association revoked accreditation over its finances. Absorption by Knoxville College in 1989 bought five more years, but the parent was sinking too — $4 million in debt, 315 students, its own accreditation revoked in 1996 — and the satellite was the first economy. One history records the final 65 students being wound down in December 1995.
The closure took more than a school. For Black Morristown, the college on the hill had been employer, church partner, stage, and proof — three generations of evidence that the children of the enslaved could build, brick by literal brick, an institution of their own. Its slow public ruin, capped by the fires of 2008 and 2010, was a second loss. The colonnade replica in today’s Fulton-Hill Park marks where the originals stood; the originals are gone.
St. Mary of the Plains College, in Dodge City, Kansas — opened by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Wichita in September 1952 and a four-year institution by 1954 — closed at the end of the 1991–92 academic year: forty years old as a college, seventy-nine as a school, and western Kansas’s only Catholic college. It did not die of scandal or a predator’s contract. It died of arithmetic: a small, tuition-dependent liberal-arts college with no large endowment, drawing students from a quarter of Kansas that had been losing people for two decades, in an era of leaner federal aid and — by one accounting — roughly $10 million in defaulted-student-loan exposure. When the numbers stopped computing, the congregation that had built the campus twice accepted the verdict and shut the doors.
The 1952 date understates how much dying and rebuilding the place had already survived. Its genealogy runs from Soule College — a failed 1888 venture whose empty buildings Bishop John J. Hennessy of Wichita bought in 1912 for $8,500, recruiting the reluctant Sisters by telegram — through the academy they opened in 1913, to the evening of May 10, 1942, when a tornado leveled the campus hours after students formed a living rosary on the lawn. No one was killed; wartime restrictions forbade rebuilding; the Sisters spent a decade fundraising and built the school again on Dodge City’s north side. The college that opened in 1952 was four-year by 1954, accredited in 1963, and by the late 1960s enjoying the golden age the Sisters had been promised: four new dormitories, enrollment climbing from roughly 500 toward 800, Cavaliers in the Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference, singers touring Latin America, and more than 6,000 alumni — nurses, teachers, business graduates — staffing the towns of southwest Kansas.
Then the towns themselves began to thin. Rural depopulation in the 1970s and 1980s drained the college’s catchment; enrollment slid, deficits compounded, and no endowment existed to absorb them. The end, when it came in 1992, was quiet and almost orderly — student records entrusted to Kansas Wesleyan University, the campus leased and later sold to the city, and Newman University of Wichita opening a western Kansas center in Hennessy Hall that same year, so that the building the Sisters raised from a tornado’s wreckage has never quite stopped teaching.
Tarkio College, in Tarkio, Missouri — founded in 1883 by United Presbyterians in a farm town of fewer than two thousand people in the state’s far northwest corner — filed for bankruptcy protection in 1991 and closed in 1992, 109 years old and roughly $25 million in debt. What killed it was not the slow demographic leak that empties most rural colleges, though Tarkio had that too: it was a decision, taken around 1980, to treat enrollment as a manufacturing problem. Under a consultant-turned-vice-president named Dennis Spellman, the college built a network of off-campus programs that The New York Times would later describe flatly as illegitimate, and signed up thousands of unprepared students — “many of them whisked right off city streets.” Seventy-nine percent of those students defaulted on their federal loans. The government eventually demanded $16.8 million for the defaults and $5.2 million more for misused program funds, and a college that had survived a century on Presbyterian thrift discovered it had spent its second century in advance.
The institution buried under those numbers deserved a better obituary. Tarkio was the work of prairie Presbyterians and of David Rankin, the legendary Atchison County farmer whose money raised its buildings and whose 1892 octagonal mule barn became the Mule Barn Theatre — a playhouse remembered as a mecca for northwest Missouri theatergoers, its program drawing students from the East Coast. Its rolls touched scientific history twice: Wallace Hume Carothers, who went on to invent nylon, and Carl Djerassi, a father of the oral contraceptive, both passed through tiny Tarkio. Enrollment held around 250 through the Depression and peaked near 750 in the 1960s, when the college and the town operated as a single organism.
The unraveling was quicker and stranger. The teacher-education program lost its accreditation in 1979; post-Vietnam enrollment sagged; and the rescue Tarkio chose — enrollment financed by federal aid, recruited from people given little chance of earning a degree — was the era’s most corrosive. The boom inflated the books, the defaults detonated them, and the record that followed — audits, repayment demands, bankruptcy — was administrative and financial throughout; no published account records a criminal prosecution of the college’s officers. Precision matters here: Tarkio’s scandal was a civil and regulatory collapse, a college dying of clawbacks rather than convictions.
When it closed in 1992, the library went to a Bible college in Pennsylvania, the campus drifted through a creditors’ sale into a youth academy that itself closed in 2004, and the town of Tarkio spent a generation looking at empty buildings. The afterlife took twenty-seven years: alumni restored Rankin Hall, reacquired the campus in March 2019, and won state approval for Tarkio Technology Institute, which opened in January 2020 to teach welding, plumbing, and wind energy. It is a revival of the ground, not the college — the baccalaureate institution chartered in 1883 stayed dead. But in a town that small, a lit window on campus counts for something.