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.
McIntosh College was a career college in Dover, New Hampshire, founded in 1896 as the Dover Business College and shut down in 2009 after 113 years — closed not by the market or a regulator but by the deliberate decision of the for-profit corporation that owned it. It granted associate and bachelor’s degrees in vocational fields with local appeal: business management, criminal justice, culinary arts, graphic design, and massage therapy. It was an open-admissions school that served first-generation and working students across New Hampshire’s seacoast, and at its height it enrolled roughly 1,000 of them. When it gave its final classes in 2009, just 224 students remained.
The note attached to this case in the registry lists Kaplan Higher Education as the owner. Research does not bear that out, and the truth matters here: from 1999 until its closure, McIntosh was owned and operated not by Kaplan but by Career Education Corporation (CEC), the large publicly traded for-profit operator. The distinction is more than bookkeeping. McIntosh’s fate was set by CEC’s portfolio strategy — the school was one of nine money-losing campuses the company decided to shed — and CEC, not Kaplan, was the corporate parent that announced first a sale and then, when no buyer materialized, a closure.
That sequence is the whole arc. In November 2006, CEC announced it would sell several underperforming colleges, McIntosh among them; the nine targeted campuses had lost some 30 million dollars in just the first nine months of that year. When the sales did not come together — McIntosh’s own president later said he had brought the corporation three purchase offers and it chose to close anyway — CEC announced in February 2008 a “teach-out,” an orderly wind-down letting enrolled students finish their programs before the doors shut for good. Over the following year and a half, McIntosh taught out its remaining students and closed in 2009, a 113-year-old institution ended by a line item.
What makes McIntosh quieter than the era’s notorious collapses is precisely that it was orderly. There was no abrupt lockout, no bounced payroll, no fraud indictment — a teach-out let the last students graduate, and faculty got stay bonuses and severance. But the dignity of the exit does not change the verdict on the model: a school that had survived two world wars and the Depression as an independent institution lasted barely a decade inside a for-profit chain, closed because it no longer pencilled out. The campus on the Cochecho River was sold off and, in time, redeveloped into apartments and a mixed-use district that still carry the McIntosh name.
New College of California, a small progressive college in San Francisco’s Mission District founded in 1971, ceased operating in early 2008 after its regional accreditor moved to strip its accreditation and the U.S. Department of Education cut off its access to federal student aid. It was, for most of its life, exactly the institution it set out to be: an activist, humanities-centered alternative college with a law school dedicated to public-interest practice, programs in poetics and women’s spirituality, and a faculty that at various times included figures of the American left. It trained progressive lawyers and writers and organizers for nearly four decades. Then governance and money failed it, and the bodies that certify a college as a college withdrew their certification.
The decline was long and, by the end, fully documented. The Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) had warned New College repeatedly across decades — over curriculum, governance, and finances — and in the summer of 2007 launched an investigation that found serious, long-standing deficiencies across every area it reviewed and placed the college on probation. By late 2007 the college was losing tens of thousands of dollars a month, had stopped paying faculty, and let health benefits lapse. After discovering record-keeping and financial-aid improprieties, the Department of Education placed New College on heightened cash monitoring and then, in early 2008, revoked its eligibility for federal aid — the financial oxygen a tuition-dependent college cannot live without.
The end was not a clean closing date but a quiet asphyxiation. Spring classes that were supposed to begin in mid-January 2008 were postponed and then never really started; with federal aid frozen, there was no money to run a semester. WASC revoked the accreditation in February 2008, and the college simply stopped functioning. The most viable parts were transplanted: the law school’s students moved to John F. Kennedy University in April 2008, and the women’s spirituality master’s program migrated to a graduate institute in Palo Alto. What remained was debt, unpaid staff, and a building on Valencia Street that had been, for a generation, one of San Francisco’s training grounds for the activist left.
New College’s story is not the demographic enrollment cliff that would claim so many small colleges a decade later. It is an older, plainer failure: a mission-driven institution whose internal governance and financial controls decayed until the external authorities that vouch for a college could no longer do so. When accreditation goes, federal aid follows, and for a college that lives on tuition, that is the end.
Antioch College, the historic progressive liberal-arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, founded in 1850 and led at its start by Horace Mann, was closed in 2008 by the very institution it had spawned. Antioch University’s board of trustees declared the college in financial exigency on June 7, 2007, voted days later to suspend its operations, and shut the residential campus on June 30, 2008, after 158 years and with roughly 400 students enrolled. It is the rare case in this registry whose fate word is not “Closed” but “Revived”: three years later, in the autumn of 2011, an alumni-led corporation that had bought the campus, the endowment, and the name reopened Antioch College as an independent institution. It closed; it came back.
The cause was governance as much as money. Antioch College was the founding campus of a sprawling system — Antioch University, with adult-education centers across the country — and over decades the relationship inverted: the small, expensive, low-enrollment residential college in Yellow Springs came to be seen by the university’s leadership as a drain on a system that no longer depended on it. With a small endowment of about $36 million, declining enrollment, and a costly campus, the college had little leverage. When the university board declared exigency and moved to suspend operations, the faculty protested that they had been frozen out of the decision; the American Association of University Professors would later sanction the administration for infringing governance standards. The college did not so much fail as get cut loose.
What followed is what makes Antioch extraordinary. Its alumni, fiercely loyal to a college famous for cooperative education, the honor of its activist history, and the slogan Horace Mann gave it — “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity” — refused to let it disappear. They organized, raised money, and in 2009 negotiated an asset purchase agreement with the university: for $6.08 million the Antioch College Continuation Corporation acquired the physical campus, the Glen Helen nature preserve, and the college endowment, and won the right to operate Antioch College as a legally independent institution.
In the autumn of 2011 the reborn college reopened with just 35 students. To attract them it offered free tuition to its first classes, drew thousands of applications, rebuilt a four-year curriculum, and set out on the long road back to accreditation, which the Higher Learning Commission granted in 2016. The revived Antioch is tiny and perennially precarious — it has weathered furloughs and salary cuts since — but it exists, independent of the university that closed it, which is more than almost any closed American college can say.
Sheldon Jackson College, in Sitka, Alaska, the oldest institution of higher learning in the state, traced its lineage to an 1878 Presbyterian mission school for Alaska Native children and suspended operations in the summer of 2007 with several million dollars of debt and no cash to make payroll. On Friday, June 29, 2007, the administration told faculty and staff that their employment would end in thirty days; the roughly one hundred full-time students and two hundred part-timers learned in the same stroke that the only college in their town, on a campus their families had attended for four generations, was closing. The suspension was framed as temporary, a pause to “determine a financially viable future.” It was, in fact, the end.
The institution that closed had carried two histories uneasily in one body. The first was a nineteenth-century mission boarding school — the Sitka Industrial and Training School — founded to educate, and to assimilate, Tlingit and other Alaska Native youth, an enterprise that for decades required Native parents to indenture their children for years and that taught English and Protestant American culture at the deliberate expense of their own. The second was a small twentieth-century liberal-arts college, accredited as a junior college in 1966, that drew students into environmental studies, outdoor leadership, and education, ran a working salmon hatchery, and counted roughly a third of its enrollment as Alaska Native into its final years. The campus on Baranof Island was the same ground throughout: a place of both wound and belonging for the Native community it had first sought to remake and later sought to serve.
What killed the college was ordinary and slow. Enrollment never recovered the level it had reached in the 1970s, when state tuition grants briefly made Sheldon Jackson competitive with the public university; a court ruling that ended that subsidy and a long erosion of students left the college chronically short of operating revenue. By 2006 it was borrowing to survive — five short-term loans of $2.5 million, then a $4.7 million consolidation loan secured against subdivided waterfront land. Its insured value was about $35 million, but nearly all of it was locked in century-old buildings and ground, not cash, with an estimated $10 million in deferred maintenance waiting behind the walls. When the college asked the City and Borough of Sitka for a $1 million emergency loan that June, the assembly voted no. Three days later the school shut its doors.
The ending was abrupt, but the afterlife was unexpectedly kind. The campus sat boarded up for four years — full sheets of plywood over every window of Alaska’s oldest college — until, in 2011, the trustees deeded the core campus to Alaska Arts Southeast, the nonprofit behind the Sitka Fine Arts Camp, whose volunteers and campers restored the buildings and gave the National Historic Landmark a second life as a place of learning. The degree-granting college was gone; the ground, remarkably, was not.
Mary Holmes College, in West Point, Mississippi, founded in 1892 by the Presbyterian Church’s Board of Missions for Freedmen to educate Black women, lost its accreditation in December 2002, suspended classes in the fall of 2003, and was formally declared closed by the Presbyterian Church (USA) on March 3, 2005. A historically Black institution that had taught Black Mississippians for 110 years — first as a seminary, then a teacher-training school, finally an open-admission two-year college that took students no one else would — ended not with a single dramatic blow but with the slow, compounding failure that closes most small colleges: too little money, then probation, then the loss of accreditation, then the loss of the federal financial aid on which nearly every student depended.
The cause of death was the accreditation. In December 2000 the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools placed Mary Holmes on probation, citing severe financial weakness; two years later, in December 2002, it dropped the college from membership entirely. Without accreditation, Mary Holmes could no longer access Title IV federal student aid — the grants and loans that funded almost every one of its students, many of them low-income and first-generation. For an open-admission college whose mission was precisely to serve students of modest means, the loss of federal aid was not a setback but a fatal wound. By the time the college’s trustees voted on August 22, 2003 to suspend operations, the institution was carrying roughly $2.5 million in debt, including money owed to the U.S. Department of Education, a food-service contractor, and the IRS for unpaid payroll taxes.
What made the closure more than a balance-sheet event was the institution’s place in Black Mississippi. Mary Holmes had begun in 1892 as Mary Holmes Seminary for the daughters of freed people, survived two campus-destroying fires, become coeducational in 1932, turned to training the elementary-school teachers who would staff segregated Black schools, and in 1959 reinvented itself as an open-admission junior college — a second chance for students the rest of the system had passed over. Its closing removed one of the historically Black colleges from a state that has long depended on them, and it took with it a 184-acre campus, an alumni network, and a name that had stood in West Point for more than a century.
The afterlife was quiet. The Presbyterian Church (USA) reassumed control of the roughly 100-acre core property and the college’s records in early 2005, the institution worked through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filed in 2004, and in 2010 the church sold the campus and its two dozen buildings to Community Counseling Services, a regional mental-health and addiction provider. The classrooms now serve a different kind of need, but the college itself is gone.
Barat College, a Catholic women’s college founded by the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1858 and seated on a wooded campus in Lake Forest, Illinois, ceased to exist in June 2005, when DePaul University — which had absorbed it four years earlier — closed the campus and let the name lapse. For most of a century and a half it had been the small, devout, arts-minded college that the Religious of the Sacred Heart built to educate young women north of Chicago. It ended not with a padlocked gate in mid-semester but with a final commencement, the diplomas of its last class issued under DePaul’s seal, and a 100-year-old campus put up for sale. Barat did not merge into a partner that kept its name on the door, as Mills did with Northeastern; it was taken in, run at a loss for three years, and quietly dissolved.
The arithmetic that killed it was the familiar one — a tuition-dependent women’s college, lightly endowed, watching the single-sex market evaporate — but Barat’s particular ending was shaped by the institution that tried to save it. In February 2001 DePaul University, the large Vincentian university in Chicago, formed an educational alliance with the struggling college, making Barat College of DePaul University one of the university’s campuses on the bet that DePaul’s scale, name, and enrollment machine could fill Lake Forest’s classrooms. Demand never materialized. After pouring more than $22 million into the venture and absorbing significant operating losses on a campus whose maintenance costs were prohibitive, DePaul’s trustees voted in February 2004 to stop.
The closure took effect in June 2005, the earliest date the agreement between the two Roman Catholic institutions allowed, and the last class — roughly 150 graduates — crossed the stage that spring. Continuing students were folded into DePaul’s Lincoln Park and Loop campuses in Chicago; the tenured and tenure-track faculty were absorbed into the university, many teaching there for years afterward. By the brutal standards of the closure wave this was a humane unwinding: a teach-out, honored degrees, people not abandoned. What ended was the place and the name.
What Barat represents is the absorbed college in its purest form — taken into a larger one, supported for a while, then switched off when the numbers refuse to turn. The casual observer in Lake Forest saw the same buildings, the same chapel, the same wooded acres until 2005; what had quietly happened was that an independent 1858 college had become a line item on a Chicago university’s balance sheet, and line items get cut. The final grace note belongs to the campus itself, which after a developer’s failed condominium scheme and a bank foreclosure was gifted, in 2012, to the Sacred Heart secondary school next door — reuniting the land with the order that had bought it in the first place.
Mount Senario College, a small private liberal-arts college in Ladysmith, in the timbered hill country of northern Wisconsin, was established as a four-year institution in 1962 by the Servants of Mary and shut its doors on August 31, 2002, after forty years. It displaced roughly 230 full- and part-time students and put about seventy-five employees out of work in a town of barely 3,900 people, for many of whom the college had been a neighbor, an employer, and the closest thing to a university the county would ever have. Its accreditation, granted by the North Central Association in 1975 after a long candidacy, survived only into 2003, just long enough for its last credits to count somewhere.
What makes Mount Senario unusual among college failures is how avoidable it was. This was not a century-old institution slowly strangled by a demographic cliff it could not outrun. As recently as 1997 — five years before it died — Mount Senario had paid off the mortgage on its buildings and was effectively debt-free. It then spent itself into the ground in half a decade. Under president Norman L. Stewart, who took office in December 1995, the college poured money it did not have into athletics expansion and student services that never produced the enrollment they promised, while neglecting the dull, essential work of fundraising. By 1999 it was deferring more than half a million dollars in payroll taxes; by 2000 it had skipped pension contributions; by November 2000 it could not show the North Central Association a balanced budget, and the accreditor put it on probation.
The accreditor’s probation was the beginning of the end, because for a college accreditation is oxygen: it is the gateway to federal student aid and the guarantee that a degree means something. Stewart was placed on leave and then ousted in March 2001 amid allegations of financial mismanagement and secrecy. Enrollment, which had run around 800 in better years and stood at 425 in the fall of 2000, collapsed to roughly 235 by the spring of 2002 as students fled the visible decay — dropped sports, thinned services, a college plainly in trouble. In April 2002 the board voted to close at the end of the academic year. An indebtedness of about $2.85 million, trivial against a real endowment but fatal to a college that had none, was enough to fold it.
What was lost was not a famous name but a rural anchor. Mount Senario had reached into northwestern Wisconsin through some two dozen satellite sites, serving working adults and first-generation students for whom a four-year degree had been geographically and financially out of reach. When it closed, that access closed with it, and a small Rust Belt-of-the-Northwoods town lost an institution it could not easily replace. The campus changed hands and use several times in the years after; the college did not return.
Marycrest International University, on a bluff above the Mississippi River in Davenport, Iowa, founded in 1939 as a Catholic women’s college by the Congregation of the Humility of Mary, announced in December 2001 that it would close at the end of the spring 2002 semester, and shut its doors on June 30, 2002. By then the institution that had opened with 76 women and grown to 935 students at its 1961 peak was enrolling roughly 350 full-time and 300-some part-time students, too few to cover its operating costs, and had been placed on probation by its accreditor. President Pat DeLuca delivered the news in the campus gymnasium: the small college with six decades on the bluff was done.
The institution’s last act was also the story of its undoing. In 1990, facing the slow demographic and financial pressures that squeezed every small private college, Marycrest had affiliated with the Teikyo Yamanashi Education and Welfare Foundation of Japan — a sprawling educational conglomerate then buying up American campuses — and renamed itself Teikyo Marycrest University, then Marycrest International University in 1996 to signal a global mission. The Japanese partnership brought capital and a recruiting pipeline of international students. But when Japan’s economy slid into its long recession in the mid-1990s, the flow of students and support thinned, domestic enrollment kept falling, and the Teikyo network in the United States shrank from five colleges to two. Marycrest was the next to go.
What closed was a real college with a real mission. The Congregation of the Humility of Mary had built it to educate women in the liberal arts and the professions; it went coeducational in 1969, trained teachers and nurses and computer scientists, and was woven into the civic and Catholic life of the Quad Cities. Its closure was orderly rather than abrupt — a December announcement gave students and the 130 staff and 34 full-time faculty members roughly half a year’s notice, and the college helped place its students at nearby institutions — but it was a closure all the same, ending a 63-year-old institution in a region that still had other colleges to absorb its students and its grief.
The campus, a handsome Collegiate Gothic and mid-century ensemble on the bluff, survived. Placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, it was converted beginning in 2006 into the Marycrest Senior Campus, an affordable-housing community for older adults in the former residence halls. The academic records went to the University of Iowa. The buildings endure as housing; the university does not.
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.
Computer Learning Centers, Inc. was a publicly traded for-profit chain of computer-training schools headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia, founded in 1967 and shut down in January 2001. For most of its life it was a quiet, profitable trade school. Then, riding the late-1990s technology boom, it went public on NASDAQ in 1995 under the ticker CLCX, expanded with the speed the era rewarded, and grew to roughly two dozen campuses across eleven states and three more in Canada — about 12,000 students at its 1998 peak — selling the most marketable promise of the moment: a fast credential and a job in information technology.
The promise rested on federal money. By the late 1990s about three-quarters of the company’s revenue came from federal student loans and grants, which made enrollment volume the only number that mattered and made aggressive recruiting the company’s core skill. That skill, regulators concluded, had curdled into something illegal. Students filed complaints that the training was thin, the equipment dated, and the job placements the recruiters had promised never materialized. State attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission took notice. And the U.S. Department of Education, examining how the company recruited, found that Computer Learning Centers paid its admissions staff commissions tied to the number of students they signed up — a practice the Higher Education Act forbids precisely because it turns a school into a sales operation.
The end was administrative, not market-driven. In December 2000 the Education Department moved to strip the company of its eligibility for federal aid and demanded repayment of roughly 187.5 million dollars tied to the recruiting violations. For a business that lived on the daily flow of Title IV money, the loss of that eligibility was terminal. On January 22, 2001, Computer Learning Centers closed; days later it filed for bankruptcy. Students learned the news from signs taped to classroom doors, postings online, and recorded telephone messages.
It was one of the first big for-profit collapses of the modern era, and in miniature it contained nearly the whole script the 2010s would run at scale: the public stock fueled by aid revenue, the recruiters paid by the head, the inflated placement claims, the students left holding debt and a worthless credential, and the regulator’s hand on the federal tap as the only thing that finally stopped it. Corinthian, ITT Tech, and the rest were a decade away. Computer Learning Centers had already shown how the machine was built — and how it broke.
Bradford College, in the Bradford section of Haverhill, Massachusetts, traced its origins to 1803 — making it one of the oldest institutions of its kind in New England — and held its final commencement on May 20, 2000, after 197 years. On November 19, 1999, its board of trustees announced that the college would close at the end of that academic year, ending a lineage that began as Bradford Academy, became one of the most respected women’s junior colleges in the country, and finished its life as a small, struggling, coeducational four-year liberal-arts college of roughly 500 students. Some thirty-five full-time faculty and more than a hundred staff lost their jobs.
The college’s death was a story of arithmetic, not scandal. Bradford had spent the 1990s running annual operating shortfalls of more than a million dollars while discounting its tuition by up to half to fill seats, a combination that bleeds an institution from both ends. To break this cycle the trustees made a bet: in 1997 they took on a roughly $18 million debt, refinancing old obligations and building new dormitories on the theory that better residential facilities would draw the larger student body — a target near 750 — needed to stabilize the finances. The students did not come. In the autumn of 1999 the college fell short of even its modest enrollment goal, and with operating losses on the order of $11 million over two years stacked atop the dormitory debt, the board concluded there was no path forward.
To its credit, Bradford did not vanish overnight in the manner that would later make Mount Ida infamous. Having announced the closure six months out, the college spent its final year managing a genuine teach-out: it kept nearly all of its full-time faculty through the last semester, stood up a Transfer Advising Center, and hosted two college fairs that brought close to ninety institutions to campus to recruit its displaced students. The second-semester attrition was, to the administration’s surprise, only slightly above normal. Students who had rallied to save the school — even appearing on national television — ultimately scattered to other colleges with their credits and, in most cases, their graduations intact.
What ended was not a marginal trade school but a place with a real intellectual pedigree. Under principal Dorothy M. Bell, who led it from 1940 to 1967, Bradford Junior College had earned a national reputation as the most intellectual of the “Little Sisters,” the elite women’s junior colleges that orbited the Seven Sisters. Its alumnae included the novelist Esther Forbes, the missionary Ann Hasseltine Judson, and Portia Washington Pittman, daughter of Booker T. Washington and the institution’s first African-American graduate. When the college closed, its remaining $3.6 million endowment was transferred by court order to Hampshire College, a kindred experiment in self-directed, interdisciplinary learning; the 53-acre campus sat derelict for years before a benefactor bought it and gave it to a Bible college.
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.