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.
California College of the Arts, founded in Berkeley in 1907 and for most of its life the Bay Area’s defining school of art and design, announced on January 13, 2026 that it would cease to exist as an independent institution, ceasing operations at the end of the 2026–27 academic year and handing its San Francisco campus to Vanderbilt University. It is, by the measure that matters most, a closure: the 120-year-old college will graduate a final cohort in 2027, stop admitting degree-seeking students, and dissolve. What survives is the name, repurposed — Vanderbilt will open a West Coast campus on the site and brand a piece of it the “California College of the Arts Institute at Vanderbilt,” with CCA’s respected Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts folded in as a research and exhibition arm.
For most of the twentieth century CCA was a thriving, fee-charging professional art school with two campuses — its historic home in Oakland and a design-district outpost opened in San Francisco in 1996 — and a peak enrollment near 1,800 full-time students around 2019. Then the model broke. Enrollment fell by roughly a third after 2019; the college had bet heavily on consolidation, spending some $123 million to abandon Oakland and concentrate everything on an expanded San Francisco campus completed in 2024. The new campus arrived just as the students did not, and CCA found itself carrying an enlarged physical plant, a roughly $20 million operating deficit, and an endowment far too thin to absorb it.
The rescue attempts were real and, for a moment, dramatic. In early 2025 the college raised some $45 million in emergency gifts — including a $22.5 million match from Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang and a $20 million grant from the state of California — and still its own leadership conceded the money was “temporary and not sustainable.” Rather than padlock the gates mid-degree, the board chose the absorbed exit: sell the campus to a wealthy out-of-state university hunting a San Francisco foothold, preserve the name on a smaller scale, and shepherd current students to a finish line.
What CCA represents is the art school as acquisition target. Its 145 Hooper Street campus, purpose-built for the intersection of art, design, and technology, was worth more to Vanderbilt as a turnkey San Francisco beachhead than CCA could make it worth as a standalone art college. The deal keeps the lights on and the brass plate up, but the institution that for 120 years taught generations of Bay Area artists and designers will not survive its own real estate.
Hampshire College, the famously experimental liberal-arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts, founded in 1965, announced on April 14, 2026 that it will close at the end of the fall 2026 semester — and this time the announcement is final. Hampshire is the college that almost died once before and didn’t: in 2019 it declared it was seeking a merger partner and would not admit a full freshman class, then reversed course, stayed independent, and spent seven years trying to claw its way back. The reprieve held until the debt came due. Unable to refinance roughly $21 million in bonds against a tender deadline, and placed on “show cause” by its accreditor in March 2026, Hampshire ran out of the one thing it had been borrowing for six years: time.
Hampshire was conceived as a deliberate experiment in alternative education, founded alongside the four established institutions of the Pioneer Valley — Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst — that together form the Five College Consortium. It gave no grades, replacing them with written narrative evaluations; it organized study not into class years but into three Divisions of increasing independence; and it asked students to design their own concentrations and, in the end, to create original work rather than complete a checklist. For a stretch in the 1970s it was among the most sought-after colleges in the country, and at its height in the 2010s it enrolled more than 1,200 students. Its alumni include Ken Burns, Jon Krakauer, Lupita Nyong’o, and Liev Schreiber — a record of cultural output wildly out of proportion to its size.
The model that made Hampshire distinctive also made it fragile. It was small, tuition-dependent, lightly endowed, and expensive to run, with labor-intensive narrative evaluation in place of cheap standardized grading. When the 2019 crisis hit — declining enrollment, a thin endowment, a deteriorating market for small private colleges — president Miriam Nelson and the board moved to find a partner. A community revolt, the resignation of leadership, and the arrival of a new president, Edward Wingenbach, reversed that decision; Hampshire chose independence and launched a $60 million campaign. It raised tens of millions, rebuilt a curriculum, and admitted classes again. But enrollment never returned to pre-2019 levels, the budget never fully balanced, and the bond debt sat on the books like a fuse.
By fall 2025, enrollment had slipped to 747, down 11 percent year over year and roughly half its 2015 figure, and the September 2026 bond tender loomed with no refinancing in sight. The accreditor’s March 2026 show-cause order made the stakes explicit. In April the board concluded, in chair Jose Fuentes’s words, that “declining enrollment, the weight of long-standing debt, and stalled progress on land development left us no other responsible path.” Hampshire is now coordinating teach-out and transfer arrangements with its Five College neighbors. The experiment that twice defined alternative American higher education — once by existing, once by refusing to die — will end, this time, on schedule.
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.
Martin University, the only predominantly Black institution in Indiana, founded in Indianapolis in 1977 to serve adult and nontraditional learners that other colleges overlooked, paused operations on December 8, 2025, surrendered its accreditation on December 31, and was formally declared closed by its trustees at the turn of the new year. After 49 years it ended not with a scandal but with an empty bank account: an audit for the fiscal year ending June 2024 had shown essentially zero reserves, and by December the university could no longer make payroll. Roughly 200 students were enrolled when the doors shut, a tenth of the student body it had once carried.
The institution was the work of a vision rather than an endowment. Father Boniface Hardin, a Benedictine monk and civil-rights activist, and Sister Jane Edward Schilling founded it in 1977 as the Martin Center College — named for Saint Martin de Porres and Martin Luther King Jr. — specifically to reach Black, low-income, and adult students in Indianapolis who had been failed or skipped by conventional higher education. For decades it did exactly that, peaking near 1,000 students around 2010. But it was tuition-dependent and aid-dependent in the extreme, with no cushion to absorb a downturn, and the downturn was relentless: enrollment fell to 223 by fall 2023 and 198 by fall 2024.
The end was financial mechanics compounding on themselves. The university had operated under federal “heightened cash monitoring” since March 2023, borrowed from its own modest endowment to cover cash flow, absorbed the cost of a cyberattack, and relied on the timing of federal student-aid disbursements to make payroll. Auditors warned three years running. The state had been a lifeline — a $5 million biennial appropriation passed in 2023 — but newly elected Governor Mike Braun left Martin out of his 2025 budget, and the expected money evaporated. Without it, the arithmetic no longer worked.
What closed was not just a college but the institutional memory of a community’s effort to educate its own. Students discovered that financial-aid holds on their accounts could block them from enrolling elsewhere; refunds owed to them ran weeks and months late, and some never arrived. The Martindale-Brightwood campus on the city’s east side, where Martin had moved in 1987, was listed for sale at $3.5 million. Indiana lost the one accredited four-year institution founded to serve the students that everyone else’s enrollment models leave out.
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.
Lourdes University, in Sylvania, Ohio, founded in 1958 as Lourdes Junior College by the Sisters of St. Francis of Sylvania, announced on February 11, 2026 that it would close at the end of the 2025–2026 academic year. The institution that ended was a 68-year-old Catholic university built on land the Sisters had owned since 1917 — a teaching college that had grown to a university, then contracted, then arrived at a point its founding congregation named plainly: the Sisters could no longer subsidize it at the level its operations required. Some 964 students were enrolled at the close, and a WARN notice filed in March 2026 disclosed that 387 employees would lose their jobs when the doors shut.
What killed Lourdes was the slow withdrawal of the very thing that had kept it alive. A confessional college survives, in part, because a church wills it to and pays for the gap between what students can afford and what the institution costs to run. For years the Sisters of St. Francis filled that gap — $7.3 million in cash plus other assets in a single recent period — even as enrollment fell and deficits widened. The university posted a $2.8 million operating deficit in fiscal 2024 as net tuition revenue slid more than seven percent; it carried roughly $13.9 million in long-term debt against an endowment of about $9.4 million, most of it donor-restricted and unavailable to plug operating holes. When the subsidy that distinguished a church school from a market actor became unsustainable, the gap had nowhere left to hide.
The closure was orderly rather than abrupt, and the decline was long. Fall headcount had been near 2,500 around 2011; by 2024 it stood at 964, down more than thirteen percent in three years and almost two-thirds below its early-2010s peak. The Sisters replaced a departing lay president, William Bisset, with one of their own — Sister Nancy Linenkugel, the congregation’s minister — as the 13th and final president, and within a month signed a teach-out agreement with the University of Toledo that would carry students through spring 2027 and make UToledo the permanent custodian of Lourdes’s records.
What was lost in Sylvania was a Franciscan university and the living work of a congregation that had taught there since 1958 — a nursing and health-sciences college, a regional Catholic anchor, and a campus the Sisters had stewarded for more than a century before they had to decide what becomes of it next.
Providence Christian College, in Pasadena, California, which enrolled its first class of 22 students in 2005 (the college was incorporated in 2002) as a confessionally Reformed liberal-arts college, announced after a February 7, 2026 board vote that it would close at the end of the 2025–2026 academic year. The institution that ended was small by any measure — roughly 168 undergraduates in the fall of 2024 — and it died of a vulnerability small colleges share but rarely display so starkly: it had almost nothing in reserve. Its endowment, the financial cushion that lets an institution survive a bad year, stood at $25,322. When a single recurring revenue source disappeared, there was nothing underneath it.
That revenue source was a federal grant tied to a designation Providence had earned in 2023, when the U.S. Department of Education recognized it as a Hispanic-Serving Institution — a status it qualified for because nearly half its undergraduates were Hispanic or Latino. The HSI designation came with a $3 million grant to be paid over five years in $600,000 annual increments. In September 2025 the federal government, having concluded that minority-serving grant programs were unconstitutional, terminated the award effective immediately. For most colleges, $600,000 a year is a meaningful line item; for one running a roughly $941,558 operating deficit in fiscal 2024 against a $25,000 endowment, it was the difference between continuing and closing. The grant did not merely shrink Providence’s budget — it removed a recurring sum larger than the deficit the college was already failing to cover.
The closure was orderly and the warning signs were on the record. The college had operated without a president for four years before Dr. Steven B. Kortenhoeven’s arrival; in February 2025 the WASC Senior College and University Commission placed Providence on probation, citing the absence of a multi-year financial plan, the lack of a strategic enrollment plan, and insufficient quality-assurance processes. A year later, with the grant gone, the accreditor’s patience tested, and a sticker price near $36,963 chasing 168 students, the board concluded the obvious. Roughly half of those students were on track to graduate in May 2026; the college arranged teach-out partnerships with Biola University, Concordia University, and The Master’s University, and transfer partnerships with Dordt University, Calvin University, and Covenant College.
What closed in Pasadena was a young, earnest college that had reached just over two decades and was building a genuinely diverse student body — and that had bet its survival on a federal grant it could not control, with no reserve to fall back on when the money stopped.
East Georgia State College, founded in Swainsboro in 1973 as Emanuel County Junior College and for half a century the rural access college of southeastern Georgia, ceased to exist as an independent institution on January 1, 2026, when it was consolidated into Georgia Southern University by the University System of Georgia’s Board of Regents. The college was not in crisis, not insolvent, not stranding students; it was the smaller partner in a deliberate, top-down state restructuring that reduced the number of USG institutions from 26 to 25. Its campuses in Swainsboro, Statesboro, and Augusta continue to operate — now branded the “Georgia Southern University – East Georgia campuses” — but the standalone college, its separate accreditation, its own president and identity, are gone.
For fifty-three years East Georgia did the unglamorous, essential work of an open-access public college: it took students the selective institutions would not, the first-generation and the underprepared and the place-bound, and gave them an affordable on-ramp to a degree. Founded as a two-year junior college serving Emanuel County and its surrounding rural counties, it was renamed East Georgia College in 1988 and East Georgia State College in 2012, when it gained limited four-year status and began offering a handful of bachelor’s degrees. Enrollment ran in the low-to-mid 2,000s at its strongest, modest by university standards but meaningful in a region with few alternatives.
The end came not from the demographic cliff or a balance-sheet failure but from policy. The University System of Georgia has spent more than a decade consolidating institutions — pairing larger universities with smaller nearby colleges to cut administrative duplication and, the system argues, expand opportunity. In April 2025 Chancellor Sonny Perdue recommended folding East Georgia into Georgia Southern; the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges signed off; and on December 9, 2025 the Board of Regents gave final approval. On January 1, 2026 the consolidation took effect, with Georgia Southern’s name and President Kyle Marrero atop the combined institution.
What East Georgia represents is the merger as administrative tidying — the gentlest fate in this archive, with no stranded students and no padlocked doors, but a real ending nonetheless. The campuses stay open and the open-access mission is pledged to continue. Yet a fifty-three-year-old institution that belonged to its small town, that carried its own name and answered to its own leadership, has been dissolved into a larger university by a decision made in Atlanta. The buildings are the same; the institution is not.
Northland College, the environmental liberal-arts college on the south shore of Lake Superior in Ashland, Wisconsin, traceable to an academy founded in 1892, voted to close in February 2025 and held its final commencement on May 24 of that year, ending 133 years of teaching. It was, by its own account, the first American college to weave the environment through its entire liberal-arts curriculum — a small, place-rooted institution that turned its position in the northern forests into its identity. What ended it was not its mission but its balance sheet: years of borrowing from its own endowment to cover operating shortfalls had hollowed out the institution from the inside.
The wound was self-inflicted in the most literal sense. Between roughly 2015 and 2024, Northland drew about $22 million out of its endowment to paper over cash-flow problems, reducing a fund that had been worth more than $23 million to a remnant of about $3.3 million. An endowment is supposed to be the thing a college never touches — the corpus whose earnings cushion bad years. Northland spent the corpus itself, and once it was gone there was no cushion and no way to rebuild one. By the time leadership declared financial exigency, the institution was running on fumes.
The final act was a public appeal that fell well short. Facing a roughly $12 million shortfall, administrators told the community they needed to raise about $12 million in a matter of weeks to keep the college open. The donors came — more than 1,000 of them — but the money did not: only around $1.5 to $2 million arrived against a need six times larger. The Board of Trustees, chaired by Ted Bristol, concluded there was “no sustainable path forward,” and on February 19, 2025, announced the college would close at the end of the academic year. Roughly 200 full-time undergraduates were enrolled in that final year, a fraction of the college’s high-water mark of around 700.
What closed was a particular kind of irreplaceable. Northland was one of a tiny number of colleges built entirely around environmental study, anchored by the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation and a long association with the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute, in a region whose forests and freshwater were the curriculum. Ashland lost a 133-year-old institution and a significant employer; the field of environmental higher education lost a pioneer; and the endowment’s surviving fragments became the subject of a court proceeding over where the restricted money — including the Burke Center’s funds and a proposed grant to the Olson Institute — should go now that the college that held them no longer existed.
Limestone University in Gaffney, South Carolina — founded in 1845 as the first women’s college in the state and one of the earliest in the nation — held its final graduation on May 3, 2025, days after its Board of Trustees voted on April 29 to close at the end of the spring semester. After 180 years, the only four-year college in Cherokee County ended in a matter of weeks, undone by a $30 million debt and the failure of an eleventh-hour appeal to raise the roughly $6 million that might have bought it one more year. Some 1,600 to 1,700 students were enrolled, and roughly 300 employees lost their jobs.
The institution’s history was long and serially renamed. It opened as the Limestone Springs Female High School, became the Cooper-Limestone Institute, then Limestone College in 1898, went coeducational in 1970, and rebranded as Limestone University in 2020 in the now-familiar bid to project comprehensiveness. For most of its modern life it was a small, tuition-dependent college that had built much of its enrollment on athletics — by the end, roughly 700 of its 1,700 students were NCAA Division II student-athletes, many on scholarships the college could not actually afford.
The collapse was a cash-flow cliff dressed up as a fundraising drive. President Nathan Copeland described it plainly: “We ran out of runway.” Limestone carried about $30 million in debt and would not see meaningful tuition revenue until the fall, leaving it unable to cover the intervening months. Leadership floated converting to an online-only institution and selling the campus, then put the question to donors: raise about $6 million immediately or the university closes. Roughly 200 donors gave about $2.1 million — generous, and not close. On April 29 the board voted to close, and the money raised was returned to those who gave it.
What ended was a cornerstone of a small Upstate city. Limestone was Gaffney’s college, an estimated $150 million annual economic engine for the area and the only four-year institution in Cherokee County, set on a 125-acre campus dotted with historic buildings — the 1837 Curtis Building, older than the college itself, and the National Register-listed Winnie Davis Hall of History. Students scattered to teach-out arrangements at other South Carolina institutions; the athletic program vanished overnight; and the campus was put up for sale, with one firm floating a long-shot effort to raise private capital and restart the school. The town now grapples with what an empty 125-acre campus becomes when the institution that filled it is gone.
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.
Bacone College, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, founded in 1880 as Indian University to educate Native Americans and the oldest continuously operating institution of higher education in the state, was forced into liquidation in May 2025, when a federal judge converted its bankruptcy from a reorganization into a Chapter 7 sale and a trustee took the keys to a 145-year-old campus. By then the college had already stopped teaching. The end was not a single dramatic vote but the last turn of a long, grinding decline — a school that had served generations of Muscogee, Cherokee, Osage, Kiowa, and other tribal students reduced to an estate to be sold for the benefit of its creditors.
The institution that closed had two histories layered on top of each other. There was the mission school — founded by a Baptist missionary, Almon C. Bacone, on Cherokee and then Muscogee (Creek) Nation land, built across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries into a place where Native students could earn a degree without surrendering their identity, and where Native enrollment ran as high as three-quarters in the 1950s. And there was the small, struggling four-year college of the twenty-first century, perpetually short of money, cycling through four presidents in its final decade, that kept trying to convert its heritage into the federal funding that flows to tribal colleges — and kept failing to qualify.
The numbers tell the arc plainly. Modern enrollment peaked around 1,184 students in 2010; by the fall of 2023 the college counted roughly 106. It had nearly closed once already, in 2018, when it announced it needed $2 million simply to keep its doors open and sold off property to survive. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2024, suspended classes, lost its accreditation from the Higher Learning Commission the following month, and limped along as a legal shell until the trustee moved in. By the time the court ordered liquidation, the question was no longer whether Bacone would survive but who would absorb the loss — and what would become of the land a tribal nation had once given to educate its children.
What was lost was not an ordinary small college. It was one of the country’s oldest institutions founded expressly to serve Native Americans, a fixture of Muskogee for a century and a half, and a repository of Native art and culture — a rare place removed from a landscape where such places have always been scarce, amid allegations from the U.S. Trustee itself of gross mismanagement at the very end.
St. Andrews University, in Laurinburg, North Carolina, founded in 1958 as St. Andrews Presbyterian College and operating since 2011 as a branch campus of Florida’s Webber International University, closed on May 5, 2025 — eleven days after its students and faculty learned, in a Friday-morning meeting, that the end was already scheduled. The closure stranded roughly 800 students and ended a 67-year history. What made it bitter was the timing: St. Andrews was not shrinking. Its enrollment had risen from about 635 students in 2013 to roughly 832 by 2023, one of the few small colleges in the region growing rather than fading. It closed anyway, because the institution that owned it had run out of money.
The college that closed was, by the end, two things at once. It was St. Andrews — a Presbyterian liberal-arts college born from the 1958 merger of Flora Macdonald College and Presbyterian Junior College, known for an unusual barrier-free campus built for students with disabilities and for a pioneering therapeutic-horsemanship program. And it was a line item on the books of Webber International University, the small Florida institution that had absorbed it in 2011 after St. Andrews lost accreditation as a standalone college. The 2011 merger was widely called St. Andrews’s “saving grace”: it bought fourteen more years, but it also bound the college’s survival to a parent whose own finances were deteriorating.
The mechanics of the ending were as much about real estate as about enrollment. In 2011 St. Andrews had sold its 198-acre campus and leased it back, a move that converted a permanent asset into cash and a permanent obligation: by 2023 the lease cost roughly $780,705 a year. Webber, meanwhile, was carrying liabilities that exceeded its assets by more than $10 million as of mid-2023, against an endowment of well under $10 million. When the parent could no longer subsidize a branch that did not own its own land and could not cover its own rent, the calculation was cold and quick. In the weeks before the announcement, St. Andrews faculty received only about 85 percent of their pay; the president would later say the university was operating “with minus three cents in our pockets.”
The closure was abrupt in the way that compounds harm. The announcement came on April 25, 2025; the campus would cease operations on May 5; the 127th and final commencement, on May 4, conferred more than a hundred diplomas from an institution that would not exist the next morning. More than a dozen schools offered to take transfers, and teach-out arrangements were assembled in the compressed window, but students who had chosen a growing college found themselves, with days’ notice, choosing another. A college can do everything right on its own campus and still be closed by the institution above it.
Eastern Nazarene College, in the Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Massachusetts, founded in 1900 and affiliated with the Church of the Nazarene, closed at the end of the 2024–25 academic year after its board voted in June 2024 that it could no longer continue. It had stood on its Quincy hilltop for more than a century — one of the denomination’s founding institutions — and it ended at 125 years old, undone by the same demographic and financial arithmetic that has closed dozens of small religious colleges in New England: too few students, too much tuition discounting, and an operating deficit that grew faster than any rescue could close it.
The college that closed was a small Christian liberal-arts institution that had once been considerably larger. Enrollment peaked around 1,075 students in 2007 and then fell by roughly half over the following decade and a half; by 2022 headcount had dropped past 535, and by the autumn before the final year only about 78 students remained on campus. The finances deteriorated in step: the operating deficit widened from about $1.3 million in fiscal 2022 to roughly $4.9 million in fiscal 2023, as operating revenue fell nearly 19 percent in a single year to about $15.5 million. The board attributed the collapse to the “enrollment cliff” — the shrinking pool of college-bound graduates — and to its own practice of discounting tuition too deeply, especially for athletes and international students, to fill seats that no longer paid their way.
Unlike the abrupt shutdowns that strand students mid-semester, Eastern Nazarene managed something closer to an orderly exit. Having announced the closure roughly a year in advance, the college arranged teach-out agreements with three sister Nazarene and faith-based institutions — Gordon College, Mount Vernon Nazarene University, and Trevecca Nazarene University — with Mount Vernon Nazarene serving as the institution of record for student transcripts and records. The students who remained had real landing places; the closure, for all its sorrow, did not betray them the way a sudden one would have.
What lingered longest was the campus. A 2025 agreement to sell the 27-acre property to a developer, the Crain Company, for a residential redevelopment called “Eastern Nazarene Estates” collapsed by November 2025. The story resolved only the following spring, when the City of Quincy stepped in: in April 2026 Mayor Thomas Koch announced a deal for the city to buy the campus and 14 nearby properties for $21 million — well below the roughly $55 million assessed value — to control the future of a hilltop that had defined the neighborhood for a hundred years.
The King’s College, an interdenominational Christian liberal-arts college that spent its last quarter-century in Lower Manhattan, was founded in 1938 and dissolved by the New York State Board of Regents on November 4, 2025 — though for any practical purpose it had already ended in the fall of 2023, when it stopped teaching. Its trustees made the closure official on July 14, 2025, conceding that a two-year campaign to gift the college to “likeminded evangelical Christians” and resurrect it had failed. It was the second time the institution had run out of money and stopped operating. The first time, in 1994, a benefactor revived it. The second time, no one did.
The college was an unusual creature: a small evangelical school, never more than a few hundred students, that had improbably planted itself first in the Empire State Building and then one block south of Wall Street, betting that a conservative Christian liberal-arts education delivered in the financial and media capital of the country would attract ambitious students and the donors who admired them. For a stretch in the 2010s, under presidents who courted the conservative intelligentsia, the bet seemed plausible. Enrollment reached the mid-500s in 2017. But the school had no endowment to speak of, leaned heavily on a handful of major donors, and operated on tuition revenue that could not cover the rent on prime Manhattan real estate once those donors aged out and the students stopped coming.
The decline was steep and the warning signs were ignored. Enrollment fell from 555 in fall 2017 to 326 in fall 2022. A 2023 emergency appeal sought $2.6 million and raised $178,000. The college stopped admitting students in spring 2023, canceled its fall 2023 classes, and watched the Middle States Commission on Higher Education withdraw its accreditation effective August 31, 2023 — the regulatory equivalent of a death certificate for an institution that lives on federal financial aid. What followed was a two-year limbo in which the trustees insisted the closure was not permanent and searched for a partner to take the charter, the name, and the debts. None came.
The students, mercifully, had largely been spared the worst by the timing: the college simply stopped enrolling before stranding a new cohort, and those mid-degree in 2023 scattered to other schools. What was lost was an institution and an idea — the notion that a tiny, undercapitalized evangelical college could survive on faith and Manhattan rent — and the careers of the faculty and staff who had built it.
The New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts — the for-profit acting school in Manhattan that the industry knew as NYCDA — was founded in 1980, grew up alongside the city’s audition economy for forty-five years, and announced on June 3, 2025 that it would stop offering performing-arts training as of August 31, 2025. It was a quiet ending for a school that had trained thousands of working actors. There was no fraud finding, no accreditor’s gavel, no attorney-general inquiry. There was only an enrollment forecast that no longer added up.
NYCDA was the late name for an institution that began as a single class. Joan See, a commercial actress trained in the Meisner technique under Sanford Meisner, started teaching under the banner “Actors in Advertising,” which grew into the School for Film and Television and finally into a nationally accredited conservatory. By the end it occupied space at 39 West 19th Street in the Flatiron district and offered two-year Associate in Occupational Studies degrees in four tracks — film and television performance, musical-theatre performance, theatre performance, and media production for the actor — plus certificate and summer programs, all built on the Meisner method. It admitted roughly 200 students a year and enrolled close to 300 at its final peak. Its alumni list reached as far as Miles Teller and Jacob Batalon.
What killed it was arithmetic rather than scandal. NYCDA was a proprietary school — incorporated in New York since 1981 as the Three of Us Corporation — and a small one, dependent on a steady inflow of tuition-paying students to cover the rent and payroll of a Manhattan conservatory. Enrollment slid in the years after the pandemic; the trustees said the closure followed “a thorough evaluation of our enrollment and financial forecasts” in a landscape that had “meaningfully changed.” For a school with no endowment and no parent system to absorb a few thin years, the forecast was the verdict.
Because NYCDA closed deliberately rather than imploding, the students fared better than the for-profit norm. The school ran a genuine teach-out: classes and services continued uninterrupted through August 2025, and it arranged transfer pathways, naming Five Towns College and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts as partners so its remaining students could finish. It was the orderly version of an ending the Borrower Defense family more often documents in its abrupt and ruinous form.
Paier College was a for-profit art school in Connecticut, founded in 1946 as the Paier School of Applied Arts and closed for good in April 2025 when it lost its accreditation and withdrew its authorization to operate. It died in the order these things usually die: first the students drained away, then the state looked closely and recoiled, then the accreditor pulled the credential that let federal aid flow, and finally the president sent a letter ending the appeal. By the time it was over, a school that had once enrolled around 300 students was teaching roughly thirty in buildings the state described as moldy and underheated.
The school had a respectable lineage. Edward T. and Adele K. Paier founded the Paier School of Applied Arts in 1946; it became a degree-granting college in 1982 and spent decades in Hamden, Connecticut, training students in fine art, illustration, graphic and interior design. In 2021 it left Hamden and moved into four buildings on the campus of the struggling University of Bridgeport — a relocation that placed a small, fragile art college inside the orbit of another institution’s distress, and that, in hindsight, marked the beginning of the end rather than a fresh start.
The proximate cause of death was the loss of accreditation from the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges (ACCSC), which issued a warning in 2024 and finalized Paier’s withdrawal in April 2025. But accreditation was the last domino. In fall 2024 the Connecticut Office of Higher Education denied the college authorization to operate after a review that read like a condemnation notice: water leaks and visible mold, a failing boiler that left classrooms unheated, unsanitary dormitories, too few faculty, and unpaid bills — including a $9,000 security invoice — against an operating deficit. A school cannot run on those conditions, and the state said so.
What gives Paier its small dignity, and spares it the harshest judgment, is that the failure looks like institutional collapse rather than designed fraud. There is no evidence here of a chain inflating placement numbers or running a predatory loan book. There is, instead, a tiny art college that ran out of students and money, let its buildings decay, and could not meet the standards a state and an accreditor exist to enforce. The students — about thirty of them at the end — were the ones left holding the loss when the doors did not reopen.
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.
Cornish College of the Arts, founded in Seattle in 1914 by the music teacher Nellie Cornish and for more than a century the Pacific Northwest’s signature independent arts conservatory, ceased to exist as an independent, degree-granting institution on May 31, 2025, when it contributed substantially all of its assets to Seattle University and dissolved as a nonprofit. The institution survives in name — Seattle University now operates “Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University” as its arts school, on Cornish’s own campus — but the freestanding college, its separate accreditation, and its independence are gone. The fate was not a closure that stranded its students; it was an absorption negotiated, by the college’s own account, while there was still something left to give.
For most of its life Cornish was a small, fierce, nationally regarded arts school — music, dance, theater, visual art, design — out of all proportion to its size in cultural influence, an early American home to modernist and avant-garde performance. It never grew large; enrollment peaked around 810 students in 2003 and drifted downward thereafter, falling to roughly 500 by the mid-2020s — a decline of nearly 40 percent from its high. A small, specialized, expensive-to-operate art college with thin reserves and looming debt is one of the most fragile species in American higher education, and Cornish had been treading water, in the phrase its own founder used when she resigned in 1939, for much of its modern history.
The end was handled with unusual deliberation. After signing a letter of intent in December 2024, Cornish and Seattle University announced a definitive agreement in March 2025: an “asset contribution” under which Cornish would transfer substantially all of its assets — campus, real estate, name, intellectual property — to Seattle University, which would assume certain liabilities and operate Cornish as its arts school. The transaction closed on May 31, 2025, and Seattle U launched the merged school for fall 2025. Of Cornish’s 127 employees, 92 were rehired and 33 of 40 full-time faculty accepted positions; roughly 91 percent of continuing students chose to stay.
What Cornish represents is the merger as the dignified exit for a beloved, undersized arts school — better than the abrupt closures that befell peer art colleges, and a genuine reprieve for the campus and the programs. But it is still an ending. The independent institution that nurtured generations of Northwest artists, that traced its line to a one-room studio Nellie Cornish leased in 1914, no longer exists. Its name endures as a college-within-a-university, and its students earn Seattle University degrees.
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.
Birmingham-Southern College, a selective liberal-arts college perched on a hilltop on the western edge of Birmingham, Alabama, traced its lineage to 1856 and ceased operations on May 31, 2024. It was not a marginal institution drifting toward irrelevance. BSC was a nationally ranked college with a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, a Methodist heritage that had long since softened into a broadly secular liberal-arts identity, and a reputation as one of the better small colleges in the South. What killed it was not obscurity but arithmetic — an endowment spent down over more than a decade until there was nothing left to spend, and a last-ditch rescue that the state of Alabama, having designed it, declined to fund.
The mechanism was a slow bleed dressed as a strategy. The college operated at a deficit in eight of its final ten fiscal years and covered the gap by drawing on its endowment, which fell from a peak above $110 million to roughly $51 million by fiscal 2022. An endowment is supposed to be the cushion a tuition-dependent college lands on in a bad year; BSC instead treated it as an operating account, and enrollment, which had topped 1,500 in 2010, slid to 731 by the fall of 2023. By then the college needed not a cushion but a rescue: it estimated it would have to raise some $200 million to restore long-term viability.
The rescue very nearly came from the state. In 2023, Alabama created a $30 million bridge-loan program for distressed private colleges — legislation tailored, everyone understood, to keep BSC alive. But the program routed approval through the state treasurer, Young Boozer III, who in October 2023 denied the application, ruling that the college had failed the statutory collateral requirement and was, in his words, a “terrible credit risk.” BSC insisted it had met the qualifications and offered the state a first-security position; it called the denial a betrayal of good faith. A 2024 bill to amend the program and route around Boozer’s veto failed in the Alabama House.
When the bill died, so did the college. The board voted to close, folding a campus that claimed a $90 million annual economic impact on Alabama. Nearly all of roughly 150 faculty and the rest of the staff lost their jobs; the students were left to transfer, their BSC scholarships not guaranteed to follow them. A 168-year-old college had been engineered a lifeline by its own legislature, and then watched that legislature decline to extend it.
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.
The University of the Arts, a private arts university in central Philadelphia whose roots reached back to schools founded in the 1870s and which took its university name in 1987, told its community on the evening of Friday, May 31, 2024 that it would close the following Friday, June 7 — about a week later. There was no teach-out year, no semester to wind down, no warning the public could see. Roughly 1,100 students, and close to 700 faculty and staff, learned in a single announcement that the institution awarding their degrees and signing their paychecks would not exist in eight days. The suddenness, more than the closure itself, is what made UArts the East Coast’s Mount Ida — proof that a 148-year-old institution can vanish in a week.
The collapse was financial, and it had been building for years. UArts was deeply tuition-dependent in a shrinking market for arts education; enrollment had fallen from roughly 2,000 in 2013 to 1,149 by the fall of 2023. A successful 2018–2022 capital campaign had raised more than $67 million and grown the endowment past $60 million, but those funds were largely restricted and could not pay operating bills, and the university entered most years with about a single month of cash on hand. By the spring of 2024, leadership later said, it would have taken roughly $40 million to keep the doors open, and the money was not there.
What turned a financial crisis into a scandal was the accreditation. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education said it learned of the university’s intent to close only on May 29 — days before the public announcement — and on June 1 it withdrew the university’s accreditation, faulting UArts for failing to inform the commission in time or to plan an orderly closure with a teach-out for students. An accredited university effectively ceased to be one overnight. President Kerry Walk resigned on June 4; the board hired a turnaround firm to manage the shutdown; and in September 2024 the university filed for Chapter 7 liquidation.
What was lost was a pillar of Philadelphia’s cultural life and a rare thing in American higher education: a standalone, comprehensive arts university, with schools of art, design, film, dance, music, and theater clustered along the Avenue of the Arts. Students scattered to teach-out partners, faculty and staff sued over the lack of notice, the Pennsylvania Attorney General opened an inquiry, and the campus — nine buildings in the heart of the city — was sold off piece by piece in bankruptcy.
Union Institute & University, a private non-profit university built for adult and distance learners and headquartered in the Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio, began in 1964 as a bold consortium experiment and closed permanently on June 30, 2024, sixty years later, leaving behind unpaid faculty, stranded doctoral candidates, and a Chapter 7 estate listing more than $28 million in liabilities against assets of $191,335. It did not fail quietly. For more than a year before the end, its own employees worked without paychecks, students could not pry loose the transcripts they had paid for, and the institution that had pioneered learning-on-your-own-terms could no longer keep its own lights on.
Union was, in its founding spirit, one of the more idealistic institutions in American higher education. It grew out of a 1964 gathering of liberal-arts college presidents — Antioch, Bard, Goddard among them — convened to reinvent how adults could earn degrees, and it became a national network of “University Without Walls” programs and a low-residency graduate school known for interdisciplinary doctorates and a social-justice bent. At its height around 2012 it enrolled roughly 1,666 students across the country, many of them working professionals, criminal-justice and emergency-services practitioners, and mid-career adults for whom a conventional campus was never an option.
The decline was steep and then sudden. Enrollment fell to 787 by the fall of 2022, a drop of more than half in a decade. The U.S. Department of Education found the university had drawn down more federal financial aid than it was entitled to, fined it $4.3 million, placed it under Heightened Cash Monitoring, and ultimately cut off Title IV aid. By 2023 salaries were arriving late or not at all; in November the fall semester was cancelled, and the university was evicted from its Florence Avenue headquarters. It surrendered its accreditation with the Higher Learning Commission effective June 25, 2024, and shut down five days later.
What lingered was the wreckage. In March 2025 the university filed for Chapter 7 liquidation, disclosing 235 individuals owed back wages, 534 former students listed as unsecured creditors, $3.5 million still owed to the Education Department, and millions more in accelerated rent. For a university that had spent six decades insisting that adult learners deserved to be taken seriously, the cruelest detail was the smallest: students who had finished their work could not get the transcripts to prove it, because the records were held hostage to tuition the university said it was still owed.
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.
Eastern Gateway Community College, a public two-year college based in Steubenville, Ohio, with a campus in Youngstown, opened in 1968 and dissolved on October 31, 2024 — destroyed not by the enrollment cliff that claims most small colleges but by an enrollment boom that turned out to be illegal. In the late 2010s the college partnered with a for-profit company, the Student Resource Center, to run a “Free College Benefit” for the members of labor unions, principally AFSCME. The program swelled Eastern Gateway from a modest regional community college into one of the largest enrollments in Ohio — nearly 46,606 students at its 2021 peak, almost all of them out-of-state union members — and it did so by means the U.S. Department of Education ultimately found violated federal law.
The mechanism was the kind of thing that looks clever until a regulator draws the diagram. Eastern Gateway charged Pell-eligible students the full amount of their Pell Grants, then waived the bills of students who did not qualify for federal aid, booking those waivers as “external scholarships.” In effect, the surplus from federal grant dollars was used to subsidize the free education of other students — a cross-subsidy the Department concluded was impermissible. In July 2022 it ordered the program shut down. The college won a year’s reprieve in court, but the reprieve only delayed the reckoning.
When the free-college spigot finally closed, so did the college. Enrollment cratered from roughly 15,000 in fall 2023 to 9,000 by spring 2024. The Department placed Eastern Gateway under heightened cash monitoring, slowing the federal funds it needed to operate; in January 2024 state auditors and law enforcement executed a search warrant over financial irregularities. On February 29, 2024, the college paused enrollment and partnered with Youngstown State University to move students out. On May 16, 2024, the board voted to dissolve the institution effective October 31, 2024. A later Ohio Auditor of State review questioned $17.3 million in costs — essentially all the federal student aid disbursed in 2023 — and logged 44 findings.
What was lost was a genuine public good wrapped around a scheme that was not. Eastern Gateway had spent decades as the affordable, local route into a credential for the working people of the Ohio Valley and the Mahoning Valley — exactly the mission a community college exists to serve. The Free College Benefit hijacked that mission, inflated the institution far beyond its real footprint, and left a 56-year-old public college dead and two struggling Rust Belt regions without their community college. Youngstown State absorbed the students it could and took over the campus real estate; the institution itself simply ceased to exist.
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.
The University of Saint Katherine, a small Eastern Orthodox college in San Marcos, California, was founded in 2010 and incorporated that June, began teaching as Saint Katherine College in 2011, and abruptly ceased to exist on April 25, 2024 — announced by an email that landed in students’ inboxes around four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, two weeks before finals and three weeks before its planned commencement. It had survived barely fourteen years. The notice said the university could no longer meet its financial obligations because of a steep shortfall in operating cash, canceled finals and all further instruction and athletics effective immediately, and told several hundred students and dozens of employees that the institution issuing their degrees and paying their salaries had simply run out of money.
USK was an unusual hybrid: an Orthodox Christian liberal-arts college that was, in practice, an athletics program with a curriculum attached. It described itself as the only accredited Orthodox Christian institution of higher learning in North America, taught liberal arts and sciences across more than twenty fields, and won regional accreditation from WSCUC in 2016, the same year it upgraded its name from college to university. But roughly 85 to 95 percent of its small student body — 232 students in the fall of 2022 — were varsity athletes on NAIA teams that competed as the Firebirds in the California Pacific Conference. The university recruited nationally for sports, discounted tuition by more than 40 percent to fill rosters, and built a budget that depended on those discounted bodies showing up.
The closure was abrupt in the most literal sense. The president had sent a celebratory message the previous month, congratulating teams on their national-tournament appearances and noting rising enrollment; weeks later he sent the email that ended the school. The women’s beach volleyball team learned, while it was actually competing at a national championship in Tennessee, that it had no university to return to. Athletes found out mid-workout, or at a grandmother’s birthday party, that their college careers and in many cases their scholarships had evaporated. The university filed for bankruptcy, vacated its leased campus, and told students that those with enough credits could still graduate on May 18 while everyone else would have to transfer what credits they could.
Cabrini University, a small Catholic institution in Radnor, Pennsylvania, founded in 1957 by the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, conferred its final degrees in May 2024 and ceased operations at the end of that academic year. It did not collapse mid-semester or lock its gates without warning. Instead, in June 2023 — nearly a full year out — it announced that it would close after the 2023–24 year and that its 112-acre campus would pass to its far larger neighbor, Villanova University, two miles up the road. Villanova formally assumed ownership on June 28, 2024. The result is the gentlest verdict in this archive’s vocabulary and one of its saddest: a 67-year-old university, named for the first American saint, dissolved into the property of another.
The arithmetic was unambiguous well before the announcement. Cabrini had run operating deficits for nine consecutive years, from 2013 through 2022; the gap had widened to more than $10 million on a budget of roughly $45 million, and the university carried close to $49 million in debt by mid-2022, prompting a Standard & Poor’s downgrade that autumn. Enrollment, which had peaked around 2,360 students in 2016–17, had slid roughly a third by the time the board acted — a familiar fate for a tuition-dependent college with little endowment cushion, selling a four-year residential education in a saturated Philadelphia-area market against wealthier competitors, in the long demographic shadow of the pandemic.
The deal was less a rescue than a dignified wind-down with a buyer attached. Villanova agreed to retire roughly $45 million of Cabrini’s debt and to spend an estimated $25 million more on improvements, taking the campus for its own expansion. Cabrini’s students were not the asset; the real estate was. The university arranged transfer partnerships with Holy Family, Gwynedd Mercy, and Eastern Universities so that students could finish their degrees elsewhere, and Villanova pledged to consider Cabrini employees for its own openings — soft cushions, but not continuity.
What Cabrini represents is the acquisition as exit: an institution that saw the end coming, negotiated from what little strength it had left, and protected its students and its mission’s memory at the price of its own existence. The campus survives, rechristened the Villanova University Cabrini Campus; the Missionary Sisters extracted a promise to honor Mother Cabrini’s legacy; the final Mass was said by Villanova’s president, not Cabrini’s. The buildings are full of plans. The university that built them over 67 years is gone.
Marymount Manhattan College, a small liberal-arts college on the Upper East Side of New York City, founded in 1936, agreed in May 2024 to merge into Northeastern University, ending its independence and beginning its conversion into Northeastern University – New York City, the fourteenth campus in Northeastern’s global system. Founded by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary as a women’s college and long since independent and non-sectarian in practice, MMC had built a national reputation in theatre, dance, and the performing arts — a college that trained working actors a short walk from Broadway. The 2024 agreement, ratified by both boards, marked the institution’s decisive end as an autonomous college; the regulatory machinery to finalize it would run on into 2025 and 2026.
The forces behind the decision were the familiar ones, worn smooth by repetition across this archive. MMC was tuition-dependent and small, and its enrollment had eroded: from roughly 2,000 students before the pandemic — its high-water mark, reached around 2017 with students from 48 states and 36 countries — to about 1,400 by the time of the merger announcement. The college framed the move as a choice made from a position of strength rather than crisis, noting it had posted positive revenue in nine of its ten most recent fiscal years and had spent two years studying its strategic options before acting. But the trajectory was unmistakable, and the conclusion its leaders reached was that its mission would be better sustained inside a large, well-capitalized university than alone.
For Northeastern, the appeal was equally clear and somewhat colder: a Manhattan foothold and a campus of real value. The deal added the East 71st Street property — land and buildings later valued at roughly $215 million — to Northeastern’s balance sheet, and reporting in 2026 described an overall gain to Northeastern of more than $200 million from the transaction. Northeastern pledged to preserve and expand MMC’s signature creative and performing-arts programs, which it said had been constrained by MMC’s limited investment capacity, and began sending its own students to the campus in fall 2025 ahead of the closing.
What MMC represents is the merger as a planned, unforced exit — the rarer, more deliberate cousin of the desperation deal. No class was stranded; the campus stays open; the performing-arts programs that defined the college may well grow. But the independent college that had stood on the Upper East Side for nearly nine decades will not exist as itself; it becomes a New York City campus of a Boston-based university. The name on East 71st Street will change. The grief, as with all the absorbed, is the quiet kind.
Cambridge College, a Boston-based, non-profit college built expressly for working adults, was founded in 1971 and ceased to exist as an independent institution on July 1, 2024, when it was acquired by Bay Path University of Longmeadow, Massachusetts. It was never a traditional college and never pretended to be one: it had no dormitories, no eighteen-year-old freshman class, no football team. It was an idea — that adults shut out of higher education by money, geography, or a first-language other than English deserved a way in — wrapped in an accredited charter. For more than half a century it served that idea, and at its height it reached tens of thousands of teachers, nurses, managers, and first-generation students who would otherwise never have held a degree.
The college grew out of the Institute of Open Education, an experimental graduate program that enrolled nearly a hundred students in July 1971 and that two educators, Eileen Moran Brown and Joan Goldsmith, had dreamed up to serve adults from every background. By 1979 it had become an independent, accredited institution, and through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s it expanded relentlessly — opening regional centers across the country and in Puerto Rico, building accelerated evening and weekend programs, and pushing enrollment, by some accounts, past thirteen thousand. It was, for a generation, one of the largest adult-serving colleges in New England.
What undid it was the same arithmetic that has hollowed out small private colleges everywhere, sharpened by Cambridge College’s particular dependence on a churning, tuition-paying adult population. As that market softened and online giants captured the working-adult learner the college had pioneered serving, enrollment slid from its peak toward roughly three thousand, and a tuition-dependent institution with a modest endowment had no cushion to wait out the decline. Rather than drift toward insolvency, its board found a partner with a near-identical mission. Bay Path University, which served the same working adults and first-generation learners, agreed in February 2024 to acquire it; the deal closed that July.
Cambridge College represents the quieter, more managed end of the closure era — the institution that read its own decline early enough to sell from strength rather than collapse from weakness. No class was stranded, no campus padlocked overnight. The Cambridge College name still operates under Bay Path, and its Charlestown campus stays open. But the independent institution that incorporated in the 1970s, that built a national network around a radical premise, is gone — its governance dissolved, its charter absorbed, its future now decided in Longmeadow rather than Boston.
St. Augustine College, the first bilingual institution of higher education in Illinois and in the Midwest, was founded in Chicago in 1980 and ceased to exist as an independent college when it merged into Lewis University, with the combination becoming operational under the Lewis name in spring 2024. For forty-four years it was something unusual and precious: a fully accredited college that let Spanish-speaking adults begin their studies in their first language and finish in English, built specifically for the immigrant and Latino communities of Chicago’s North Side. It did not vanish in the merger so much as fold its identity into a larger institution that pledged to carry the mission forward — but the independent, Hispanic-serving college that Father Carlos A. Plazas built no longer exists.
The college grew from more than a decade of community work by Spanish Episcopal Services, an agency created under the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, and from the conviction of its founder, Father Carlos A. Plazas, that language should not be a wall between Latino Chicagoans and a degree. The Illinois Board of Higher Education granted it operating authority on October 7, 1980. From its base in the Uptown neighborhood it served a non-traditional, largely first-generation, heavily Hispanic student body, offering associate and bachelor’s degrees in a bilingual format found almost nowhere else in American higher education. At its height around 2010 it enrolled on the order of 1,700 students.
Then came the long decline that has squeezed nearly every small, tuition-dependent college in the country, felt acutely by an institution serving low-income students with little financial cushion behind it. Enrollment fell from roughly 1,700 in the early 2010s toward the neighborhood of 1,000 by the early 2020s. Lightly endowed and dependent on the very students least able to absorb a tuition increase, St. Augustine faced the familiar choice between a slow erosion and a managed exit. In April 2023 its board, together with Lewis University — a larger Catholic-heritage institution in suburban Romeoville — announced a merger, framed explicitly as a way to preserve and expand bilingual, Hispanic-serving education rather than let it disappear.
St. Augustine’s ending belongs to the gentler category of the closure era, and to a particularly careful kind of grief. The Uptown campus stayed open and still operates today as St. Augustine College at Lewis University, its bilingual programs intact and even recognized nationally for social mobility. But a minority-serving institution born of the Episcopal Church’s mission to Chicago’s Latino community lost its independence, its own accreditation, and its self-governance. What an immigrant community had built for itself now exists as a campus and a brand inside another university’s charter — preserved in form, dissolved in substance, and worth remembering for exactly what it was.
Salus University, a specialized health-sciences institution in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, traced its origins to 1919 and ceased to exist as an independent university in 2024, when it merged into Drexel University of Philadelphia. Its founding college, the Pennsylvania College of Optometry, was one of the oldest optometry schools in North America and the first in the United States to award the Doctor of Optometry degree; over a century it grew from a single-discipline optometry college into a small but respected university spanning optometry, audiology, occupational therapy, speech-language pathology, physician-assistant studies, and biomedicine. Unlike most institutions in this archive, Salus did not merge to escape collapse — it merged from a position of relative health, trading independence for the scale and reach of a research university.
The Pennsylvania State College of Optometry opened in 1919, the product of a 1918 Pennsylvania Optical Society conference, and in 1923 became the first optometry school in the country to confer the O.D. degree. It relocated within Philadelphia in 1932, was renamed the Pennsylvania College of Optometry in 1964, and in 1978 opened The Eye Institute, a major clinical and teaching facility. In 1998 it moved to an 11.5-acre campus in suburban Elkins Park, and over the following decade it added colleges of audiology, health sciences, and rehabilitation, taking university status and the name Salus — Latin for health — on July 1, 2008. At its height it enrolled roughly 1,200 students, almost entirely in graduate and professional programs.
Salus was solvent and well-regarded, but it was also small and narrow in an era when health-sciences education increasingly rewards scale: research infrastructure, clinical partnerships, interprofessional breadth, and the financial depth to weather shocks. In June 2023 it announced a merger with Drexel University, a large research institution a few miles away. The corporate merger completed on June 30, 2024 with the approval of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education; the U.S. Department of Education granted final approval in July 2025, and the former Salus students became Drexel students that fall.
Salus represents the most strategic and least mournful form of absorption: not a rescue, not a fire sale, but a considered decision that a century-old specialty institution could do more for its students and its disciplines inside a research university than alone. The Elkins Park campus remains open as Drexel’s Elkins Park Campus, The Eye Institute continues, and the Pennsylvania College of Optometry became Drexel’s newest college, its name and lineage carried forward. What ended was the independent university — its charter, its board, its mace, retired at a final ceremony in October 2025. The optometry school endures; the university that grew up around it does not.
Multnomah University, a non-denominational Christian university in Portland, Oregon, was founded in 1936 as the Multnomah School of the Bible and ceased to exist as an independent institution on May 1, 2024, when it folded into Jessup University, an evangelical school 600 miles south in Rocklin, California. For most of a decade Multnomah had run on fumes — enrollment sliding from roughly a thousand students to 608 by the fall before the merger, a thin $8.7 million endowment, and a business model its own president called fundamentally broken. The merger was sold as a rescue: Jessup would take Multnomah’s campus, assets, and liabilities, keep the Portland site open as a satellite, and preserve the eighty-eight-year-old name. It was framed, in the language of the moment, as a “merger of mission” rather than a closure.
The rescue did not hold. Jessup itself was carrying more than $100 million in debt and, by its own filings, would have lost nearly $11 million in fiscal 2023–24 without the windfall of Multnomah’s roughly $30 million in assets, acquired for about $7.7 million in transaction costs. Two months after the deal closed, in June 2024, Jessup took out a $15 million loan against the Portland campus; a $6 million lien followed. In May 2025, barely a year after promising to keep the lights on, Jessup announced it would close the Portland campus, move the seminary online, and send remaining undergraduates elsewhere. By August 2025 the 20-acre campus at 8435 NE Glisan Street was listed for sale.
What makes Multnomah a distinctive entry in the absorbed file is the sequence: this was not a college that merged into a healthy partner and quietly faded. It handed its entire physical and financial existence to an institution in worse shape than itself, and within a year the partner had monetized the campus and announced its closure. The Multnomah name survives only as a seminary brand inside Jessup; the school, the campus community, and the independent institution founded by a Portland Bible teacher in a former mortuary are gone.
By 2026, a group of alumni and former staff — including descendants of the founders, organized as the “Multnomah Family Team” — was publicly arguing that Jessup had been either deceptive or recklessly overconfident, and fighting to have the campus and assets returned. The dispute is the bitter coda to a closure that wore the costume of a partnership: the harshest version of the absorbed ending, a school that gave away everything to survive and lost it all anyway.
Cazenovia College, a private liberal-arts college in the village of Cazenovia, New York, southeast of Syracuse, founded in 1824 as the Seminary of the Genesee Conference, announced on December 7, 2022 that it would close at the end of the following spring semester. The institution graduated its final class on May 13, 2023 and ceased operations on June 30 — closing a year and a half short of its 200th anniversary. It was one of the oldest colleges in the region, and its end came down to a single, unforgiving piece of arithmetic: it could not refinance roughly $25 million in debt that had come due.
The college had defaulted on that bond obligation in the autumn of 2022, after a payment extension lapsed. Behind the default lay the same slow erosion that has felled small colleges across the Northeast: enrollment had peaked near 1,042 students in the fall of 2016 and had fallen by more than 40 percent to about 746 by fall 2021. Fewer students meant less tuition, less tuition meant deficits, and deficits meant the college could neither service nor refinance the debt it had taken on. The board concluded it would not have the funds to operate for the fall of 2023 and beyond.
The leadership pointed to a stack of contributing pressures: the pandemic’s costs and disruption, inflation, volatile bond and stock markets, the long demographic decline in college-age students, and competition from New York’s Excelsior Scholarship, which offers free public-college tuition to many middle-income families and drew students away from a private college that could not match the price. Each pressure was real; together they made the debt impossible to carry.
Cazenovia handled the closure relatively well, given how little room it had. It assembled teach-out agreements with two dozen institutions so that its students — and there were on the order of 700 — had documented paths to finish their degrees. The campus, more than 270 acres and 500,000 square feet of buildings including a noted equestrian center, went up for sale and found an interim tenant in the New York State Police, which used it as a training academy. But the institution itself, a fixture of central New York since 1824, did not survive to its bicentennial.
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.
Iowa Wesleyan University, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, chartered in 1842 as the Mount Pleasant Literary Institute and grown into a United Methodist university — one of the oldest institutions of higher learning west of the Mississippi River and Iowa’s first coeducational one — announced on March 28, 2023 that it would close at the end of that academic year, ceasing operations in May after 181 years. Its board of trustees voted unanimously. The decisive fact was financial: the university owed roughly $26 million on a U.S. Department of Agriculture-backed loan secured in 2016, with its 60-acre campus as collateral, and the loan could be called as early as November 2023. A last appeal to the state for help had just been refused.
The university had a history out of proportion to its size. It claimed to be the oldest coeducational institution west of the Mississippi; its alumni included James Van Allen, the physicist who discovered the radiation belts that bear his name, and Belle Babb Mansfield, the first woman admitted to the bar in the United States. By 2023 it enrolled roughly 600 full-time students and employed about 110 people, 35 of them faculty, and it was a genuine economic engine for its rural southeast-Iowa town — an estimated $55 million in annual economic impact. But it had spent years carrying losses, and its own auditor had flagged “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue as a going concern.
The endgame turned on a request and its denial. Iowa Wesleyan asked Governor Kim Reynolds for $12 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds, money the state controlled, framing the appeal around the governor’s own rural-Iowa initiative. Reynolds commissioned an independent accounting review, which concluded that one-time federal dollars would not solve the university’s systemic financial problems, and she declined. With the USDA debt looming and no rescue forthcoming, the trustees closed the institution. Teach-out agreements with four Iowa universities — William Penn, Upper Iowa, Dubuque, and Culver-Stockton — gave students a path to finish. What closed was a 181-year-old Methodist university older than the state of Iowa itself, and a rural town’s largest cultural and economic anchor, undone by a debt it could not carry and a bailout the state judged it could not justify.
Holy Names University, perched in the Oakland hills of California and founded in 1868 by the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, announced on December 19, 2022 that it would close at the end of the spring 2023 semester, ending 154 years of continuous operation. It was among the oldest institutions in the East Bay and one of the most diverse — a Catholic university that had become, by its final decades, a college of first-generation students, of Hispanic and Black and immigrant Oakland, of the working adults and aspiring teachers the region’s larger universities priced out or passed over. It closed not because of scandal or fraud but because the numbers no longer worked: declining enrollment, a deepening operating deficit, and a debt load that made survival impossible.
The institution that closed was small and getting smaller. Founded by a teaching order of sisters from Quebec, Holy Names had spent a century and a half preparing teachers and serving the East Bay, and it remained, to the end, defined by its mission to under-resourced students. In the fall of 2022 it enrolled roughly 943 students — about 520 undergraduates and 423 in graduate programs — but only 449 registered for spring 2023 as students, sensing the end, drifted toward the exits. Beneath the enrollment lay the real weight: roughly $49 million in debt secured on the property, and a 65-year-old campus whose deferred maintenance and compliance upgrades the board estimated could exceed $200 million. No partner could be found to absorb a college carrying that.
The closure came with a teach-out rather than a cliff. Dominican University of California, a fellow Catholic institution in San Rafael, agreed to take in Holy Names students and to import several of its academic programs, so that students could continue toward the degrees they had begun. Still, the loss was real and specific. When Holy Names closed, the East Bay lost one of its principal pipelines of teachers, and a population of first-generation students lost the small, mission-driven college that had been built precisely for them. The COVID-19 pandemic, the board said, had accelerated and exacerbated challenges that fell hardest on exactly those students — and on the institution that existed to serve them.
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.
Alliance University, in New York City, founded in 1882 as the Missionary Training Institute and known for most of its life as Nyack College, lost its accreditation in June 2023 and closed on August 31 of that year, ending a 141-year mission to train ministers and to educate the city’s immigrants and working poor. It was one of only two evangelical Christian colleges in New York City, and by the end it was among the most ethnically diverse colleges in American evangelicalism — its student body roughly a third Latino, a third Black, the rest Asian and international. When the Middle States Commission on Higher Education revoked its accreditation for failing the standard on financial health, the institution that had outlasted two world wars and the Depression was given barely two months to disappear.
The cruelty of the timing was its own indictment. Alliance had just posted its strongest recruiting numbers in fifteen years — some 683 students accepted for the fall of 2023, a rebound that suggested the school’s mission still had a market. None of those students would enroll. The college that had spent the previous decade operating in deficit, carrying more than $90 million in debt and drawing emergency life support from its founding denomination, simply ran out of the one thing a college cannot manufacture: the accreditor’s signature that makes a degree real and federal student aid flow.
Founded by the Canadian-born preacher A. B. Simpson to train missionaries — the school that gave the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination its educated clergy — Alliance had relocated over its history from Manhattan to a leafy campus in South Nyack, in Rockland County, and then, fatefully, back to Lower Manhattan. In 2016 it bet its future on real estate, buying 160,000 square feet of condominium space in a Battery Park City office tower for $49.2 million, financed by a $50.6 million loan that was sliced into a commercial mortgage-backed security. The bet was that a downtown campus would draw the students. Instead the debt drew the closure. When Alliance shut down, it stranded a returning class, scattered a uniquely diverse student body, ended the operations of its 63-year-old seminary, and left a securitized lender holding an empty eight floors above the harbor.
Finlandia University, in Hancock, Michigan, founded in 1896 as Suomi College by Finnish Lutheran immigrants on the copper-mining frontier of the Upper Peninsula, announced on March 2, 2023 that it would close after the spring semester, ending a 127-year run as the only college in the United States founded by Finnish Americans. It was the lone private university in the Upper Peninsula, a small Lutheran liberal-arts institution of roughly 350 to 400 students, and it died of the two ailments that have killed so many of its kind at once: an enrollment cliff that left too few students to fund it, and a debt load its board finally called “unbearable.”
The institution that closed was a cultural anchor as much as a college. Suomi College — Suomi is the Finnish word for Finland — was established by the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to train ministers and teachers for the Finnish-speaking miners and farmers who had crossed an ocean to dig copper out of the Keweenaw Peninsula. It opened in 1896 with ninety students and a theological seminary, built its Romanesque “Old Main” by 1900, and over the next century evolved into a four-year college, joining the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and renaming itself Finlandia University in 2000, around the same time its enrollment crested near 650. It was the last surviving institution of Finnish-American higher education in the country, and its closure severed a tangible link between a region and the immigrants who built it.
The end was orderly in its planning and abrupt in its arrival. Carrying roughly $10.6 million in debt against a fall-2021 enrollment of about 430 — down to some 354 by the final year — and unable to sell the mortgaged property that might have relieved it, the Board of Trustees voted on March 14, 2023 to dissolve the university, twelve days after the closure was announced. Operations ended that May, after a final commencement at which nearly a hundred graduates crossed the stage. The university arranged transfers and teach-outs with a string of regional schools, Northern Michigan University and Michigan Technological University foremost among them, and handed its academic records to Michigan Tech for safekeeping. What was lost was not only a college but a community’s center of gravity — the Finnish American Heritage Center, the art-and-design school, the historic campus that had stood on the hill above Hancock for 127 years.
The Art Institutes were a national chain of for-profit art and design schools that traced their lineage to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, founded in 1921. Built into a system by the Education Management Corporation (EDMC) after it acquired the Pittsburgh school around 1970, the chain peaked in 2012 at roughly 50 campuses and some 80,000 students studying graphic design, photography, culinary arts, fashion, and animation. It died in stages over the following decade and then, on September 30, 2023, switched off its last eight campuses with less than a week’s notice, stranding about 1,700 students at the very end of a 102-year arc.
The decline was not an accident of the market; it was, in large part, the consequence of how the business was run. In 2015 EDMC paid 95.5 million dollars to settle U.S. Justice Department allegations that it had illegally paid its recruiters by headcount — running “boiler room” enrollment operations that signed up students with little chance of succeeding so the federal aid would flow. It was the largest settlement of its kind in the for-profit education sector. Enrollment, already sliding, never recovered.
Then came the mismanagement chapter. In 2017 EDMC sold the schools to the Dream Center Foundation, a Los Angeles Pentecostal organization with no track record running colleges and grand plans to convert them to nonprofit status. The Dream Center’s stewardship was a catastrophe: it ran the affiliated Argosy University into the ground, withheld federal-aid stipends owed to students, and lurched toward insolvency within two years. The Art Institutes were shunted to another nonprofit, the Education Principle Foundation, which managed a slow, quiet wind-down until the last campuses simply closed.
What the chain left behind was a long roster of art students with credits that rarely transferred and debt that frequently outlasted the schools. In 2024 the federal government delivered the reckoning: it discharged roughly 6 billion dollars in loans for about 317,000 former Art Institutes students, finding the schools had systematically misled them — a mass cancellation that closed the books on a century of art education turned into an aid-harvesting machine.
Bloomfield College, a small, fiercely diverse college in Bloomfield, New Jersey, founded in 1868 out of the Presbyterian tradition, ceased to exist as an independent institution on July 1, 2023, when it merged into the public Montclair State University and became Bloomfield College of Montclair State University. It was the first merger of a private college into a public university in New Jersey history — a novel kind of rescue for a novel kind of institution. By the end Bloomfield was the closest thing New Jersey had to a historically Black college: the only four-year school in the state designated simultaneously a Predominantly Black Institution, a Hispanic-Serving Institution, and a Minority-Serving Institution, with a student body that was nearly half Black and a third Hispanic, overwhelmingly low-income and first-generation.
That mission is exactly why its near-death and its rescue both mattered so much. In October 2021, with enrollment fallen from roughly 2,000 in 2016 to about 1,300 and a tuition-dependent budget bleeding money, President Marcheta Evans did something colleges almost never do: she went public, announcing that Bloomfield might not survive the next academic year and openly asking institutions, corporations, and the state for help. The plea worked. New Jersey appropriated $12.5 million in transitional funding to keep the doors open through 2022–23, and Montclair State University, a much larger public research university about ten miles away, stepped in as a partner — first as a lifeline, then as the institution Bloomfield would join.
The merger moved with unusual speed and required machinery a private failure usually does not: accreditor approval from the Middle States Commission, and an act of the New Jersey Legislature, which Governor Phil Murphy signed on June 30, 2023, the day before the merger took effect. Montclair offered positions to nearly 90 percent of Bloomfield’s faculty and staff, kept the campus open, retained the athletics programs and the Bears mascot, and — crucially — preserved the minority-serving mission that had made Bloomfield singular.
What Bloomfield represents is absorption as deliverance, and the rarest version of it: a public university taking on a private one not for its real estate but, substantially, to keep its students and its mission alive. The independent college is gone; its name survives as a college within a state university, its students pay public-tuition rates, and the institution that might have closed instead became the first of its kind. It is, in this archive, almost a happy ending — almost, because the 155-year-old college still ended.
The Vermont State Colleges System spent the years between 2018 and 2023 erasing its own member institutions, and on July 1, 2023 the last of the old names went dark when Castleton University, Northern Vermont University, and Vermont Technical College were fused into a single accredited institution called Vermont State University. The oldest thread in that braid reached back to 1787, when the Rutland County Grammar School — the seed of what became Castleton — was chartered, making Castleton Vermont’s oldest college. The consolidation did not close a campus or padlock a quad. It dissolved the separate institutions that had stood on those campuses for as long as two centuries, and replaced them with branches of one statewide university.
The consolidation came in two waves. In 2018, Johnson State College (rooted in an 1828 school) and Lyndon State College (founded 1911) were merged into Northern Vermont University, a single institution with two campuses in Vermont’s rural Northeast Kingdom. Five years later, that university — together with Castleton and Vermont Technical College, founded in 1866 — was folded into Vermont State University, a five-campus institution spanning Castleton, Johnson, Lyndon, Randolph, and Williston. The Community College of Vermont remained separate. What had been a confederation of distinctly named, locally rooted colleges became one brand with one accreditation and one administration.
The driver was money and demography in equal measure. The system carried a structural deficit reported at roughly $25 million, and enrollment had been sliding for years as Vermont’s pool of high-school graduates shrank — the New England version of the national enrollment cliff. State leaders chose consolidation over closure, betting that a single university sharing administration, branding, and back-office functions could survive where four or five separate tuition-dependent colleges could not. The Vermont legislature backed the gamble with tens of millions in one-time funding, and the New England Commission of Higher Education accredited the combined institution in July 2022, clearing the path to the 2023 launch.
What made the Vermont case notorious was not the merger itself but the early days of the institution it produced. In early 2023, months before the official launch, the new university’s leadership announced plans to convert campus libraries to “all-digital” collections and to downgrade NCAA athletics. The backlash — student protests, a faculty no-confidence vote, national press — forced reversals on both, and the founding president, Parwinder Grewal, resigned after barely a year. The institutions that had stood for as long as 236 years were gone in name; the university built to replace them began its life apologizing.
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.
The San Francisco Art Institute, founded in 1871 as the California School of Design and long the oldest art school west of the Mississippi, ceased its degree programs on July 15, 2022, and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy the following April — ending a 151-year run that had shaped American art more profoundly than its small enrollment ever suggested. It was the school where Ansel Adams founded the country’s first fine-art photography department in 1945, where Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Richard Diebenkorn taught and Bay Area abstraction took root, and where Diego Rivera painted a monumental 1931 fresco that still covers a gallery wall. In the end, roughly 330 students — about 220 undergraduates and 112 in graduate programs — were enrolled at an institution that could no longer pay its bills.
SFAI did not die of irrelevance; it died of debt. The school had borrowed heavily for ambitious building projects, accumulating well over $10 million in liabilities against a tiny, perpetually strained operating budget and an endowment far too small to carry it. Art schools are among the most expensive forms of higher education to run — studios, equipment, materials, low student-faculty ratios — and the least able to raise tuition on a student body that is, by vocation, not wealthy. For years SFAI survived on austerity, emergency fundraising, and a rotating series of merger and rescue talks. The 2020 pandemic, which emptied the studios that are the whole point of an art school, removed what little margin remained.
The most painful chapter was the school’s attempt to monetize the one asset it could not spend: the Rivera mural. In early 2021, facing collapse, SFAI’s leadership floated selling the fresco — valued at around $50 million — to filmmaker George Lucas, only for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to block any removal by designating it a city landmark. The plan to save the school by selling its soul failed, and the deeper rescue attempts failed too. A 2020 effort to be absorbed by the University of California, Berkeley collapsed, and in July 2022 the University of San Francisco walked away from a five-month acquisition study, citing insurmountable financial liabilities, weak enrollment projections, and years of deferred maintenance.
With no buyer and no money, SFAI ended its degree programs in July 2022 — having graduated only about 175 students across the two years it spent in financial freefall — and turned to liquidation. The Chapter 7 filing in April 2023 listed more than $10 million in debt, with the University of San Francisco alone claiming roughly $6 million from the failed deal. In a final twist that the school itself never lived to enjoy, a nonprofit backed by philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs bought the Chestnut Street campus and the Rivera mural for nearly $30 million in 2024, pledging to keep the site an arts institution. The buildings will stay devoted to art. The 151-year-old school that built them is gone.
Marymount California University, a small Catholic institution overlooking the Pacific from the bluffs of Rancho Palos Verdes, California, founded in 1968 by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, announced on April 22, 2022 that it would close permanently at the end of that summer, with the summer 2022 term its last instruction. The decision came two days after a long-planned merger with Florida’s Saint Leo University collapsed — and it left students, faculty, and staff weeks from a fall semester that would never come. After fifty-four years of teaching, much of it as a two-year college and only the last decade as a four-year university, Marymount ended not with a teach-out year but with an August closing line and a scramble to relocate everyone before the term began.
Marymount was, by the standards of this encyclopedia, young and small. It opened in 1968 as a Catholic junior college, operated for decades as a two-year institution, and only became a four-year university with graduate programs in the 2010s, adopting the name Marymount California University in 2013. Its enrollment had crested around 1,179 students in 2014–15 — just as it completed the transition — then fell by more than half, to roughly 500 full-time students by its final year. Rising costs, the pandemic, and a tuition-dependent budget with no cushion did the rest. The survival plan had been the merger; when the merger failed, there was no plan B except closure.
The timing drew criticism, and the criticism was fair. An April announcement of an August close gave students one summer to find a new college for the fall — not the six-weeks’-notice cruelty of the worst closures, but far short of the orderly multi-year teach-out that protects degrees. Marymount said it had chosen the most compassionate path available and brokered transfer agreements with more than five dozen institutions; critics noted that a college which had spent a year betting everything on a single merger had left itself, and its students, nowhere to land when the bet failed. The oceanfront campus was bought within months by UCLA for $80 million. The students were dispersed across dozens of schools by September.
Stratford University was a privately held for-profit institution based in Falls Church, Virginia, founded in 1976 and closed at the end of September 2022 — not because students stopped enrolling, not because it ran out of money on its own, but because the obscure agency that accredited it, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), finally lost the federal recognition that let its schools touch federal student aid. When ACICS went down, Stratford went down with it, and it did so fast: the U.S. Department of Education stripped ACICS of recognition on August 19, 2022, and Stratford announced its closure roughly five weeks later, ceasing operations on September 30.
At the end Stratford ran campuses in Alexandria and Woodbridge, Virginia, and Baltimore, Maryland, plus an outpost in New Delhi, India, and offered career-oriented programs — nursing, medical assisting, culinary arts, business, and information technology — to a student body that was roughly a fifth international and a fifth military. About 1,000 students were enrolled when the closure was announced, and some 250 staff lost their jobs. Stratford was not one of the network’s great frauds; its president argued, plausibly, that the school could have survived if regulators had simply let it keep enrolling while it found a new accreditor. But that is precisely the diagnosis: a school whose survival hinged entirely on uninterrupted access to federal aid through a single, chronically troubled gatekeeper.
The mechanism of death was bureaucratic and almost bloodless. Once ACICS lost recognition, the Department gave its schools 18 months to find a new accreditor but barred them from enrolling any new student who could not finish within that window. For Stratford, new students supplied roughly 40 percent of annual revenue. Cut that off, and the math collapsed before the 18 months could run. The president estimated the school was only eight to ten months from approval by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission. It never got the chance to find out.
What was lost was a working career school and the time of the people inside it. Nursing students — the program most worth saving — were referred to Chamberlain University; business and IT students to the University of the Potomac; culinary and hospitality students had no destination identified at all when the doors closed. Credits, as ever in these closures, transferred unevenly. Five months later, in early 2023, Stratford and its holding company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, with the president and vice president listed among the largest creditors.
Mills College, a historic women’s college in Oakland, California, traced its founding to 1852 and ceased to exist as an independent, degree-granting institution in 2022, when it was folded into Northeastern University and renamed Mills College at Northeastern University. It was, by its own reckoning, the oldest women’s college west of the Rockies — a small, fiercely identified liberal-arts college that had spent 170 years educating women, and that had, in 1990, become legendary for refusing to stop. After the merger, the campus remained open and the Mills name survived as a college-within-a-university, but the independent institution, and its single-sex mission, did not: the new entity admits men.
For most of its life Mills was the kind of college that depended on tuition and devotion in roughly equal measure, and it never built the endowment to outlast a long enrollment slide. Applications fell sharply in the 2010s; in May 2017 the board declared a “financial emergency,” with an operating deficit of more than $9 million and an enrollment that had dropped below 1,000. Years of cuts, layoffs of tenured faculty, and curricular reform narrowed the gap but never closed it, and the pandemic finished what demographics had started. In March 2021, the president, Elizabeth Hillman, announced that Mills would stop admitting new degree-seeking undergraduates and grant its last degrees in 2023, reconstituting itself as the non-degree “Mills Institute.”
That announcement read as a death notice, and it galvanized the alumnae who had once saved the college. Six months later, in September 2021, the board chose a different ending: a merger with Northeastern, the Boston-based global university, which would keep the Oakland campus open and operating. The deal was fought in court — the Alumnae Association of Mills College sued for the financial records behind the decision and to pause the vote — but the injunctions were lifted, the trustees approved the merger, and on July 1, 2022 it became official.
What Mills represents in the closure era is the gentler verdict, and the more ambiguous grief. It was not abandoned mid-semester; its campus was not auctioned for parts; its name was not erased. It was absorbed — preserved in form and dissolved in substance — and its alumnae have been split ever since between relief that the place survives and sorrow that the institution they fought for is gone. The college that once reversed its own board now lives on as a name inside someone else’s university.
The University of the Sciences, a small specialized university in the University City district of Philadelphia, traced its origins to 1821 and ceased to exist as an independent institution on June 1, 2022, when it merged into Saint Joseph’s University, the Jesuit university roughly five miles up the road. It was the oldest pharmacy school in the United States — founded as the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy when sixty-eight apothecaries met in Carpenters’ Hall to raise the standards of their trade — and for two centuries it had trained the people who compounded and dispensed the nation’s medicine, including, in 1883, the first American woman to earn a pharmacy degree. The name is gone; the work it pioneered continues inside someone else’s institution.
The mechanics were the now-familiar arithmetic of the specialized college. USciences was tuition-dependent and narrowly focused, and it ran into a double squeeze: a national decline in pharmacy-school applications and the broader demographic pressure on every small private college in the Northeast. By 2018 it was carrying a budget deficit of around $4.5 million; in 2020 both Fitch and Moody’s downgraded its credit as it drew down its endowment at a rate analysts called unsustainable. In the summer of 2020 the university began, in its own framing, to look for a partner with the scale to carry its programs into the future.
It found one across town. Under the agreement completed in June 2022, Saint Joseph’s absorbed the entirety of USciences — its academic programs, its 24-acre University City campus, its assets and its liabilities — with no money changing hands. Saint Joseph’s retained about 140 of USciences’ roughly 170 faculty (the rest received a full year’s salary in severance), folded the health programs into a new College of Health Professions, and emerged as one of the ten largest universities in the Philadelphia region, with an endowment north of $500 million and nearly 9,000 students.
What USciences represents is the merger as a soft landing for a small but venerable institution — and the quiet completeness of absorption. No class was stranded; the buildings are full; the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy continues by name as a school within Saint Joseph’s. But the independent university that incorporated standards for an entire profession in 1821, that issued degrees in its own right for two centuries, no longer exists. Its red-devil mascot was retired; the hawk flies over its campus now.
On July 1, 2022, six universities in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education — California, Clarion, and Edinboro in the west; Bloomsburg, Lock Haven, and Mansfield in the central and northern tiers — ceased to exist as independent institutions. The three western schools were consolidated into a single new entity, Pennsylvania Western University, known as PennWest; the three central schools became Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania. Six historic names, most of them rooted in nineteenth-century normal schools that had trained Pennsylvania’s teachers for generations, were retired into two. The campuses stayed open and the students stayed enrolled, but six distinct universities became two.
The lifespan here belongs not to a single institution but to a lineage. The oldest of the six, Bloomsburg, traced its roots to 1839; the others followed across the middle decades of the nineteenth century — California (1852), Edinboro (1857), Mansfield (1857), Clarion (1867), Lock Haven (1870) — almost all of them founded as academies or normal schools to supply teachers to a growing commonwealth. Over more than a century and a half they grew into comprehensive regional public universities, the affordable four-year option for the rural and small-town students in their corners of the state. By 2022, when they were merged away, the entire fourteen-school PASSHE system enrolled roughly 88,700 students, down sharply from a peak above 119,000 a decade earlier.
The mechanism was demographic and budgetary, not scandalous. Pennsylvania, like much of the Northeast, faced a shrinking pool of high-school graduates, and the state system’s enrollment had fallen by roughly a fifth across the 2010s. Smaller campuses were hardest hit, running structural deficits that the system could no longer cover. In July 2021 the PASSHE board of governors voted 18–0 to consolidate the six into two, blending their administrations, faculties, and academic catalogs while keeping each physical campus operating under a shared accreditation and a single university name.
What was lost is harder to photograph than a padlocked college, but it is real: six institutions with their own histories, mascots, alumni loyalties, and place in their towns were subsumed into regional umbrellas. The early returns were sobering — in its first year PennWest lost nearly 12 percent of the enrollment its three predecessors had carried — suggesting that consolidation slowed the bleeding without stopping it. The campuses survive. The universities, as they were, do not.
Becker College, a private college in Worcester, Massachusetts, with roots reaching back to a 1784 academy and an 1887 business school, closed at the end of the 2020–21 academic year and ceased to exist on August 31, 2021 — a victim of thin finances that the COVID-19 pandemic turned terminal. At closing it enrolled roughly 1,675 students, down from a peak near 1,892 in 2016, and it had carved out a national reputation in an unlikely specialty: video-game design, where its program was ranked among the best in the world. The college also trained nurses and ran a veterinary-science program, the practical, career-facing offerings of a small institution that knew what it was for.
The closure followed the now-familiar pattern of the small, tuition-dependent, lightly endowed college, but with a sharp pandemic accelerant. Becker entered 2020 already financially fragile, and the costs and revenue shocks of COVID-19 — emptied dorms, refunded fees, a frightened applicant pool, and emergency spending — removed its remaining margin. In early March 2021, the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, acting under the post-Mount Ida regime that requires the state to monitor at-risk colleges, publicly flagged Becker’s finances as “sufficiently uncertain” to threaten its viability and warned it was unlikely to make it through another academic year. Weeks later, on March 29, 2021, the board voted to close.
Crucially, Becker closed the right way. Rather than the six-weeks’-notice catastrophe that Mount Ida had become three years earlier and ninety minutes east, Becker gave its students a full teach-out window through August 2021 and lined up more than a dozen transfer partners before it shut. Clark University agreed to take Becker’s celebrated game-design program — faculty and all — relaunching it as the Becker School of Design & Technology and offering to match students’ financial aid. Worcester State University, Quinsigamond Community College, Assumption University, and others absorbed students from nursing, the liberal arts, and beyond. The institution died; most of its students’ educations did not.
What was lost was nonetheless real: a 134-year-old college (by its business-school lineage) or a 237-year-old one (by its academy roots), 329 jobs, and an independent home for one of the country’s pioneering game-design programs. The Worcester campus did not sit empty for long — Worcester State, Clark, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute moved into its buildings — but the name on the diploma was gone. Becker became one more data point in Massachusetts’s grim run of small-college closures, distinguished mainly by having done the dying about as decently as the circumstances allowed.
Ohio Valley University, in Vienna, West Virginia, chartered in 1958 and opened in 1960 as Ohio Valley College, voted to close on December 8, 2021, after the institution could no longer meet its payroll and sat beneath some $25 million in bond debt it had stopped servicing years earlier. Affiliated with the Churches of Christ, it was a small Christian liberal-arts university — about 170 students at the end, the great majority of them recruited as athletes — and it died of the most basic insolvency: it ran out of cash, owed more than it could pay, and lost the accreditation that depends on financial health.
The numbers tell the story of a slow contraction rather than a sudden shock. From a record enrollment of roughly 643 students in the fall of 2008, the university shrank by three-quarters over the next thirteen years, to about 273 in 2021 and then to roughly 175 by that final fall, with somewhere between two-thirds and 70 percent of those students on the rosters of its sixteen sports teams. Tuition revenue collapsed with the headcount, but the costs of a campus, a payroll, and a bond did not. The Higher Learning Commission placed the university on probation in June 2020 for insufficient financial resources, and from July 2021 forward the institution simply could not pay its people on time. An anonymous donor’s $900,000 gift covered the roughly eighty employees through December; when the donor money and the semester ran out, so did the university.
What followed was the orderly part of a disorderly collapse. The board’s vote ended classes after the fall 2021 term, but the institution arranged “teach-out” agreements with seven sister institutions of the Churches of Christ so that its roughly thirty seniors could finish their degrees without losing credits, holding a final commencement in May 2022. Oklahoma Christian University took over the registrar’s records so that alumni could still obtain transcripts. The West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission revoked the university’s authority to grant degrees, and in 2023 West Virginia University at Parkersburg bought the 225-acre campus for $4.6 million — a public college rising on the bones of the church school that could not make its payroll.
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.
Independence University was an online career college based in Salt Lake City, Utah, that traced its roots to a school founded in 1978 and shut down without warning on August 1, 2021, after its accreditor moved to revoke its accreditation and the U.S. Department of Education turned off the federal aid that kept it alive. It was one of four schools — alongside CollegeAmerica, Stevens-Henager College, and California College San Diego — owned and operated by the Center for Excellence in Higher Education (CEHE), a Utah entity controlled by the for-profit-education entrepreneur Carl Barney, who had restyled his chain as a “nonprofit” in a conversion that regulators and courts came to treat with deep suspicion.
The school sold the same product every predatory career chain sells: the credible promise of a job. CEHE marketed its programs on the strength of salary figures and employment rates that a federal review later found to be widespread, pervasive misrepresentations — claims about what graduates earned and how readily they were hired that did not survive scrutiny. The students it recruited were disproportionately the people the fraud requires: low-income, including a large cohort attending on GI Bill benefits, enrolling in four-week-module online programs with completion rates so low — a 12 percent bachelor’s graduation rate at Independence by some measures, sub-25-percent completion in some programs — that the credential was, for most, a debt with no degree attached.
The end came the way these ends usually come, through the regulators rather than the market. In 2020 Colorado fined Carl Barney roughly $3 million for defrauding students. By the spring of 2021 the school had received no federal cash since May 2020, its accreditor, the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges (ACCSC), had moved to withdraw accreditation effective May 31, 2021, and the Department of Education had effectively closed the spigot. On July 29, 2021, CEHE told the Department all four schools would close; on August 1 they did, stranding their students mid-program.
What survived was the bill — and it landed on the public. In January 2025 the Department of Education discharged the federal loans of borrowers who had attended any CEHE school between January 1, 2006, and the August 1, 2021, collapse: roughly $1.15 billion for about 73,600 borrowers, granted automatically, on the finding that CEHE had engaged in widespread substantial misrepresentation. The Department also moved to put CEHE itself on the hook for tens of millions in closed-school discharges. Independence University ended as a case study in how a for-profit can dress itself as a charity and still operate as a debt machine pointed at the vulnerable.
Concordia College, a small Lutheran institution in Bronxville, New York, founded in 1881 and run by the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, announced on January 28, 2021 that it would cease operations that summer, and its Bronxville campus passed to its Catholic neighbor, Iona College, three miles away in New Rochelle. This is the Bronxville Concordia, distinct from the network of LCMS Concordias scattered across the country — not Concordia Portland, the largest of them, which had collapsed a year earlier, nor Concordia Selma, the historically Black Lutheran college in Alabama that had closed in 2018. It was, in fact, the fourth Concordia to close or merge in eight years, and the manner of its ending — an acquisition by a Roman Catholic institution that absorbed the campus and taught out the students — gives it its own clinical interest.
The mechanism was the now-familiar one, accelerated by the pandemic. Concordia was a tuition-dependent college with a long history of thin finances; its accreditor had flagged its position as precarious as far back as 1987, and rising tuition discounts and operating costs had ground at it for years. Enrollment, which stood near 1,300 in 2019–20, was nearly halved by COVID-19 — falling to roughly 580 by spring 2021 — and a college that small, that dependent on tuition, and that short on reserves could not survive the collapse. The board concluded that closure was the only honest course.
What it arranged was an acquisition rather than a stranding. In an agreement reached on May 11, 2021, Iona College — a larger Catholic institution nearby — took the Bronxville campus and committed to a teach-out so that Concordia’s students could complete their degrees. Concordia ceased academic instruction before the fall 2021 semester; that October it petitioned a Westchester court to formalize the $30 million sale of its main campus to Iona. Iona itself became Iona University on July 1, 2022, and went on to build the NewYork-Presbyterian Iona School of Nursing and Health Sciences on the former Concordia grounds.
What Concordia Bronxville represents is the acquisition as a managed end for a college that had run out of room: a 140-year-old Lutheran institution, absorbed campus and student body into a Catholic university that needed space to grow. The buildings remain in use; the cross on them is now a different denomination’s. The college that taught generations of Lutherans on that hill is gone in everything but the deed history.
Wesley College, a small private college in Dover, Delaware, founded in 1873, ceased to exist as an independent institution on July 1, 2021, when its neighbor a few blocks away — the public, historically Black Delaware State University — completed its acquisition. The transaction was a landmark: by Delaware State’s account, it was the first time a historically Black college or university had acquired another higher-education institution outright. A 148-year-old, Methodist-heritage, predominantly white private college was absorbed into a public HBCU, an inversion of the usual direction of college consolidation and a genuine reversal of historical fortune.
Wesley’s decline followed the standard script for a small tuition-dependent college, accelerated by a steep price tag. It had grown to roughly 2,000 students in better years but slid hard in the late 2010s, and by 2019 its finances were so precarious that without a $3 million state grant its students would have lost access to federal financial aid. The state of Delaware ultimately contributed around $6 million over two years to keep the doors open while Wesley searched for a partner; it talked with Saint Leo University in Florida and with the University of Delaware before the deal with Delaware State, its literal neighbor in downtown Dover, came together.
Under the agreement finalized in mid-2021, Delaware State took over Wesley’s roughly 50-acre downtown campus and its 21 buildings — capital assets appraised near $32 million — by assuming Wesley’s debts rather than paying cash. It gained 14 academic programs, including a master’s in occupational therapy, and folded them into a new Wesley College of Health and Behavioral Sciences, honoring the old name in the new structure. Crucially, the merger gave Wesley’s students a path: nearly 80 percent registered to continue at Delaware State, drawn in part by tuition roughly half of what Wesley had charged, and 71 Wesley faculty and staff were offered positions.
What Wesley represents is the merger as both rescue and reversal. Its students were not stranded; its campus did not go dark; its name lives on as a college within Delaware State. But the independent Methodist-heritage college that had served Dover for nearly a century and a half is gone, dissolved into a public university with a different mission and a historic ambition to grow. For Delaware State, the acquisition was a jump-start. For Wesley, it was a dignified end.
The University of Bridgeport, founded in 1927 as the Junior College of Connecticut and chartered as a four-year university in 1947, ceased to exist as an independent institution in 2021, when its programs, students, buildings, and accreditation were divided among Goodwin University, Sacred Heart University, and Paier College — with Goodwin ultimately absorbing the bulk of what remained. For nearly a century it had been the largest private university in the state’s largest industrial city, and it ended not in a single dramatic closure but as the last act of a slow, multi-decade decline, its assets parceled out among healthier neighbors and the name kept on as a Goodwin-owned subsidiary.
Bridgeport’s arc tracks the rise and fall of its city. The university grew explosively in the postwar decades, riding the baby boom, the G.I. Bill, and a wave of international students to a peak of roughly 9,100 students in 1969. Then the same deindustrialization that hollowed out Bridgeport, Connecticut hollowed out its university: enrollment slid through the 1970s and 1980s until, by 1990, more than a third of the campus’s fifty buildings sat empty and debt had climbed past $22 million. Tuition cuts did not help. By 1991 enrollment had fallen to around 1,300, a two-year faculty strike was under way, and accreditation was at risk.
The rescue that followed is the part of the story most people remember. In May 1992, the Professors World Peace Academy — an affiliate of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church — injected $50.5 million into the failing university in exchange for a majority of the board’s seats, a deal the university’s charter effectively forced its trustees to consider. The arrangement kept the doors open and the accreditation intact, but it cost Bridgeport much of its faculty and, for years, its reputation; sixty-six professors and librarians took compensated departures. The university received Academy funding until 2002, became financially independent in 2003, and in 2019 voted the last of the Academy’s governance rights out of its bylaws.
What independence could not fix was the underlying decline. By 2020 the university, still small and still strained, agreed to dismantle itself in an orderly way — a three-way deal to hand its programs to Goodwin, Sacred Heart, and Paier. Sacred Heart withdrew, Goodwin absorbed the larger share, and in 2021 the institution that had survived bankruptcy, a strike, and a church takeover finally dissolved into others. Absorbed, not closed: the students kept studying and the name survived on the buildings, but the independent University of Bridgeport was gone.
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.”
Concordia University, in Portland, Oregon, founded in 1905 as a Lutheran academy and grown into the largest university of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in the United States, announced on February 10, 2020 that it would close at the end of that spring semester. By the following graduation, on April 25, the institution that had taught pastors, schoolteachers, nurses, and — through a vast online arm — tens of thousands of working educators across the country would simply cease to exist. More than five thousand students and roughly 1,500 employees were told, with little warning and fewer answers, that the place issuing their degrees and signing their paychecks had run out of time.
The institution that closed was, in a real sense, two institutions wearing one name. There was the small residential campus in the Concordia neighborhood of northeast Portland — perhaps five hundred undergraduates, a Lutheran liberal-arts college of the ordinary kind. And there was the online machine: a Master of Education program so large that Concordia awarded more such degrees than any other nonprofit in the country, built and marketed in partnership with a Silicon Valley company called HotChalk. The online business had lifted total enrollment past 7,400 at its 2014 peak and made Concordia Oregon’s largest private nonprofit university. It had also bound the university’s finances to a contract it could not, in the end, survive.
The closure was abrupt, but the decline was not. Revenue had fallen nearly 40 percent in four years; the university had defaulted on bond covenants; the Church Extension Fund and the Synod itself had become creditors and, finally, reluctant ones. When the Board of Regents voted to close, it did so quickly and quietly, and — on the same day, HotChalk would later allege — moved the Portland campus into the hands of a Lutheran entity, out of reach of the creditor that promptly sued for $302 million. The law school Concordia had opened in Boise in 2012, by then fully accredited and posting a perfect bar-passage rate, was orphaned overnight; the University of Idaho would eventually take in its students and its building. What was lost in Portland was not a struggling diploma mill but a 115-year-old church university, dissolved by a single vote, that told the people who depended on it last.
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.
Marlboro College, a tiny progressive liberal-arts college on a hilltop in Marlboro, Vermont, was founded in 1946 and ceased to exist as an independent institution in 2020, when it transferred its endowment, its faculty, and its name to Emerson College in Boston and sold the Vermont campus that had been its entire reason for being. Its programs and faculty survive inside Emerson as the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies; the self-governing rural college, with its Town Meetings and its hand-built community, does not. It was absorbed — preserved as a curriculum and a name, dissolved as a place.
Marlboro was never meant to be large, and its smallness was both its glory and its ruin. Founded by World War II veterans who wanted an experiment in democratic education, it built a model unlike almost any other in America: students and faculty and staff governed the college together in a literal Town Meeting, and each student designed an individualized course of study — the “Plan of Concentration” — culminating in a senior thesis defended before an outside examiner. At its high-water mark, around 2004, roughly 350 students lived on the hill. By the end there were about 150. A college that small, tuition-dependent, and remote could not survive the demographic decline that emptied small colleges across the Northeast.
The board first tried to merge with the University of Bridgeport in 2019; those talks collapsed within months. In November 2019 it announced a different arrangement with Emerson College, the Boston communications-and-arts institution. Rather than a conventional acquisition, Marlboro made Emerson a gift: it handed over its endowment, valued at more than $30 million, and the proceeds from selling its campus, in exchange for a guarantee that Marlboro’s roughly two dozen tenured and tenure-track faculty would have appointments at Emerson and that its students could finish there. The deal closed on July 23, 2020.
What Marlboro represents is the merger as inheritance rather than rescue — a dying college choosing not merely to fold into another but to endow it, buying continuity for its faculty and a fragment of its pedagogy at the cost of the institution itself. The Vermont campus, sold off, passed through several hands. The Town Meetings ended. The independent college that had governed itself for seventy-four years voted, in effect, one last time: to give itself away.
Pine Manor College, a small private college on a wooded campus in the Chestnut Hill section of Brookline, Massachusetts, founded in 1911, ceased to exist as an independent institution in 2020, when it was acquired by its far larger neighbor, Boston College. By the time the pandemic forced the decision, Pine Manor had remade itself into something unusual and valuable: a minority-serving institution where most students were the first in their families to attend college and many were low-income. Boston College took the campus, the assets, and the liabilities, taught out the remaining students, and built the Pine Manor name into a new Pine Manor Institute for Student Success. The college was absorbed — its mission preserved as a program inside a Jesuit research university, its independent existence ended.
Pine Manor’s history is a study in reinvention. It began in 1911 as a post-secondary division of the Dana Hall School, a finishing-school-era institution where the all-female student body once posed for class photographs in long white dresses. It became an independent junior college, then a four-year women’s college, then — under a deliberate change of mission in the 1990s — pivoted from educating the daughters of the social elite to educating women of color from underserved communities. It went fully coeducational in 2014. By the end it served a few hundred students, a majority first-generation and low-income, on a 45-plus-acre estate five miles from downtown Boston.
The reinvention was admirable and the finances were perilous. Pine Manor had a tiny endowment — about $8.7 million, much of it restricted — and depended heavily on auxiliary revenue: a daycare, summer English-language programs, weddings and corporate events. Roughly half its operating revenue came from those activities. When COVID-19 shut down campus life in the spring of 2020, that revenue evaporated overnight, and a college that had warned its own students about its uncertain future could no longer guarantee a fall opening. On May 13, 2020, Boston College announced it would take over.
Pine Manor represents the acquisition as both rescue and dissolution. Boston College, with a $2.4 billion endowment, absorbed Pine Manor’s roughly $11 million in liabilities, kept current students on the Chestnut Hill campus for up to two years to finish their degrees, and endowed the Pine Manor Institute for Student Success with $50 million to extend Pine Manor’s first-generation, low-income mission inside BC. The college that had reinvented itself to serve the students higher education most often overlooks ended by handing that mission, and its name, to a university with the resources to sustain it.
Robert Morris University Illinois, a career-focused private university in downtown Chicago whose lineage reached back to the 1913 founding of the Moser School of Business, ceased to exist as an independent institution in 2020, when it merged into Roosevelt University — a neighbor whose front door stood roughly 256 steps away. The Higher Learning Commission cleared the deal in early 2020, and on March 9 the integration was finalized: Robert Morris folded into Roosevelt under Roosevelt’s name, its programs gathered into a newly created Robert Morris Experiential College, its athletics and most of its faculty absorbed, its ten-member board dissolved. After 107 years, a school built to train clerks, nurses, chefs, and first-generation strivers became a college-within-a-university bearing its founder’s name.
The merger was, in the brutal arithmetic of small private higher education, a soft landing — but it came after a hard fall. Robert Morris had been an enrollment story before it was a closure story: a sprawling, multi-campus career college that grew across the Chicago suburbs in the 1990s and 2000s and enrolled in the thousands at its peak, roughly 6,100 students by one count in 2008. Then the floor dropped. Enrollment slid through the 2010s as the for-profit-style career-college sector contracted, regulatory scrutiny tightened, and the demographic and competitive pressures squeezing every tuition-dependent school in the Midwest bore down. By the fall before the merger, Robert Morris enrolled fewer than 1,900 students; its endowment had fallen by more than half in a single year to about $8.6 million; it had been “losing money for much of the last decade” and had closed its Springfield campus in 2019.
Roosevelt was no fortress itself — a university running operating deficits since 2014, its bonds rated junk by Moody’s — which is part of what made the merger less a triumphant acquisition than two struggling neighbors lashing their lifeboats together. The pitch emphasized mission overlap (both served diverse, first-generation, working students), program complementarity (Robert Morris’s nursing, allied health, culinary, and applied programs filling gaps in Roosevelt’s liberal-arts catalog), and the sheer convenience of two campuses a city block apart in the South Loop.
What Robert Morris represents is the career college absorbed into a traditional university — a quieter, gentler verdict than the abrupt closures that defined the era, but a real ending all the same. No students were stranded; faculty were largely retained; the name lives on as a college within Roosevelt. But the independent institution, its governance, and the distinctive career-and-access mission it had carried for over a century dissolved into a larger entity, and the landmark State Street building it had occupied sat vacant for years afterward.
Watkins College of Art, the oldest art institution in Nashville, traced its origins to 1885 and ceased to exist as an independent college in 2020, when it merged into Belmont University and reopened that fall as the Watkins College of Art at Belmont. It began not as an art school at all but as the Watkins Institute, a charitable trust established by Samuel Watkins — a former bond servant turned self-made Nashville businessman — who left $100,000 and a parcel of land to the State of Tennessee to provide free lectures and classes for the city’s poorer youth. Over more than a century it evolved into a small, accredited, degree-granting college of the visual arts, granting BFAs in fine art, film, photography, graphic design, and interior design. By 2020 it enrolled only about 150 students, down from roughly 304 just six years earlier, and its president had concluded that small, specialized colleges could no longer “perpetuate themselves.”
The merger, announced January 28, 2020, and effective that fall, distributed Watkins’s programs across Belmont: fine arts, graphic design, illustration, photography, and art into a newly created Watkins College of Art at Belmont; interior design into Belmont’s O’More College of Architecture and Design; film into the motion-pictures program in Belmont’s Curb College. Continuing Watkins students kept their lower tuition rate — about $31,600 a year against Belmont’s roughly $49,920 — with credits protected and added career and study-abroad support. It was Belmont’s second art-and-design acquisition in two years, following its 2018 absorption of the O’More College of Design, part of a national wave sweeping small specialized colleges into larger universities.
The absorption was not frictionless. Two students and a professor sued to stop it, and an opposition group, “Save Watkins,” argued that because the institution had begun as a public charitable trust, its assets could not simply be conveyed to a private religious university. In April 2020 a Tennessee chancellor declined to halt the merger, ruling the plaintiffs lacked standing under state nonprofit law. Beneath the legal question ran a cultural one: Belmont was a Christian university with religiously grounded employment and conduct policies, and Watkins was a secular art college, raising pointed concerns about academic freedom and the fit between the two.
In 2021 Belmont sold the 16.5-acre Watkins campus in MetroCenter for $22.5 million, dedicating the proceeds to a scholarship endowment for Watkins art students; the site is now a roughly 750-unit apartment development. The verdict is the classic absorbed ending: the programs and the name survive inside a larger university, the students were carried through, and a 135-year-old institution founded as a gift to the public — and the campus that housed it — dissolved into Belmont and a residential real-estate project.