Cascade College — A Borrowed Name, a Subsidized Campus, and Numbers That Never Reached Break-Even

Summary

Cascade College, a Churches of Christ liberal-arts college in northeast Portland, Oregon, was closed by its parent institution at the end of the spring 2009 semester after fifteen years as a satellite campus of Oklahoma Christian University. The Oklahoma Christian Board of Trustees announced the decision on October 27, 2008, citing the obvious arithmetic: after fifteen years of effort and roughly four million dollars in subsidy, the Portland branch had never come close to the enrollment it needed to pay for itself. Some 280 students and about 45 full-time faculty and staff were given the spring to wind down. The final commencement, on May 2, 2009, sent out a class of 69.

The institution that closed in 2009 was younger than its name suggested. The Cascade College that held its last graduation was opened in the fall of 1994, when Oklahoma Christian University — a Churches of Christ school 1,500 miles away in Oklahoma City — agreed to take over a struggling Portland campus and run it as a branch. That campus had belonged to Columbia Christian College, a fellow Churches of Christ institution founded in 1956 that lost its regional accreditation and closed in 1993. Oklahoma Christian revived the old, resonant name of an earlier Portland school — the original Cascade College, which had run from 1918 to 1969 before merging into Seattle Pacific — and reopened the doors with 143 students that first semester. It was, in effect, a third attempt to sustain a four-year Christian college in Portland on the same ground. Like the two before it, it did not last.

The cause was not scandal or fraud but a simple structural mismatch between cost and scale. A residential four-year college with a faculty, a campus, and a sports program needs hundreds of full-paying students to break even; Cascade ran, by its board chairman's own estimate, in the 300 range against a break-even closer to 500 to 700. Oklahoma Christian covered the gap year after year out of its own budget, and when the 2008 economy turned and the path to growth disappeared, the parent decided it could no longer justify subsidizing a branch that would not become self-supporting. The closure was orderly by the standards of the genre — more than a semester's notice, a teach-out offer, an open door at the Oklahoma City campus — but the offer's geography told the story: students could finish their degrees, fifteen hundred miles from home. About 65 made the move.

What was lost was small in headcount and large in meaning: a Christian liberal-arts foothold in the Pacific Northwest, a tight community of a few hundred, the careers of 45 employees in a recession, and a name — Cascade — that had now been buried twice in the same city.

Timeline

A Name Reclaimed in Northeast Portland

The Cascade College that closed in 2009 carried a name with deep Portland roots and a complicated provenance. The original bearer was founded in 1918 as the North Pacific Evangelistic Institute, became the Portland Bible Institute in 1929, and took the name Cascade College in 1940 as it grew from a Bible school into a four-year liberal-arts college. That first Cascade expanded to meet its enrollment, took on debt to do it, and could not service the debt; after its fifty-first graduation in 1969, the board chose to discontinue operations and merge what remained — students, alumni records, mailing lists, mementos, and traditions — into Seattle Pacific College, which shared its religious outlook and became the keeper of its memory. The first Cascade College died of the oldest cause in this encyclopedia: it built for a future enrollment that never arrived.

The campus that would later wear the name had its own separate history. Columbia Christian College, a Churches of Christ school, was founded in 1956 and made its home on an eleven-acre campus at 9101 East Burnside Street. It, too, struggled financially, and the trouble cost it the thing a college cannot live without — its regional accreditation. Columbia Christian closed in 1993, leaving an intact campus, a willing constituency of Churches of Christ in the Northwest, and no institution to use them.

Into that vacancy stepped Oklahoma Christian University, a sister Churches of Christ institution in Oklahoma City. Rather than let the Portland foothold disappear, Oklahoma Christian agreed in 1994 to operate the campus as a branch of itself — extending its own accreditation over the new operation rather than seeking the slow, separate approval a standalone college would have required. It reached back past the failed Columbia Christian name to the older, fonder one and reopened the doors as Cascade College, with 143 students that first semester. The golden age, such as it was, came quickly and ran modestly: through the late 1990s and 2000s, Cascade was a genuine small Christian college — a residential community of a few hundred, a faculty devoted to undergraduate teaching, NAIA Thunderbirds in the Cascade Collegiate Conference, a place where the Churches of Christ of the Pacific Northwest could send their children to a four-year college close to home. For students and faculty inside it, it was the whole world for a while. The trouble was that the world was never quite large enough to pay for itself.

The Arithmetic of a Small College

Cascade's problem was not mismanagement, malfeasance, or a single bad year. It was the unforgiving arithmetic of the small residential college, stated more plainly here than almost anywhere. A four-year campus with classrooms, dormitories, a faculty, and an athletics program carries a large fixed cost regardless of how many students walk through the door, and tuition revenue scales only with enrollment. Board chairman Kerry Barnes put the figure bluntly: a college like Cascade needed roughly 500 to 700 students just to break even, and Cascade ran in the 300 range. The 2007 census counted about 265 students; the 2008 figure stood near 300. At no point in fifteen years did the branch approach the threshold that would have let it stand on its own.

Oklahoma Christian absorbed the difference. Over the fifteen years it ran Cascade, the parent subsidized the Portland branch with approximately four million dollars — an act of denominational mission, a Churches of Christ institution willing the survival of a Churches of Christ college in a region that wanted one. That subsidy was both Cascade's lifeline and the measure of its dependence. As long as the parent was willing to cover the gap and could see a credible path to closing it, the branch survived. The decisive question was never solvency in the abstract; it was whether Oklahoma Christian would keep paying, and for how long.

By the autumn of 2008 the answer hardened. After fifteen years, Cascade had shown no trajectory toward self-sufficiency, and the financial crisis then gripping the country removed any optimism that the next fifteen would differ. Board chairman Don Millican framed the decision as the end of a long, sincere effort: after fifteen years of considerable effort and investment, the trustees had been unable to find a viable financial or academic model that would let Cascade flourish for the foreseeable future. It was the rare closure announced not in a panic over a missed payroll but in the cool recognition that a subsidy with no end in sight is not a strategy. The parent could afford to keep Cascade open; it could no longer justify it.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The students scattered. Roughly 65 transferred to Oklahoma Christian's main campus in Oklahoma City; the remainder of the 280 enrolled at closing assembled their own landings among Oregon's colleges or left school. The final class of 69 graduated under the Cascade name on May 2, 2009, the last degrees the institution would ever award. About 45 full-time faculty and staff lost their positions in the teeth of a national recession; roughly two-thirds found new work, several of them staying in the Portland area — one joined the University of Portland, another became a minister at a nearby Church of Christ — but for the rest, a small specialized academic job market had just contracted further.

The campus itself outlasted the college, as campuses tend to. The eleven-acre site at 9101 East Burnside, having now housed two failed Churches of Christ colleges in succession, was purchased in 2012 by Columbia Christian Schools, and Warner Pacific College later made use of continuing-education space there. The records and traditions of the modern Cascade joined those of its predecessors in the documentary afterlife: Oklahoma Christian commissioned a written history of the 1994–2009 branch, "The Northwest Corner of Heaven," to sit alongside the older archives of the 1918–1969 Cascade now kept at Seattle Pacific. The lasting mark of Cascade College is quieter than most in this collection — no lawsuit, no fraud, no scandal — but it is instructive precisely because of that. It is the clean case of an institution that everyone wanted to succeed, that was run honestly and supported generously, and that closed anyway because the numbers, patiently and repeatedly, refused to add up.

Lessons

References

• Cascade College to close after spring semester The Christian Chronicle
• Saying goodbye to Cascade College The Christian Chronicle
• Cascade College Wikipedia
• Cascade College: Narrative Description Encyclopedia.com
• Cascade College, 1918–1969 — Special Collections Seattle Pacific University