Highland Park Community College — The College That Died With Its Company Town
Summary
Highland Park Community College, a public two-year college in Highland Park, Michigan — the small city completely surrounded by Detroit — was founded in 1918 as Highland Park Junior College and closed in 1996, when the collapsing city and school district that owned it could no longer pay for it. The end was not one announcement but a slow strangulation: the college missed two consecutive annual audits, Governor John Engler began withholding its state aid, and in February 1995 he announced its funding would be stripped from the budget entirely. By December 1995 the college had run out of money and shut its doors mid-year, stranding students — some a single semester from graduation — and the state's registrars recorded the formal closure in August 1996.
It was one of Michigan's oldest junior colleges, born in the same building as the high school of the original company town of the automobile age. Highland Park was where Henry Ford's Model T plant invented the moving assembly line and the five-dollar day; the city grew from 4,100 people in 1910 to 46,500 by 1920, and the junior college that opened in 1918 with 35 students was the boomtown's promise to its workers' children. It survived the Depression by referendum, swelled from 117 students to 1,800 on the GI Bill, and by the 1980s enrolled 2,000 to 3,000 students a year — by then a predominantly Black student body in a city 83 percent Black by the 1980 census and getting poorer as the industry that built it left.
The diagnosis is unusually clean: this was not a college that failed its market but a tax base that failed its college. Ford moved production out in 1927 and its headquarters out in 1930; Chrysler, founded in Highland Park in 1925, announced in September 1992 that it too was leaving, moving 7,000 jobs to suburban Auburn Hills. By 1989 the college carried a $1.4 million deficit, the "worst facilities of any community college in the state" per state investigators, and books too disordered to complete the audits its state aid depended on. When the state cut the cord, there was nothing underneath.
What was lost was the only college in one of the poorest cities in America — an open door that had stood 78 years for a state senator, a celebrated labor organizer, writers, artists, and thousands of nurses and technicians. No teach-out softened the landing; many stranded students simply never finished. The building that had housed the college since 1918 burned, piece by piece, into the next century.
Timeline
The Junior College of the Five-Dollar Day
No American college was ever more literally a company town's college. Highland Park in 1910 was a village of 4,100; then Henry Ford opened the Model T plant, perfected the moving assembly line, and announced the five-dollar day, and by 1920 the city held 46,500 people drawn from everywhere. The school district built a grand limestone high school in 1915, added a second unit in 1918, and tucked into it — alongside the girls' high school — a junior college. Thirty-five students enrolled that September for French, rhetoric, chemistry, zoology, and analytic geometry. The idea was the boomtown's bargain in miniature: the men on the line would have children who went to college, two blocks from the line.
For half a century the bargain held. Enrollment reached about 300 in the 1920s, and when the Depression cut it to 159 and nearly killed the college in 1929, the citizens of Highland Park voted to keep it — a referendum of loyalty few junior colleges ever receive. The Second World War emptied it to 117 students; the GI Bill refilled it to roughly 1,800 by 1947. In May 1954 the college put its own radio station, WHPR-FM, on the air. In 1977, when the high school moved up Woodward Avenue, the college — long since renamed Highland Park Community College — inherited the whole Glendale Avenue complex, and in the mid-1980s rebuilt its fire-gutted old gymnasium into a planted concourse for concerts and galleries. Through its doors passed Martha G. Scott, later a Michigan state senator; General Baker Jr., the Detroit labor organizer; the writer Bill Harris and the textile artist Carole Harris. It was never selective and never meant to be. It was the open door, kept open for 78 years.
But the city around the college had been hollowing for decades. Ford moved production to the River Rouge in 1927 and its headquarters to Dearborn in 1930; the freeways carried the prosperous outward. By 1968 the district's students were majority Black while its administration remained mostly white — a gap that drew sit-ins in 1969. Highland Park became a poor, proud, overwhelmingly Black city — 83 percent by the 1980 census — locked inside Detroit, its tax base resting on one remaining corporate citizen: Chrysler, headquartered in town since its founding in 1925.
Worst Facilities in the State
The college's final decade was a contest between its enrollment, which stayed respectable, and everything else, which did not. Two to three thousand students a year came through in the 1980s — for nursing, for transfer credits, for the second chance a community college sells cheaply. The institution underneath them was crumbling. By 1989 the deficit had reached $1.4 million. When administrators cut the LPN and respiratory-therapy programs — the college's most employable credentials — students staged a four-day sit-in until the cuts were reversed. The programs survived; the arithmetic did not. There were accusations of rampant misuse of funds, and worse than the accusations was the bookkeeping: the college missed two consecutive annual audits, which for a publicly funded institution is less an accounting lapse than a confession that no one knows where the money goes.
Then the city's last pillar fell. On September 8, 1992, Lee Iacocca announced that Chrysler — "based in the Detroit enclave since its founding 67 years ago," as the wire report put it — would move to its new technology center in suburban Auburn Hills, taking 7,000 employees by the end of 1993 and most of the rest two years later. Chrysler paid compensation, but the equation was final: a city of under 20,000, with poverty climbing toward the 38 percent the census would later record, had lost its largest taxpayer — and the college's local revenue was a claim on property values that were evaporating.
The state's patience evaporated with them. Governor John Engler began withholding state aid over the missed audits, and the inspectors he sent returned with a verdict that doubled as an epitaph: Highland Park Community College had the worst facilities of any community college in Michigan. The college the five-dollar day built was now the poorest college in the state, in the poorest city in the state, asking a budget-cutting governor to keep writing checks its own books could not account for.
No Longer Economically Viable
In February 1995 Engler stopped writing them. Announcing that all funding for the college would be stripped from the state budget, he pronounced sentence with the courtesy of a eulogy: "Though the college has a long and distinguished tradition, it has become apparent that it is no longer an economically viable institution." Local representatives fought to restore the money, arguing the college was mending its finances and its loss would devastate Highland Park's economy — both true, neither persuasive in Lansing. There was no merger partner, no endowment, no county district to annex it, and no city left to tax.
The college limped into the fall of 1995 on fumes and closed when the fumes ran out. By December 1995 it had no money to continue; instruction simply stopped, mid-year, with no teach-out plan. Students were stranded in mid-study, some a single semester from graduation. Nearby colleges offered what they could, but transfer is a tax paid by the student — credits, schedules, bus routes, child care — and many never finished, walking away from higher education entirely. The faculty and staff of the city's only college lost their jobs. In August 1996 the closure became official; the transcripts of 78 years went to the school district.
What makes the loss cut deeper than most is who was left holding it. This was a public college whose students, by its final decades, were overwhelmingly Black residents of a city the surrounding prosperity had abandoned — people for whom the college on Glendale Avenue was the only higher education within reach of a bus ride and a paycheck. Highland Park lost its hospitals in the 1990s, its main library in 2002, and — in a detail that became national shorthand for municipal collapse — most of its streetlights in 2011, repossessed over an unpaid electric bill. The college was the first of those amputations, and the least reversible. A city can rebuild a water system. Nobody rebuilds a 78-year-old college.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
The students scattered or stopped; the record keeps no count of which. The school district reopened the Glendale complex in 1996 as the Highland Park Career Academy, a vocational program in nursing, dental hygiene, and auto repair — a sliver of the old mission — and in 2001 Ford opened an automotive training center in the vocational building its five-dollar day had indirectly built. That afterlife ended the way the college had: the district, hemorrhaging enrollment and money, shut the Career Academy abruptly in January 2009, and in 2012 the state placed Highland Park's schools under an emergency manager, who converted the district to charter operation.
The building's fate completed the parable. Abandoned from 2009, the limestone complex was stripped by scrappers, and in May 2022 a fire destroyed the grand 1,100-seat auditorium where commencements had been held since the First World War. The complex stands abandoned and fire-scarred on Glendale Avenue today, periodically offered for sale, photographed by urban explorers as one of Detroit's most haunting ruins. Transcripts survive with the school district — the State of Michigan maintains a page directing alumni to them — and the alumni survive too, from a state senator to a movement organizer to thousands of nurses and technicians who began at the open door on Glendale. Highland Park has had no college since; of everything the city lost, none has been harder to undo.
Lessons
- Fund community colleges across a geography wide enough to survive one city's collapse; a single-municipality district is a single point of failure.
- Treat clean audits as existential, not clerical — an institution that cannot account for public funds hands its executioner the axe.
- If the state must defund a public college, it owes the enrolled students an orderly teach-out; starvation closures punish the only blameless party.
- Watch the tax base, not just the enrollment: Highland Park's classrooms were full long after the revenue that sustained them was gone.
- Count the equity cost of closure before the budget cost — when the only college in a poor Black city dies, the loss lands on those with the fewest alternatives, and it does not come back.
References
- Highland Park High School / Junior College / Career Academy Detroiturbex
- Highland Park Community College Transcript Request Michigan Department of Education
- Chrysler readies to pull out of Highland Park UPI
- Index of Closed Michigan Colleges MACRAO
- Highland Park Community College Wikipedia