Loretto Heights College — A Hilltop Women’s College the Sisters Sold to Stay Solvent

Summary

Loretto Heights College, founded by the Sisters of Loretto in 1891 atop a hill in southwest Denver and grown over nearly a century into one of Colorado's notable Catholic women's colleges, closed in 1988 — and the Sisters then sold the landmark campus, which a successor institution would occupy under another name. The Catholic college that had taught Denver women for ninety-seven years, transferred several programs to Regis College, sold its red-sandstone hilltop, and ceased to exist as an institution. The buildings endured; the college did not.

The decision was the Sisters', and it was made under financial pressure rather than catastrophe. By the 1980s Loretto Heights faced the same vise that closed scores of small Catholic women's colleges in the same decade: declining enrollment as coeducation drew women to formerly all-male universities, a shrinking and aging order of teaching sisters who had once supplied the college its low-cost labor and its very identity, and a cost structure no longer matched to its student count. Loretto Heights had adapted before — it admitted men in 1970 and, in 1971, helped pioneer the national University Without Walls program for adult learners — but adaptation did not restore the numbers, and the religious community that owned the college concluded it could no longer sustain it.

What followed makes the Fate word a genuine question. In 1988 the Sisters of Loretto closed the college and sold the hilltop campus to Regis College, the Jesuit institution across town; three Loretto Heights degree programs — including its respected nursing school — moved to Regis, helping it grow into Regis University by 1991. Regis, in turn, sold the campus in 1989 to the Teikyo University Group of Japan for about $7 million, and Teikyo opened Teikyo Loretto Heights University there to serve international students. The institution that bore the Loretto name was not continued under new ownership; it was wound down, its parts dispersed, and its real estate sold to a buyer who built something different on the ground.

The hilltop's story did not end with the Sisters. Teikyo Loretto Heights University became Colorado Heights University in 2009, an institution that itself closed at the end of 2017 as enrollment fell. In 2018 the Teikyo group sold the campus for $16.5 million to a developer, and the Edbrooke-designed administration building and Pancratia Hall — the landmarks the Sisters raised — entered a long redevelopment as a Denver neighborhood. The architecture survived three institutions. The Catholic women's college that built it survived only its own century.

Timeline

The Sisters' Hilltop

Loretto Heights began in the missionary energy of the Sisters of Loretto, who had come to Colorado from Kentucky in 1864 to bring Catholic schooling to a frontier territory. The college proper rose from a decision in the late 1880s to build a grand new academy on a hill southwest of Denver, a project led by Mother Pancratia Bonfils, whose name the campus's signature hall would later carry. The Sisters commissioned Denver's pre-eminent architect, Frank Edbrooke — designer of the Brown Palace Hotel — for the Administration Building, a red-sandstone landmark that opened in 1891 and that still crowns the hilltop today. From its first day the institution was a statement: a permanent Catholic presence for the education of women, built in stone to last.

For nearly a century it did what such colleges did, and did it well. The academy matured into a degree-granting college, accredited by 1926, and over the following decades built the programs that defined it — most enduringly the collegiate nursing school begun in 1945, which trained generations of Denver nurses. Harry Edbrooke's Pancratia Hall, raised around 1928–1930, expanded the residential campus and gave the Heights its second great building. The college's golden decades were those of the mid-twentieth-century Catholic women's college: a community of teaching sisters and lay faculty educating young Catholic women in the liberal arts, nursing, education, and the fine arts, on a hilltop with a view of the Front Range. The Sisters owned it, staffed much of it, and subsidized it with their vocations — the unpaid, vowed labor that made small Catholic colleges financially possible in the first place.

That model was the college's strength and, ultimately, its vulnerability. Loretto Heights existed because an order of women religious willed it into being and sustained it with their lives; its identity, its affordability, and its mission were all bound to the Sisters of Loretto. So long as the order was large and young, the arrangement held. When the order began to shrink and age in the second half of the century — as nearly all American teaching orders did after the 1960s — the foundation beneath the college began, slowly and then unmistakably, to give way.

A College Adapting Against the Current

Loretto Heights did not go quietly into decline; it tried, repeatedly, to change with its era. In 1970, after nearly eighty years as a women's college, it admitted men — the same concession that swept the small Catholic women's colleges of the period as coeducation at the formerly all-male universities drew away the women who had once filled their classrooms. In 1971 it went further, joining twelve colleges nationwide to pioneer the University Without Walls, an early and genuinely innovative program that let adult learners earn degrees through flexible scheduling and credit for life experience. These were not the moves of a complacent institution; they were the moves of a college reading the demographic and cultural shifts correctly and trying to find a sustainable place within them.

But adaptation could not reverse the underlying arithmetic. The pool of young Catholic women seeking a single-sex liberal-arts education was shrinking, and coeducation, while it broadened the market, also threw Loretto Heights into direct competition with larger, better-funded universities. More decisively, the Sisters of Loretto — the order that owned the college and had always subsidized it through the donated labor of its members — was contracting. Fewer sisters meant both a thinner identity and a higher cost structure, as vowed religious were replaced by salaried lay faculty and staff. A residential hilltop campus is expensive to operate, and by the 1980s the expense was no longer matched by enrollment or by the order's capacity to underwrite the gap.

By the middle of that decade the Sisters faced the question that the leadership of every small Catholic women's college faced in those years, and that this encyclopedia records again and again: whether to spend the community's remaining resources keeping a college alive, or to close it on their own terms while they still controlled the outcome. Loretto Heights had no large endowment to fall back on and no denominational subsidy beyond the order itself. The Sisters chose the harder, clearer path — to end the college deliberately rather than let it fail by attrition — and in doing so they accepted that the institution they had built over ninety-seven years would not survive them.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The students of Loretto Heights fared comparatively well, because the closure was orderly and the Sisters arranged landings rather than abandoning the campus to creditors. The nursing program and two other degree programs moved to Regis College, carrying students and faculty with them, and those programs became part of what made Regis a university by 1991; the Loretto Heights alumni were eventually embraced by Regis as its own, their records and their memory preserved by the institution that took in their college's surviving parts. It was, by the standards of the closures in this encyclopedia, a humane exit — a teach-out by transfer rather than a door locked overnight.

The campus itself outlasted the Sisters' ownership and two successors after that, until the 2018 sale opened its redevelopment as a Denver neighborhood with the Edbrooke landmarks preserved. The Sisters of Loretto remained a presence in Denver memory and in the alumni community, and the order's burial ground on the property kept the founders literally rooted to the hill. What was lost was not the architecture, which survives, but the institution: a ninety-seven-year-old Catholic women's college, closed by the women who built it because they could no longer keep it, and never reborn under its own name.

Lessons

References

• Colorado Heights University Wikipedia
• A Last Look at Loretto Heights College Regis University Magazine
• Loretto Heights Historic Denver
• History of Loretto Heights College Regis University Libraries
• Loretto Heights campus sells for $16.5 million BusinessDen