Oak Point University — A 110-Year Nursing School That Gave Its Students Three Weeks’ Notice
Summary
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.
Timeline
A Century of Bedside Training
Oak Point University was old in a way its 2021 name disguised. Strip away the rebrand and the institution reached back to February 1914, when the West Suburban Hospital School for Nurses opened its doors beside West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park to train nurses in the classic hospital-diploma model — students learning at the bedside while staffing the wards. For most of the twentieth century this was how American nursing was made, and the school was a fixture of the region's health-care system, feeding generations of nurses into the hospitals of Chicago's western suburbs.
The institution modernized in step with the profession. As nursing moved from diplomas toward degrees, the school earned degree-granting authority from the Illinois Board of Higher Education in 1981, affiliated for nearly two decades with Concordia College, and emerged in 2003 as the independent West Suburban College of Nursing. When Resurrection Health Care purchased it in 2004 and reorganized it as Resurrection University in 2010, it broadened beyond nursing into the wider health sciences — imaging technology, health informatics and administration — and in 2012 moved to a Wicker Park campus at Saint Elizabeth Medical Center. By 2017, near its peak of roughly 914 students, it was running baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs, a new Doctor of Nursing Practice, and a suite of allied-health degrees.
The 2021 transformation looked, briefly, like ambition. Cut loose to operate independently, the school rebranded as Oak Point University and opened a second campus in suburban Oak Brook, signaling growth. But the new name landed on an institution whose fundamentals were already softening, and the timing could hardly have been worse: a small, specialized, tuition-dependent university chose to expand its physical footprint at the precise moment its enrollment was about to fall off a cliff.
When the Pass Rate Fails, So Does the School
For a nursing school, two numbers matter above all others: how many students enroll, and how many of its graduates pass the NCLEX licensing exam. Between 2019 and 2022, both numbers moved the wrong way at once. Enrollment fell from 860 students in the fall of 2019 to 429 by the fall of 2022 — roughly halved in three years, the pandemic accelerating a decline that was already underway. A school of a few hundred tuition-paying students has very little margin, and Oak Point posted an operating loss of about $2.4 million in fiscal 2022. The arithmetic of a small health-sciences university is unforgiving: fixed costs in faculty, clinical placements, and now two campuses, set against a shrinking and irreplaceable tuition base.
The accreditation trouble was, if anything, more damaging, because it struck at the school's core promise. Illinois requires nursing programs to maintain at least a 75 percent pass rate on the NCLEX; Oak Point's fell below that line from 2019 through 2022, reaching a low of 62 percent in 2021. A nursing graduate who cannot pass the licensing exam cannot be a nurse, and a program that cannot reliably produce passers cannot recruit students or justify its existence. The Higher Learning Commission placed Oak Point on probation — compounded by a finding that the university had failed to disclose its probationary status to the Illinois nursing board — and although pass rates recovered to 81 percent by 2023, the reputational and regulatory damage had been done. The combination was lethal: an institution losing students it could not afford to lose, on the strength of outcomes it could not afford to miss.
By early 2024 the board had run the numbers and concluded the university could not continue. President Therese Scanlan would say only that the decision came "in response to a series of factors that have affected our University" — the standard, deflecting language of a closure announcement. The factors were not mysterious: enrollment, finances, and the pass-rate crisis had converged on a small school with no endowment cushion and a brand-new second campus it could no longer fill.
Three Weeks to Close a Clinical Program
The closure announcement on March 28, 2024 gave students roughly three weeks before the term — and the institution — would end. For students in any program that is a shock; for students mid-way through clinical nursing rotations, simulation requirements, and licensure-track coursework, it was a particular cruelty, because health-sciences credits and clinical hours do not transfer as cleanly as lecture credits, and a nurse's path to licensure is tightly sequenced. People who had organized their careers and families around finishing at Oak Point learned, weeks from the end of a term, that the school issuing their credentials would not exist by summer.
What softened the blow was geography and goodwill. Lewis University, in Romeoville, ran its own health-care programs and — crucially — operated an Oak Brook campus only a few blocks from Oak Point's. Lewis moved quickly to establish a teach-out agreement, accepting Oak Point's students with full transfer of credits earned toward their degrees, holding tuition and fees steady, and committing to safeguard and house Oak Point's academic records so that graduates and former students could obtain transcripts. The overlap in nursing and health-care programs meant Oak Point's students could, in many cases, slot into equivalent Lewis programs without losing ground — about as good an outcome as an abrupt closure allows. It was the orderly side of a disorderly ending.
Still, the manner of the closure left its mark. A teach-out a few blocks away does not erase the disruption of switching institutions weeks before finals, nor the lost momentum for students who chose to scatter elsewhere, nor the careers of faculty and staff cut short with the same short notice. After 110 years — from a 1914 hospital diploma program to a 2021 university with two campuses — one of the Chicago area's oldest and most established nursing pipelines closed in the space of three weeks. The bedside training that began at West Suburban Hospital simply moved down the road, under another university's name.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
For most enrolled students, the Lewis University teach-out worked roughly as a teach-out should. Credits earned toward an Oak Point degree transferred in full, tuition and fees held steady, and the geographic and curricular overlap — including Lewis's Oak Brook campus just blocks away — let many students continue their nursing and health-sciences programs with minimal lost ground. Lewis also took custody of Oak Point's transcripts and historical records, so the closure did not strand graduates from proving their credentials, the failure that has haunted other shuttered schools. For students deep in clinical sequences, though, three weeks' notice still meant scramble and disruption, and some left for other institutions entirely.
Faculty and staff lost their positions on the same compressed timeline, and the region lost one of its oldest dedicated nursing schools — a pipeline that had supplied its hospitals since 1914. The Wicker Park and Oak Brook campuses, like the institution itself, passed out of the higher-education landscape. What Oak Point leaves is a clean illustration of how a small professional school dies: not through scandal but through the slow convergence of falling enrollment, thinning finances, and a slipping outcome metric, until a board concludes that one more year is one year too many. The lasting consolation is that its students were caught, by a neighbor a few blocks away, rather than dropped.
Lessons
- For a professional or licensure-track school, defend the outcome metric above all else — a falling exam pass rate is an existential threat, not a quality footnote, because it dissolves both enrollment and accreditation.
- Do not expand the physical footprint into a demographic downturn; new campuses add fixed costs precisely when a shrinking tuition base can least support them.
- Disclose accreditation trouble to every body that relies on it, especially the state licensing boards that credential your graduates; concealment turns a survivable problem into a fatal breach of trust.
- Line up a teach-out partner — ideally a nearby institution with overlapping programs — before announcing a closure, so students can continue rather than scatter.
- Students entering a small, single-discipline school should watch its enrollment trend and its licensure pass rates as closely as its brochures; those two numbers predict whether the institution will be there to graduate them.
References
- Healthcare-focused Oak Point University to close abruptly in April Higher Ed Dive
- Oak Point University announces closure Inside Higher Ed
- Oak Point University nursing school announces imminent closure of Oak Brook, Chicago campuses ABC7 Chicago
- Lewis University announces teach-out agreement for Oak Point University students Lewis University
- Oak Point University Wikipedia