St. Augustine College — The Midwest’s First Bilingual College, Merged Into Lewis in 2024

Summary

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.

Timeline

A College Built So Language Would Not Be a Wall

St. Augustine College was the answer to a specific injustice. In the Chicago of the 1970s, a Spanish-speaking adult who wanted a degree faced a system that conducted itself entirely in English and that treated a first language other than English as a deficiency to be overcome before learning could begin. Father Carlos A. Plazas, a priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, spent more than a decade through Spanish Episcopal Services working among the city's Latino population before concluding that the community needed not another social program but a college of its own — one that would meet students in Spanish and walk them into English rather than demanding fluency at the door. On October 7, 1980, the Illinois Board of Higher Education granted that vision a charter, and the first bilingual institution of higher education in Illinois, and the Midwest, opened in the Uptown neighborhood on the North Side.

The bilingual model was the whole point and the whole achievement. A student could begin coursework in Spanish and finish it in English, earning genuine, accredited associate and bachelor's degrees while building the English fluency that the rest of American life would demand. For a first-generation, largely immigrant, heavily working student body, this was transformative: it removed the single barrier that had kept a degree out of reach and treated bilingualism as an asset to be developed rather than a problem to be fixed. The college earned recognition as a Hispanic-serving institution and a place in the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, and at its peak around 2010 it served on the order of 1,700 students. It was small, it was poor, and it was, for the Latino Chicago it served, something close to irreplaceable — a college the community had effectively built for itself, rooted in a church's mission and in a stubborn refusal to accept that language should decide who gets to learn.

The Arithmetic of Serving the Underserved

The mission that made St. Augustine vital also made it financially fragile. A college built for low-income, first-generation, often immigrant students cannot solve its budget problems the way a wealthier institution can — it cannot raise tuition without pricing out the very people it exists to serve, and it draws from families with little capacity to give the kind of major gifts that build an endowment. St. Augustine ran on tuition and on the federal and state aid its students brought, with scarcely any reserve behind it. So long as enrollment held, the model worked. When enrollment began to fall, there was nothing underneath.

And fall it did. From a peak around 1,700 in the early 2010s, enrollment slid to roughly 730 by the fall of 2021 — a loss of well over half its students in a decade. The forces were partly external and beyond any single college's control: a shrinking pool of traditional-age students, the rising cost of operating even a small campus, competition from community colleges and online providers, and a pandemic that hit non-traditional and low-income students hardest of all. But the effect on a tightly stretched, lightly endowed institution was acute. St. Augustine could not cut its way to stability without gutting the bilingual, high-support model that justified its existence, and it could not grow revenue without abandoning the students it was built for. By the early 2020s its leadership faced the choice that has confronted dozens of small colleges: preside over a slow erosion toward insolvency, or find a partner while the institution still had a campus, a mission, and students worth merging.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

For students, the merger was close to seamless and genuinely beneficial. The Uptown campus stayed open, the bilingual programs continued, credits and degrees retained their value, and students gained access to a far broader catalog through Lewis's strengths in health sciences, technology, and aviation. The bilingual pathway that defined St. Augustine — begin in Spanish, finish in English — survives, and the institution's national recognition for social mobility under the Lewis banner suggests the mission did not merely persist but was validated. Faculty and staff were absorbed into a larger, more stable university rather than dismissed from a closing one. By every human measure, this is the outcome a community would choose over an outright closure.

The lasting mark is harder to weigh, and it is the particular ache of seeing a minority-serving institution absorbed. St. Augustine College as an independent entity — chartered in 1980, born of the Episcopal Diocese's mission and Father Plazas's decade of work, owned by and answerable to Chicago's Latino community — no longer exists. Its accreditation, its governance, and its autonomy passed to Lewis University; what was once a college the community built for itself is now a campus and a brand within someone else's institution. There is real cause for gratitude that the bilingual mission lives on, and real cause to mark the loss of an institution that, for forty-four years, was Chicago Latino higher education in its own right rather than a program inside someone else's university. Both are true, and the careful telling holds them together: the work survives, the institution is gone.

Lessons

References

• Lewis University to Absorb St. Augustine College Higher Ed Dive
• Lewis University, St. Augustine College Say They Plan to Merge CBS Chicago
• St. Augustine College Merging With Lewis University St. Augustine College
• Lewis University and St. Augustine College Merger Lewis University
• St. Augustine College (Illinois) Wikipedia