Trinity Christian College — Sixty-Six Years on a Former Golf Course, Closed by the Math

Summary

Trinity Christian College, the Reformed-tradition liberal-arts college in Palos Heights, Illinois, founded in 1959 by Chicago-area families who wanted a college rooted in Reformed Christian higher education, announced on November 5, 2025 that it would close at the end of the 2025-26 academic year. It held its final commencement on May 8, 2026, after sixty-six years on a wooded suburban campus that had once been a golf course. A college that opened with five faculty and roughly thirty-six students, and that for two generations supplied teachers, nurses, and church leaders to the Christian Reformed community of the upper Midwest, simply could not make the arithmetic work any longer.

The college's own diagnosis was honest and uncolored by villainy. The board, having voted to close on November 3, cited "post-COVID financial losses, persistent operating deficits, a decline in college enrollment, increased competition for students, and shifting donor giving." Those are the standard riders of the small-college obituary in this decade, and Trinity wore all of them. It had operated at a loss in eight of its last ten fiscal years. Its total assets had fallen 14 percent between fiscal 2020 and 2024 to $72.3 million, and its cash had dropped by roughly $8 million to about $5 million. In June 2025 it failed to meet its bond covenants — the technical default that, for a college already bleeding cash, usually marks the beginning of the end.

What was lost was not enormous in scale but specific in character. Trinity was a confessional college: education "rooted in Reformed theology," as its board put it, and woven into the life of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, whose synod it had hosted more than once. Enrollment had peaked near 1,068 in the fall of 2019 and slipped to about 854 by the fall of 2024 — a roughly 22 percent decline across the enrollment cliff. Acting president Jeanine Mozie's conclusion was the kind that small-college boards reach with grief rather than relief: "there is no sustainable path forward for our beloved institution." The closure cost the college's roughly 100-plus employees their jobs and the Reformed community of Chicago's southwest suburbs an institution it had built deliberately, family by family, in 1959.

Timeline

A College Built on Purpose

Trinity Christian College was not the product of a denomination's central planning but of a community's conviction. In 1959, families of the Reformed tradition in the Chicago area — many tied to the Christian Reformed Church in North America — elected a board and set out to build a college that would offer higher education explicitly rooted in Reformed Christian thought. They bought a former golf course in Palos Heights, in the southwest suburbs, and opened a two-year college with about five faculty members and some thirty-six students. It was a grassroots institution in the most literal sense: a college willed into being by the people who would send their children to it.

It grew the way such colleges grow when the surrounding community sustains them. Trinity began awarding four-year degrees by 1971, added graduate programs in 2012, and matured into a comprehensive liberal-arts college offering more than seventy programs across undergraduate, graduate, and adult-degree-completion tracks. Throughout, it kept its confessional identity intact and its ties to the Christian Reformed Church close — the denomination held its synod on Trinity's campus more than once, a sign of how thoroughly the college was woven into the life of the church that surrounded it. CRC general secretary Zach King's farewell captured the relationship: "Trinity has been such a blessing to the Christian Reformed Church and its congregations for the past nearly 70 years."

The college's strongest years came in the 2010s, when enrollment climbed toward its 2019 peak of about 1,068 students and its program catalog reached its fullest extent. For a small confessional college, that was a genuine height: a stable, mission-driven institution serving a defined community, turning out teachers for Christian schools, nurses for the region's hospitals, and leaders for Reformed congregations across the upper Midwest. Trinity was never going to be large, and it never tried to be. Its identity was the point — "providing transformative education rooted in Reformed theology at an affordable rate," in the board's phrase. The trouble was that the second half of that phrase, "at an affordable rate," is precisely the part that becomes impossible to sustain when enrollment falls and costs do not.

The Slow Arithmetic of Decline

Trinity's decline was not dramatic; it was cumulative, recorded in audited financial statements rather than scandal. The college operated at a loss in eight of its last ten fiscal years — a pattern that tells the story before any single number does. Between fiscal 2020 and fiscal 2024, total assets fell 14 percent to $72.3 million, and the cash holdings that buy a struggling institution time dropped by roughly $8 million to about $5 million. Net tuition and fee revenue in fiscal 2024 came to $12.1 million against total expenses of $32.9 million — the gulf between the two filled, year after year, by drawing down assets the college could not replace.

Beneath the financials sat the enrollment cliff. From its 2019 peak near 1,068, enrollment slid to about 854 by the fall of 2024, a roughly 22 percent decline. Each of those lost students was lost net tuition, and for a college already running deficits, the math compounds: fewer students mean less revenue, which forces cuts that make the college less attractive, which costs more students. Trinity's board named the surrounding pressures precisely — increased competition for a shrinking pool of college-goers, and "shifting giving priorities by donors," the quiet erosion of the philanthropic base that a confessional college leans on more heavily than most. The community that built Trinity in 1959 was aging, and its giving was flowing elsewhere.

The technical end-stage arrived in June 2025, when the college failed to meet its bond covenants. A covenant default rarely closes a college by itself, but for an institution that has burned through most of its cash and run deficits for the better part of a decade, it removes the last cushion: it can trigger lender action, raise borrowing costs, and force the question the board had been deferring. By the autumn of 2025 there was no plausible path that did not run through more years of losses against a falling head count. The board voted to close on November 3 and announced it on November 5. Acting president Jeanine Mozie's words were the honest summary of a decade of statements: "there is no sustainable path forward for our beloved institution."

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The students were Trinity's stated first priority, and the structure of the wind-down reflected it. The college held its final commencement on May 8, 2026, graduating as many students as it could — even allowing course overloads so more could finish on time — and arranged teach-out agreements with Saint Xavier, Calvin, and Olivet Nazarene universities for those who needed to continue elsewhere. Calvin University in Grand Rapids took custody of the academic records and transcripts, the essential service that outlives the institution. No graduating class was cut off mid-degree; the closure was timed to the calendar so the academic year could finish before the doors did.

For employees, the closure meant the loss of more than a hundred jobs in Palos Heights, with the college promising departing faculty and staff "resources for moving to new jobs elsewhere" — cold comfort against the end of careers built around a single small college. The wooded campus on College Drive, a substantial suburban property with roots as a golf course, faced the uncertain post-closure future common to shuttered colleges, its disposition undetermined at the announcement. And the Christian Reformed community of Chicago's southwest suburbs lost the institution it had purpose-built in 1959 — a college that had hosted the denomination's synod and supplied its schools, hospitals, and pulpits for nearly seventy years.

The lasting mark is a reminder of how a beloved, well-run, mission-clear college dies in this decade: not in scandal but in arithmetic, one deficit year at a time, until a bond covenant fails and the board can no longer pretend the trend will reverse. Trinity's leaders did not gamble the institution away or conceal its condition; they ran a confessional college honestly into a demographic and financial headwind that proved stronger than their community's loyalty. For the cluster of small Reformed and confessional colleges that remain, Trinity Christian is the cautionary case nearest to home — the proof that fidelity to a mission and care for one's people are necessary, but not sufficient, to survive.

Lessons

References

• Trinity Christian College to close at the end of the academic year Higher Ed Dive
• Trinity Christian College to Close Christian Reformed Church in North America
• Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois, to close at end of 2025-2026 school year CBS Chicago
• Trinity Christian College Wikipedia