In recent years, I’ve seen a number of articles about an imminent “crisis” in U. S. Higher education: enrollment is declining, they say, while costs keep going up; small colleges are on the brink; student loan debt is crushing a generation; it’s worse for poor and minority students . . . It can’t go on this way.
Many readers will know the refrain.
I’m no expert, yet my observations have mostly reinforced this message: higher ed sure looks like a mess, an industry overripe for disruption and sweeping, even radical restructuring.
Mostly.
Except, these reports pile up, and meantime life on campus seems to go on churning. So it’s like Paul Revere keeps riding through our town square, ringing his bell and shouting, “The British are coming!” But one autumn follows another, and these “British” never seem to show up. Or to vary the metaphor, the higher ed pundits continued crying “Wolf!” but the snarling packs of canis lupus had yet to arrive.
So count me skeptical. If things are really that bad, I figure there should be some visible impact by now, some institutional casualties amid the supposed carnage. If this was the steel industry, there would be (and are) empty factories we could drive past and gawk at, rusting away in once-prosperous valleys. In this case, the gnawed remains of dead colleges left and right.
But the biggest kerfuffle I’d seen reported was the announcement that Sweet Briar College, a horsey women’s school in Virginia, would shut down in 2015 due to sinking enrollment and finances.
But faculty activists and deep-pocketed alumni ran off the wolves and kept it open. Interesting, and I suppose it frightened their horses, though it was hardly the herald of the oft-predicted catastrophe.
It wasn’t til last week that I read something that was more than doom-and-gloom posturing. An outfit called “highereddive.com” put out another verse of the “British-wolves are coming” tune.
But this one added something new: an honest-to-gawd list of college closures since 2016.
[NOTE: Getting hard data here is not easy. An article in the New York Times of Oct. 11 states that 81 U. S. colleges have closed in the past decade.But its linked source is a numerical table from the National Center on Educational Statistics, which does not includes the schools’ names or locations. So thanks for almost nothing, folks.]
By contrast, highereddive.com didn’t just revise & recycle the earlier articles. Someone there actually did some work.
What a concept. There ought to be a name for that; let me check my Dictionary of Forgotten Words . . . sure enough, there is: journalism (you might want to jot that down).
Anyway, since they’ve done the hard part, I’m reposting their full list below. Look it over and make your own judgment: does it mark the iceberg-hitting-the-Titanic moment of U. S. Higher ed? Or maybe it’s no more than predictable (and overhyped) attrition among the weakest of 3000-plus American colleges, which are part of an industry behemoth still largely immune to the effects of its own internal follies?
From highereddive:
We’re tracking major closings, mergers, acquisitions and other consolidation among public and private nonprofit institutions from 2016 to the present.
The last few years have been tumultuous for many U.S. colleges. Pressure to lower tuition, stagnating state funding and a shrinking pool of high school graduates has strained many institutions’ bottom lines and questioned their long-term viability. Those pressures have caused some to close.
For many still in operation, the coronavirus pandemic and its economic impact is adding a host of uncertainties to already tight operations.
To make those trends easier to detect, we updated our tracker with a map showing closings and significant consolidations by state.
In doing that, we also revised our list to omit certain consolidation activity among public institutions in which their footprints remained largely the same. Prior to this update, we removed for-profit colleges from our list; this was due to their differences in scale from private nonprofit and public institutions as well as the sometimes fragmented nature of their closings.
We hope you find this tool useful in understanding consolidation across higher ed. If you see something we missed, let us know by using this form.
College closings and mergers by state
. . . public and private nonprofit colleges [that] have closed or merged, or have announced plans to, since 2016.
Alabama (3)
Concordia College Alabama (2018)
Southeastern Bible College (2017)
Judson College (2021)
California (6)
Marymount California University (2022)
San Francisco Art Institute (2022)
Mills College (2022)
Claremont School of Theology (Ongoing)
Coleman University (2018)
Shepherd University (2017)
Colorado (1)
Colorado Heights University (2017)
Connecticut (2)
St. Vincent’s College (2018)
Bridgeport Hospital School of Nursing (2017)
Delaware (1)
Wesley College (2021)
Florida (1)
Jones College (2017)
Illinois (6)
Lincoln College (2022)
MacMurray College (2020)
Robert Morris University (2020)
Morthland College (2018)
Chicago ORT Technical Institute (2017)
Shimer College (2017)
Indiana (5)
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (2024 – Planned)[NOTE: The Indiana-Purdue “closure” is mis-identified here; in fact it will be addition rather than subtraction, as one joint campus is planned to become two separate ones in the city, one for each of the former partner-sponsors.]
Ancilla College (2021)
Valparaiso University Law School (2020)
Indiana Tech Law School (2017)
Saint Joseph’s College (2017)
Kansas (1)
Wright Career College (2016)
Kentucky (1)
St. Catharine College (2016)
Massachusetts (9)
Pine Manor College (2022 – Expected)
Becker College (2021)
Newbury College (2019)
Atlantic Union College (2018)
Mount Ida College (2018)
Wheelock College (2018)
Episcopal Divinity School (2017)
School of the Museum of Fine Arts (2016)
The Boston Conservatory (2016)
Maine (1)
Salt Institute for Documentary Studies (2016)
Michigan (2)
Marygrove College (2019)
Miller College (2016)
Minnesota (1)
Crossroads College (2016)
Missouri (2)
St. Louis Christian College (2022)
Wentworth Military Academy and College (2017)
North Carolina (1)
John Wesley University (2018)
Nebraska (2)
Nebraska Christian College (2020)
Grace University (2018)
New Hampshire (1)
New Hampshire Institute of Art (2019)
Nevada (1)
Sierra Nevada University (Ongoing)
New York (6)
St. John’s University Staten Island campus (2024 – Planned)
Concordia College New York (2021)
College of New Rochelle (2019)
Bramson ORT College (2017)
Dowling College (2016)
Union Graduate College (2016)
Ohio (4)
Chatfield College (2023 – Planned)
Urbana University (2020)
Cincinnati Christian University (2019)
Trinity Lutheran Seminary (2018)
[NOTE: There is no notice of a pending closure for the seminary; however its sponsoring denominations are rapidly shrinking toward near-extinction, so its days may be numbered.]
Oklahoma (1)
St. Gregory’s University (2017)
Oregon (4)
Pacific Northwest College of Art (2021)
Concordia University – Portland (2020)
Oregon College of Art and Craft (2019)
Marylhurst University (2018)
Pennsylvania (3)
University of the Sciences (2022)
Abington Memorial Hospital Dixon School of Nursing (2017)
Philadelphia University (2017)
South Dakota (1)
Kilian Community College (2016)
Tennessee (5)
Martin Methodist College (2021)
Memphis College of Art (2020)
Watkins College of Art (2020)
Hiwassee College (2019)
O’More College of Design (2018)
Virginia (1)
Wave Leadership College (2022)
Vermont (5)
Marlboro College (2020)
College of St. Joseph (2019)
Green Mountain College (2019)
Southern Vermont College (2019)
Burlington College (2016)
Washington (1)
Trinity Lutheran College (2016)
Wisconsin (1)
Holy Family College (2020)
West Virginia (1)
Ohio Valley University (2022)
Nami Sumida/Education Dive
Looks like way under 1% of enrolled students’ institutions, much better than what is happening in the world of business generally speaking.
well, the list isn’t complete accurate. For example, IUPUI in Indiana is ceasing to exist under that name, but will still be in operation as distinct branch campuses of Indiana University and Purdue University as opposed to one institution. It’s ending a 52 year old agreement to operate as IUPUI, but nothing is really going to change — the student body is huge.
So far Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Ohio, it has always been sitting on the corner of, and loosely affiliated with, Capitol University there. Now the affiliation will be formal. It will become Trinity Lutheran Seminary at Capital University, so it’s not going away.
Brent, the article had a lengthy footnote/sidebar about the IUPUI changes, which I omitted for space. It notes that the ending of the joint campus is expected to ultimately result in more state campuses in the Indianapolis area rather than fewer. It also reports that the unmerger has even been endorsed by Eli Lilly Corp., which we know that in Hoosierland is better than stone tablets from Sinai.
As for the Ohio Lutheran Seminary, maybe the report garbled the past with a projected future: the seminary is the current result of several earlier mergers dictated by the accelerating shrinkage of the associated denominations. Maybe that’s why the next article in the search results was about a forecast that the Lutheran denominations in the USA will likely disappear in a couple of decades. So maybe the reporter was looking ahead; of course, if that happens, the Lutherans won’t be the only church to become mostly a memory. Similarly dire projections these days are a dime-a-dozen-denominations, not excluding Quakers.
Thank you for your thoughts and your research.
I have been thinking, and sharing my thoughts wherever, and this is what I have in mind…
Perhaps it is time for a ‘rethink’ rather than closure. Why not rethink the mission of colleges such as these. The nation’s immigration question needs some new solutions.
Why not rethink these colleges as Welcome Centers for the newly arrived? The colleges offer lodging, classrooms, food service and offices for the administrative tasks that lie ahead. Forget about credit hours, but think about these colleges as places where the newly arrived can learn essential English, essential industrial skills, American culture and have the assistance they need to get identified and placed into communities that might welcome them.
If you like this idea, share it with someone over coffee, or with someone with some influence.
What I don’t see mentioned here is the general decline in population, fertility rate — not just US, but world wide. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/global-decline-of-fertility-rates-visualised/ and https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth-rate My 3 children produced 2, and that’s it. So they did not replace themselves. My parents produced 7, who produced 7 (not counting the one who fostered and adopted), so we replaced ourselves. All except one have 4-yr degrees, and that one has 2 two-yr degrees. My children all have 4-yr degrees, and two have 3 Master’s. So — we’ve got the schools covered, just not the kids. Decline in population makes a difference. (Do I, Did I want 7? NO) We didn’t have to replace the population after WWII. My folks did, or felt like they did. They both came from small families (2 and 3) respectively. And they were born in the 20’s, so it wasn’t the Depression. They both wanted larger families than they grew up in.
Chuck, which of the schools are Quaker?
Jed, no Quaker colleges have closed in recent times. However, at least two — Guilford in NC and Earlham in Indiana — have been designated as financially very shaky by financial rating agencies. I wrote about this in 2020, in this post:
https://wp.me/p5FGIu-4aQ
However, the school’s situations are fast-moving, so they may now be less at risk . . . or more.