Holy Names University — 154 Years of Oakland’s First-Generation College, Closed by Debt and Decline
Summary
Holy Names University, perched in the Oakland hills of California and founded in 1868 by the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, announced on December 19, 2022 that it would close at the end of the spring 2023 semester, ending 154 years of continuous operation. It was among the oldest institutions in the East Bay and one of the most diverse — a Catholic university that had become, by its final decades, a college of first-generation students, of Hispanic and Black and immigrant Oakland, of the working adults and aspiring teachers the region's larger universities priced out or passed over. It closed not because of scandal or fraud but because the numbers no longer worked: declining enrollment, a deepening operating deficit, and a debt load that made survival impossible.
The institution that closed was small and getting smaller. Founded by a teaching order of sisters from Quebec, Holy Names had spent a century and a half preparing teachers and serving the East Bay, and it remained, to the end, defined by its mission to under-resourced students. In the fall of 2022 it enrolled roughly 943 students — about 520 undergraduates and 423 in graduate programs — but only 449 registered for spring 2023 as students, sensing the end, drifted toward the exits. Beneath the enrollment lay the real weight: roughly $49 million in debt secured on the property, and a 65-year-old campus whose deferred maintenance and compliance upgrades the board estimated could exceed $200 million. No partner could be found to absorb a college carrying that.
The closure came with a teach-out rather than a cliff. Dominican University of California, a fellow Catholic institution in San Rafael, agreed to take in Holy Names students and to import several of its academic programs, so that students could continue toward the degrees they had begun. Still, the loss was real and specific. When Holy Names closed, the East Bay lost one of its principal pipelines of teachers, and a population of first-generation students lost the small, mission-driven college that had been built precisely for them. The COVID-19 pandemic, the board said, had accelerated and exacerbated challenges that fell hardest on exactly those students — and on the institution that existed to serve them.
Timeline
A Teaching Order's College in the Oakland Hills
Holy Names began, like so many Catholic colleges, as the work of a teaching order with a clear sense of whom it was for. Six Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, an order out of Quebec, came to Oakland in 1868 and founded a convent and school that grew, over more than a century, into a college and then a university. Its purpose never strayed far from its founding charism: the sisters were teachers, and the institution they built was, above all, a place that made teachers — generation after generation of educators for the schools of the East Bay — and a college that opened its doors to women, to working adults, and to the children of immigrant Oakland when other institutions would not.
By its final decades, that mission had given Holy Names an identity rare among American universities. It was a Hispanic-serving and minority-serving institution, consistently ranked among the most ethnically diverse campuses in the country, enrolling a student body heavily first-generation and drawn from under-resourced communities. This was the college doing exactly what its founders intended, and doing it well: a small institution — enrollment hovering under a thousand — that measured itself by access rather than selectivity. But access at a private university is expensive. It means deep institutional aid, students with little capacity to absorb tuition increases, and a revenue base perpetually thinner than the cost of the education delivered. The mission and the fragility were, as at so many religious colleges, the same fact seen from two sides.
The Weight on the Hillside
What finally sank Holy Names was not only the enrollment decline that afflicted every small private college in the 2010s and 2020s; it was debt secured on a difficult, aging campus. The board chair, Steven Borg, named the problem with unusual candor: there was roughly $49 million in debt on the university's property, and the campus, by then 65 years old on its hillside site, carried deferred-maintenance and compliance-upgrade obligations that could run past $200 million. Those are not the numbers of an institution that can be rescued by a good admissions year. They are the numbers that scare off every potential merger partner, because no healthy institution wants to inherit a quarter-billion-dollar repair bill attached to a shrinking enrollment.
The enrollment, meanwhile, was failing in a specific and telling way. National declines in the number of high-school graduates, rising operating costs, and the deepening need for institutional aid had been squeezing the budget for years. Then the pandemic struck the precise population Holy Names served the hardest. Its students — first-generation, lower-income, many balancing work and family — were the ones for whom COVID-19 was most disruptive, most likely to interrupt or abandon their studies. The board said plainly that the pandemic and the economic downturn that followed had disproportionately impacted HNU's students, and through them, the university. By the fall of 2022 enrollment had fallen to roughly 943, and the institution had spent itself trying to find a partner who would keep the mission alive. None would take on the debt.
The Last Semester and the Soft Landing
The announcement came on December 19, 2022, just before the holidays — that the spring 2023 semester would be the last, and that after 154 years Holy Names would close. The timing did to the spring class what closure announcements always do: only about 449 of the fall's 943 students registered, as students who could transfer began to leave and others lost the certainty they needed to keep paying tuition. But unlike the most brutal closures, Holy Names did not simply abandon the students who remained. It had spent its final months not only searching for a buyer but arranging a landing.
That landing was Dominican University of California, a Catholic institution in San Rafael across the bay, whose president called the two universities' missions and degree offerings "beautifully aligned." Dominican agreed to accept Holy Names students and, with accreditor approval, to take on several of HNU's academic programs outright, so that students would not merely scatter but could continue toward the degrees they had begun within a related Catholic framework. It was a genuine teach-out, the dignified alternative to the cliff. Yet a teach-out preserves the students' credits, not the institution or its particular place in its city. When the last commencement passed in the spring of 2023, the Sisters of the Holy Names' 155-year presence in Oakland higher education ended, and the East Bay lost a college whose graduates had staffed its classrooms for a century and a half. The faculty and staff who had taught and run it lost their careers on the same date the students lost their school.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
For the students, the outcome was among the better ones available in a closure: Dominican University of California's willingness to take in both students and programs meant that those who wished to continue could do so within a Catholic university whose mission resembled the one they had chosen, rather than dispersing into the transfer market alone. Holy Names' academic records and the continuity of its programs had a custodian. The faculty and staff had no such cushion; a workforce that had sustained the university for generations was released as the institution dissolved.
The harder loss was communal. Holy Names had been one of the East Bay's principal teacher-preparation pipelines, and its closure threatened to deepen an already strained supply of educators for Oakland's schools — a public consequence that outlasted the private institution. The hillside campus, encumbered by debt and decay, entered the slow disposition that follows any closure. And Holy Names took its place in a lengthening procession of small Catholic and mission-driven colleges — Marylhurst, Marygrove, Holy Family, Fontbonne, Notre Dame of Ohio — closing across a single decade, each subtracting a little more of American higher education's commitment to the first-generation student. The diversity that made Holy Names distinctive made its loss disproportionate: the students it served had the fewest alternatives, in a region that had relied on it to make teachers for 154 years.
Lessons
- Property debt and deferred maintenance can foreclose a rescue: trustees should track the gap between a campus's repair obligations and its market value, because a quarter-billion-dollar liability scares off every merger partner long before enrollment alone would.
- An aging campus is a balance-sheet risk, not just a facilities one; the buildings that house a mission accrue compliance and maintenance costs that compound silently until they exceed the institution's capacity to carry them.
- A mission of access must be financed deliberately, because serving first-generation and lower-income students requires deep aid that thins the very revenue meant to sustain the college — the students who most need it least sustain it.
- Build the teach-out before the cliff: Holy Names' arrangement with Dominican to accept both students and programs is the model for a humane close, letting individuals finish within an aligned mission rather than scattering into the transfer market.
- When a minority-serving or teacher-producing college closes, the public loss exceeds the private one — regions and school systems that depend on such a pipeline should plan for its absence, because the students it served have the fewest alternatives.
References
- Holy Names University in Oakland to Close After Spring Semester in May 2023 Holy Names University
- Holy Names University Will Close in 2023 Inside Higher Ed
- 154-year-old Holy Names University in Oakland closing after spring 2023 semester ABC7 San Francisco
- Holy Names University closure could deal another blow to the East Bay's teacher pipeline The Oaklandside