Marylhurst University, a Catholic institution on a wooded campus south of Portland, Oregon, chartered in 1893 by the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, announced in May 2018 that it would close at the end of the year. It was Oregon’s oldest Catholic university and the first liberal-arts college for women in the Pacific Northwest, and it had spent the last half of its life as something rarer still: a pioneer of adult and online education, built for the working student returning to finish a degree. The board of trustees voted unanimously to close on May 17, 2018, ending a 125-year history and dispersing its remaining students, the great majority of them well past traditional college age.
The cause was enrollment, and the irony is that Marylhurst was undone by the very market it had helped invent. Having reoriented itself in 1974 toward adult learners — older students, online and evening classes, flexible terms — it had been decades ahead of an idea that the rest of higher education eventually seized. When the recession of 2008 sent working adults back to school in search of credentials, Marylhurst’s enrollment swelled toward 2,000. When the economy recovered, those students stopped coming, and the larger, richer universities that had finally embraced online education arrived with marketing budgets Marylhurst could not match. Its president put it plainly: everyone caught up to us. Enrollment fell from 1,409 in the fall of 2013 to 743 four years later — nearly cut in half — and the board concluded the institution could not be rescued.
The closure was, by the standards of this family, comparatively gentle. The university counted just over 400 students at the end; some 81 could graduate that summer, and the institution committed to helping the remaining few hundred transfer. The 50-acre campus reverted to the Sisters of the Holy Names, the religious order that had founded the college and could now decide its future. What Marylhurst lost was not, mostly, stranded undergraduates, but an institutional identity: a small Catholic university that had bet its second century on a model the giants of higher education would eventually take, scale, and dominate.
Notre Dame College, a Catholic institution in South Euclid, Ohio, founded in 1922 by the Sisters of Notre Dame, announced on February 29, 2024 that it would close at the end of that spring semester, ending a 102-year history. (It is no relation to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana; the shared name is coincidence, and the confusion is one small indignity of its closing.) The college had grown from a women’s college into a coeducational institution that doubled its enrollment in the 2000s, then watched that enrollment fall by more than a third in a decade. By the end it carried significant debt it could not refinance, and a last-ditch effort to merge with nearby Cleveland State University failed. On May 2, 2024, the college closed for good.
The diagnosis the board offered was a familiar one for a small Catholic college in the 2020s: declining enrollment, a shrinking pool of college-aged students, rising costs, and a heavy debt load. Total fall enrollment had peaked around 2,300 in 2014 and slid to roughly 1,440 by 2022 — a decline of nearly 37 percent — while the costs of running a residential campus stayed fixed. The Sisters of Notre Dame, whose own dwindling numbers had made it impossible to sustain their leadership, had ended their sponsorship of the college in 2023, removing the founding order from the institution it had built. When fundraising, refinancing, and federal pandemic relief all proved insufficient to satisfy the college’s debt obligations, and the Cleveland State merger collapsed, the board concluded there was no path forward.
Unlike the era’s most brutal closures, Notre Dame did not strand its students without recourse. It arranged teach-out and transfer agreements with nine other institutions, guaranteeing admission and comparable tuition for students who had completed enough credits, and held a partner-college fair to help them move. Still, roughly 1,400 students had to leave the college they had chosen, some 370 employees lost their jobs, and a Division II athletics program — including a football team that had just signed its 2024 recruiting class three weeks before the announcement — was dissolved overnight. The campus that the Sisters built in suburban Cleveland would later go to auction, the final page of a century-old Catholic college undone by the arithmetic of debt and demography.
Holy Family College, a small Catholic college in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, founded in 1885 by the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity, announced in May 2020 that it would cease operations at the end of that summer term, closing for good on August 29, 2020. It had carried the Holy Family name for less than a year. For most of its modern life the institution had been known as Silver Lake College of the Holy Family, the name it took in 1972; in September 2019 it had returned, with some ceremony, to its founding identity — a restoration meant to signal renewal. Eight months later it was gone.
The college was always small and always tuition-dependent. It had begun as an academy and a teacher-training school for the Franciscan sisters, opened its doors to lay women in 1957, became coeducational in 1969, and settled into the role of a regional Catholic college on a 36-acre campus serving roughly 350 to 450 students across about two dozen undergraduate and a few graduate programs. By the spring of 2020 it enrolled around 360 students, the kind of figure that leaves no room for a bad year. The decline in traditional-age students across the upper Midwest had been pressing on it for a decade; the institution survived on the margin, year to year, with little endowment to absorb a shock.
The shock came in the form of a pandemic. The Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity Sponsored Ministries, which governed the college, cited rising operating costs, persistent enrollment and fundraising difficulties, and — decisively — the effects of COVID-19 on its already fragile recruiting. Sister Natalie Binversie acknowledged that the president had made progress on the older financial problems, but that the tough challenges had been made tougher by the outbreak. The college arranged a teach-out: Lakeland University in nearby Sheboygan County signed an agreement to admit students entering their final year and to take transfers from the rest, at the same cost or less. What closed in Manitowoc was not a scandal or a collapse but a 135-year-old community institution that ran out of the one thing it had never had a cushion of — students — at the exact moment a virus made students harder to find.
Cardinal Stritch University, a Catholic institution in the Milwaukee suburbs of Fox Point and Glendale, founded in 1937 by the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi, announced on April 10, 2023 that it would close at the end of that spring semester, winding down on May 22 after a final commencement the day before. It was, at its height, one of the largest Franciscan universities in the United States — a regional powerhouse in teacher education and adult degree completion that had enrolled more than 5,000 students at its 2011 peak. Twelve years later it enrolled barely a quarter of that, and the arithmetic that had carried it for 86 years no longer closed.
The institution had begun as St. Clare College, a teacher-training school founded by the Franciscan sisters to educate members of their own order. It was renamed in 1946 for Cardinal Samuel Stritch, the Archbishop of Milwaukee, became coeducational, and grew steadily into a comprehensive university — granted university status in 1997 — with a national reputation in education and a large, lucrative adult and graduate market. That market was its strength and, in the end, its exposure. When enrollment in education programs and adult degree completion softened across the 2010s, Cardinal Stritch had built its scale on exactly the segment that was contracting fastest. Enrollment fell from more than 5,000 in 2011 to 2,345 in 2019–20 and to 1,365 by the fall of 2021 — a decline of roughly three-quarters in a decade.
President Dan Scholz, announcing the closure, called it a “no-win situation,” citing fiscal realities, downward enrollment, the pandemic, the need for more resources, and mounting operational and facility costs. The Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi, who had founded the university and still sponsored it, accepted the board’s recommendation to close. Cardinal Stritch arranged a robust set of teach-out agreements — with Alverno, Mount Mary, Carroll, Marquette, and others — that guaranteed admission and full credit transfer so students could finish on time and at comparable cost. What ended was not a small struggling college but the flagship of Franciscan higher education in the upper Midwest, hollowed out so quickly that its closure came as a shock to a city that had assumed it too big to fail.
Fontbonne University, a Catholic institution in Clayton, just west of St. Louis, Missouri, chartered in 1917 and opened to its first students as Fontbonne College in 1923, announced on March 11, 2024 that its board of trustees had declared financial exigency and would close the university after the summer 2025 term. It was the kind of closure higher education had, by 2024, learned to recognize on sight: a small, tuition-dependent, lightly endowed religious college, founded to serve a region and a faith, ground down over fifteen years by a shrinking pool of students and a deficit that would not close. The institution had run in the red for roughly a decade. It celebrated its centennial in 2023 and announced its own ending a few months later.
Fontbonne was founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, a congregation with roots in St. Louis since 1836, and it carried their mission in its bones — service, access, and a particular care for students the larger universities overlooked. It built strengths in special education and, notably, in deaf education, a partnership with the St. Joseph Institute for the Deaf that made it one of the few places in the country preparing teachers for deaf and hard-of-hearing children. At its 2011 peak it enrolled roughly 2,293 students. By the autumn of 2023 it counted 874, against a deficit reported at $5.2 million, and a board that had spent years cutting costs, launching programs, and adding athletics found none of it had moved the line.
The closure was declared with more than a year’s runway, which made it kinder than many. Fontbonne admitted no freshman class for fall 2024 and taught its remaining students through the summer of 2025, drawing roughly $9 million from its endowment to fund scholarships so current undergraduates could finish. Washington University in St. Louis agreed to buy the 16-acre Clayton campus and leased it back to Fontbonne for the final year. What ended was not a scandal but a century of diverse Catholic education in St. Louis — a college that had taught generations of the city’s first-generation students, special educators, and dietitians, dissolving on schedule because the arithmetic of small religious colleges had finally caught it.
Urbana University, in the small city of Urbana, Ohio, founded in 1850 by followers of the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, announced in April 2020 that it would cease operations at the end of that spring semester. It was 170 years old. It did not close as an independent institution making its own last decision; it closed as a line item — a branch campus of Franklin University, a Columbus institution that had acquired Urbana’s assets in 2014 and folded it into its own accreditation as a branch campus in 2017. When Franklin’s leadership looked at a campus that had been losing money and students for years and then watched the coronavirus pandemic arrive, the math resolved itself, and the oldest Swedenborgian college in America was switched off by a board that sat seventy miles away.
The institution that closed had begun as one of the more unusual experiments in nineteenth-century American higher education. The New Church — the Swedenborgian denomination, also called the Church of the New Jerusalem — chartered Urbana College in 1850 to build a school around Swedenborg’s theology and philosophy, and it became, after Oberlin, the second institution of higher learning in Ohio to admit women alongside men. Its founding folklore is the kind most colleges would invent if they could: the land was secured with the help of John Chapman, the Swedenborgian missionary the country remembers as Johnny Appleseed, who persuaded a friend to donate the acreage southwest of town. The college suspended operations during the Civil War, reopened, ran for a century as a small junior college, became a four-year institution in 1968, and took the name Urbana University in 1975.
By the time it closed, the religious mission was a heritage line in the catalog rather than a living subsidy, and the college was simply a small, tuition-dependent institution in a part of the country with too many of them. Of the roughly 1,254 students enrolled at the end, only about a quarter — some 350 residential and commuter students — were the traditional undergraduates a campus closure most disrupts; the majority were in off-site and online programs that Franklin could continue without the Urbana campus at all. That fact is the whole diagnosis. A college whose remaining value to its owner lived in programs that did not require the campus did not need the campus. About 111 employees lost their jobs.
Marygrove College, a Catholic institution on the northwest side of Detroit, founded in 1905 by the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and rooted on its Detroit campus since 1927, announced on June 12, 2019 that it would close at the end of that fall semester. It had served the city for 92 years. The closure was the second act of a slow withdrawal: in 2017 the college had already eliminated all 35 of its undergraduate programs in a last attempt at survival, betting that a leaner graduate-only institution could endure. By June 2019 that bet had failed — only 305 students remained across seven graduate programs, and just two new students had enrolled for the coming fall — and the IHM Sisters and the board concluded that there was no path to the roughly 700 students the college would have needed to sustain itself.
What distinguishes Marygrove from the rest of the closure roster is not how it died but what its campus was already becoming as it died. Marygrove had a particular place in Detroit’s history. It admitted its first African American student in 1938 and, in 1968, in the aftermath of the city’s upheaval, launched a “68 for ’68” campaign that brought 68 Black students onto campus; for generations it was a place where Black Detroiters, many of them the first in their families, earned degrees. As the college failed, the IHM Sisters chose to plant something in its place rather than simply sell the grounds. In 2018 the Kresge Foundation committed $50 million to convert the 53-acre site into a “P-20” campus — cradle-to-career education in one place — and the Sisters deeded the property to a new entity, the Marygrove Conservancy, established to steward it.
So the institution closed, but the educational vocation of the ground did not. The University of Michigan, Detroit Public Schools, the Kresge Foundation, and the City of Detroit built a continuum on the campus: an early-childhood center, The School at Marygrove (a public high school, later K–12), and a U-M teacher-residency program modeled on medical residencies. Marygrove College, a 92-year-old Catholic college that educated Detroit’s underserved, ran out of students and money in 2019 — and is the rare entry on this roster whose campus was not emptied but re-consecrated to teaching the moment the degrees stopped.