Concordia University, in Portland, Oregon, founded in 1905 as a Lutheran academy and grown into the largest university of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in the United States, announced on February 10, 2020 that it would close at the end of that spring semester. By the following graduation, on April 25, the institution that had taught pastors, schoolteachers, nurses, and — through a vast online arm — tens of thousands of working educators across the country would simply cease to exist. More than five thousand students and roughly 1,500 employees were told, with little warning and fewer answers, that the place issuing their degrees and signing their paychecks had run out of time.
The institution that closed was, in a real sense, two institutions wearing one name. There was the small residential campus in the Concordia neighborhood of northeast Portland — perhaps five hundred undergraduates, a Lutheran liberal-arts college of the ordinary kind. And there was the online machine: a Master of Education program so large that Concordia awarded more such degrees than any other nonprofit in the country, built and marketed in partnership with a Silicon Valley company called HotChalk. The online business had lifted total enrollment past 7,400 at its 2014 peak and made Concordia Oregon’s largest private nonprofit university. It had also bound the university’s finances to a contract it could not, in the end, survive.
The closure was abrupt, but the decline was not. Revenue had fallen nearly 40 percent in four years; the university had defaulted on bond covenants; the Church Extension Fund and the Synod itself had become creditors and, finally, reluctant ones. When the Board of Regents voted to close, it did so quickly and quietly, and — on the same day, HotChalk would later allege — moved the Portland campus into the hands of a Lutheran entity, out of reach of the creditor that promptly sued for $302 million. The law school Concordia had opened in Boise in 2012, by then fully accredited and posting a perfect bar-passage rate, was orphaned overnight; the University of Idaho would eventually take in its students and its building. What was lost in Portland was not a struggling diploma mill but a 115-year-old church university, dissolved by a single vote, that told the people who depended on it last.
Concordia College Alabama, a small historically Black college in Selma, Alabama, founded in 1922 and the only historically Black college of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, announced in February 2018 that it would close at the end of that spring semester. On April 28, 2018, it graduated a final class of 147 students and ceased to exist after ninety-six years. It was the only one of the ten campuses of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod’s Concordia University System founded to serve Black students, and its closing erased a singular institution: the place where the denomination’s commitment to Black education in the Deep South had taken physical form for nearly a century.
The college began as the dream of one woman. Rosa J. Young, an African American educator remembered as “the mother of Black Lutheranism,” opened a school for Black children in rural Alabama, sought help from Booker T. Washington, and was directed by him to the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod when Tuskegee could not assist. The Synod sent a missionary, and in November 1922 the institution that became Concordia opened in Selma with fewer than ten students. Over the following decades it grew from a teacher-and-minister training school into a junior college and, finally, a four-year, accredited, baccalaureate-granting college — a steady, unglamorous engine of Black advancement in a city that would become a crucible of the civil-rights movement.
It was never large or rich. At its height in the 1960s it enrolled roughly 650 students; by the fall of 2017 it counted about 445, more than 90 percent of them Black and more than 90 percent eligible for federal Pell Grants — which is to say, drawn almost entirely from low-income families for whom Concordia was an affordable door into a degree. The college had been propped up for years by the Synod, which by its own account had directed more than 44 percent of its entire ten-campus subsidy to Concordia Alabama since 2006. When the denomination concluded that the figures would not come right and that its limited resources had to be spread across “so many worthy mission-and-ministry opportunities,” the subsidy that had kept the lights on in Selma ended. The board filed a teach-out plan with its accreditor and closed. What was lost was not a struggling diploma mill but a 96-year-old HBCU in Selma, a piece of Black Lutheran history, and the largest concrete expression of a denomination’s promise to a community.
Saint Joseph’s College, a Catholic liberal-arts college in Rensselaer, Indiana, founded in 1889 by the Missionaries of the Precious Blood, announced on February 3, 2017 that it would suspend operations at the end of that spring semester. It graduated its final traditional class, and after 128 years the residential college on the prairie halfway between Chicago and Indianapolis went dark. Roughly 900 to 1,100 students were enrolled when the board voted; about 200 employees lost their jobs; and a town of some five thousand people lost the institution that had, in large part, defined it.
The cause was not a sudden scandal or a single bad year. It was a slow accumulation of liabilities that finally exceeded any plausible rescue. By the college’s own accounting, it needed roughly $100 million to continue: about $27 million to retire its debt, about $35 million in deferred maintenance and infrastructure repairs to a long-neglected campus, and another $38 million to “re-engineer” the institution into something that could survive. In November 2016 the Higher Learning Commission placed Saint Joseph’s on probation, finding that its resource base no longer supported its programs. The college told its community that it needed roughly $20 million by June simply to open in the fall. The money did not come, and the board concluded the college “cannot continue in its current form.”
What makes Saint Joseph’s distinct in the closure wave is the shape of its killer: not the demographic enrollment cliff alone, but decades of deferred maintenance — the bills a tuition-dependent college defers, year after year, to balance the budget, until the deferred total becomes a number no one can pay. The college called its shutdown a “suspension” rather than a closure, and held out the hope of revival; a teach-out moved students to other Catholic and regional colleges, and a small two-year college bearing the Saint Joseph’s name later opened in partnership with Marian University in Indianapolis. But the residential, four-year liberal-arts college in Rensselaer — the one that had graduated tens of thousands over 128 years — did not come back. What survives on the campus today is certificate programs and trades training, not the college that closed.
Iowa Wesleyan University, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, chartered in 1842 as the Mount Pleasant Literary Institute and grown into a United Methodist university — one of the oldest institutions of higher learning west of the Mississippi River and Iowa’s first coeducational one — announced on March 28, 2023 that it would close at the end of that academic year, ceasing operations in May after 181 years. Its board of trustees voted unanimously. The decisive fact was financial: the university owed roughly $26 million on a U.S. Department of Agriculture-backed loan secured in 2016, with its 60-acre campus as collateral, and the loan could be called as early as November 2023. A last appeal to the state for help had just been refused.
The university had a history out of proportion to its size. It claimed to be the oldest coeducational institution west of the Mississippi; its alumni included James Van Allen, the physicist who discovered the radiation belts that bear his name, and Belle Babb Mansfield, the first woman admitted to the bar in the United States. By 2023 it enrolled roughly 600 full-time students and employed about 110 people, 35 of them faculty, and it was a genuine economic engine for its rural southeast-Iowa town — an estimated $55 million in annual economic impact. But it had spent years carrying losses, and its own auditor had flagged “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue as a going concern.
The endgame turned on a request and its denial. Iowa Wesleyan asked Governor Kim Reynolds for $12 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds, money the state controlled, framing the appeal around the governor’s own rural-Iowa initiative. Reynolds commissioned an independent accounting review, which concluded that one-time federal dollars would not solve the university’s systemic financial problems, and she declined. With the USDA debt looming and no rescue forthcoming, the trustees closed the institution. Teach-out agreements with four Iowa universities — William Penn, Upper Iowa, Dubuque, and Culver-Stockton — gave students a path to finish. What closed was a 181-year-old Methodist university older than the state of Iowa itself, and a rural town’s largest cultural and economic anchor, undone by a debt it could not carry and a bailout the state judged it could not justify.
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.
Marymount California University, a small Catholic institution overlooking the Pacific from the bluffs of Rancho Palos Verdes, California, founded in 1968 by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, announced on April 22, 2022 that it would close permanently at the end of that summer, with the summer 2022 term its last instruction. The decision came two days after a long-planned merger with Florida’s Saint Leo University collapsed — and it left students, faculty, and staff weeks from a fall semester that would never come. After fifty-four years of teaching, much of it as a two-year college and only the last decade as a four-year university, Marymount ended not with a teach-out year but with an August closing line and a scramble to relocate everyone before the term began.
Marymount was, by the standards of this encyclopedia, young and small. It opened in 1968 as a Catholic junior college, operated for decades as a two-year institution, and only became a four-year university with graduate programs in the 2010s, adopting the name Marymount California University in 2013. Its enrollment had crested around 1,179 students in 2014–15 — just as it completed the transition — then fell by more than half, to roughly 500 full-time students by its final year. Rising costs, the pandemic, and a tuition-dependent budget with no cushion did the rest. The survival plan had been the merger; when the merger failed, there was no plan B except closure.
The timing drew criticism, and the criticism was fair. An April announcement of an August close gave students one summer to find a new college for the fall — not the six-weeks’-notice cruelty of the worst closures, but far short of the orderly multi-year teach-out that protects degrees. Marymount said it had chosen the most compassionate path available and brokered transfer agreements with more than five dozen institutions; critics noted that a college which had spent a year betting everything on a single merger had left itself, and its students, nowhere to land when the bet failed. The oceanfront campus was bought within months by UCLA for $80 million. The students were dispersed across dozens of schools by September.