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.
Saint Paul’s College, a historically Black college in Lawrenceville, Virginia, founded in 1888 by an Episcopal priest, lost its regional accreditation in 2012 and closed on June 30, 2013, after 125 years. Its accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, stripped its accreditation over financial instability and a cascade of institutional failures; a planned rescue by a fellow Episcopal HBCU collapsed; and with no accreditation and no merger partner, the board concluded it had no path forward. When it closed, enrollment had fallen to roughly 150 students — down from a peak near 1,000 — and the institution that James Solomon Russell had built into one of Virginia’s six historically Black colleges simply stopped.
Russell’s school began in September 1888 as the Saint Paul Normal and Industrial School, founded by Russell — a formerly enslaved man who became an Episcopal priest — to train African American teachers and prepare Black Virginians for agricultural and industrial work in a state that offered them almost nothing else. It grew across the twentieth century into a four-year liberal-arts and teacher-education college, the Saint Paul’s College of 1957, and a fixture of Black life in rural Southside Virginia. Like most HBCUs, it served a population denied the wealth that endows colleges, and it ran on thin margins for its entire existence.
In its final years those margins gave way. The college accumulated debt and deficits it could not close, cut its athletic programs in 2011 to save money, and fell into the kind of financial and governance turmoil that draws an accreditor’s scrutiny. In June 2012 SACS stripped its accreditation. The college sued and won a temporary injunction that briefly restored a probationary status, but accreditation is the precondition for federal student aid, and without it a college serving an overwhelmingly Pell-dependent student body cannot enroll. Supporters pinned their hopes on a merger with Saint Augustine’s University, a kindred Episcopal HBCU in Raleigh; when that deal was abandoned in May 2013, the end was a formality. The board announced the closure on June 3, 2013, and the college shut on June 30. The campus, taken over by the federal pension agency after the college defaulted on its obligations, was eventually sold for $2.5 million. A 125-year-old HBCU — one of only six in Virginia — was gone.
Atlantic Union College, a Seventh-day Adventist institution in the village of South Lancaster, Massachusetts, founded in 1882, closed for good in February 2018 — the second time it had closed in seven years, and this time without the accreditation that had once made it a college at all. It was the oldest campus in the worldwide Adventist educational system, a small liberal-arts college that for most of its life trained teachers, nurses, and ministers for the church that owned it. By the end it enrolled a few dozen students in two unaccredited bachelor’s programs and a handful of certificates, and it was costing the regional church roughly $4.3 million a year to keep the lights on. On February 21, 2018, the Atlantic Union Conference voted to stop.
The decisive wound was accreditation, lost slowly and then permanently. The New England Association of Schools and Colleges placed the college on probation in 2008 over its finances, and in February 2011 announced that it would withdraw accreditation that July. The college laid off its staff and shut its doors. It reopened in 2015 with new leadership and a fervent hope of winning accreditation back — but a college without accreditation cannot offer federal financial aid, and a college that cannot offer federal aid cannot attract the students whose tuition would fund the climb back to accreditation. The trap closed on itself. After three years of running an unaccredited program on church subsidy, an independent feasibility study concluded the institution was not sustainable, and the conference’s executive committee voted to close it.
What was lost was less a student body — by 2018 there was barely one — than an institution and an idea. For 136 years the college had been the academic anchor of the Adventist community that had clustered around it in South Lancaster, and the symbolic flagship of a denomination that built its life around education. The closure stranded few students because few were left, which is its own kind of elegy: a college does not always die in a single shocking announcement to thousands. Sometimes it dies the way Atlantic Union did — slowly, in public, over a decade, with everyone watching and no one able to stop it.
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.
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.