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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.