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SG-008 Catholic college · Wisconsin 2020

Holy Family College — A 135-Year-Old Franciscan College the Pandemic Pushed Over the Edge

enrollmentclosed2020s
Lifespan
1885–2020 · 135 yrs
Peak Enrollment
~900 (1960s–70s era); ~360 at closure (spring 2020)
Killed By
enrollment cliff (COVID-accelerated)
Status
Closed

Summary

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.

Timeline

1885
Founded
The Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity establish an academy in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, to train members of the order and educate young Catholic women.
1935
Four-year college
The institution attains four-year college status, granting baccalaureate degrees.
1957
Lay women admitted
The college begins enrolling lay students alongside members of the religious order, broadening beyond its founding mission.
1969
Coeducation
The college becomes coeducational, admitting men.
1972
Renamed Silver Lake College
Now separately incorporated, the college is renamed Silver Lake College of the Holy Family, after the nearby lake.
2010s
The Midwestern squeeze
A shrinking pool of traditional-age students across the upper Midwest presses on enrollment; the tuition-dependent college survives year to year with little endowment.
Sept. 2019
A return to the name
Silver Lake College announces it will revert to Holy Family College, a return to its Franciscan roots meant to signal renewal.
Spring 2020
COVID-19 arrives
The pandemic disrupts the spring term and the recruiting cycle for the fall, deepening the college's enrollment and fundraising shortfalls.
May 4–5, 2020
The announcement
The Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity Sponsored Ministries announce that Holy Family College will discontinue operations at the end of the summer term, citing rising costs, enrollment, and the COVID-19 disruption.
May 2020
A landing place
Lakeland University signs a teach-out and transfer agreement, admitting Holy Family students at the same cost or less; other regional colleges open transfer pathways.
Aug. 29, 2020
The doors close
Holy Family College ceases operations after 135 years, having completed a limited slate of summer courses.
2022
Demolition
The campus buildings are demolished, the physical institution erased from the Manitowoc landscape.

A Convent School That Became a College

Holy Family College began, as so many small Catholic colleges did, inside a religious order. The Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity founded it in 1885 not as a market institution but as an instrument of their own mission — a place to form the sisters who would staff the parochial schools and hospitals of the region, and to educate the young Catholic women of Manitowoc County. For its first seven decades it served the church before it served a public; only in 1957 did it admit lay women, and only in 1969 did it admit men. It was, in other words, an institution whose reason to exist was a vocation, and whose finances were always downstream of that vocation rather than the other way around.

That origin shaped everything that followed. The college never grew large — its high-water enrollment, in the postwar decades when Catholic religious life and Catholic higher education both flourished, ran to several hundred and at times perhaps near 900 students, a modest peak by any measure. It changed its name to Silver Lake College in 1972, settled onto a 36-acre campus, and built a respectable roster of programs in education, nursing, business, music, and the liberal arts. But it remained what it had always been: a small, deeply local, tuition-dependent college subsidized in spirit and in part by a religious order whose own numbers were quietly aging and shrinking. The institution lived on the margin because it had been built for a mission, not for a margin.

The Decade of Thinning Ranks

The structural problem arrived long before the virus did. The upper Midwest was losing traditional-age students — the slow demographic undertow that higher-education economists would later name the "enrollment cliff" — and a small Catholic college in Manitowoc had neither the brand nor the endowment to compete for the shrinking pool. Holy Family discounted its tuition to fill seats, like nearly every college of its kind, and discounting eats the revenue it is meant to protect. Fundraising could not close the gap; an order of aging sisters cannot subsidize a college the way it could when its ranks were full. The 2019 return to the founding name was, in part, an attempt to market its way out of the corner — to remind the region that this was Holy Family, the old Franciscan college, and worth saving.

It was not enough, and it was not given time to be. A college that enrolls about 360 students has no slack: every admitted class is the whole budget, and a single disrupted recruiting cycle is an existential event. When COVID-19 closed campuses in the spring of 2020 and threw the fall recruiting season into chaos, Holy Family was precisely the kind of institution for which the pandemic was not a temporary inconvenience but a final straw. It did not have the reserves to ride out a year of depressed enrollment and lost room-and-board revenue. The mechanism that killed it was the ordinary one — too few students, too little cushion — and the pandemic simply moved the timetable forward by collapsing what little margin remained.

A Quiet, Orderly Ending

What distinguished Holy Family's closure from the era's more brutal examples was its restraint. There was no abrupt midyear shutdown, no students stranded weeks from graduation with nowhere to go. The Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity Sponsored Ministries announced the decision in early May 2020, in time for students to plan, and the college completed a limited slate of already-scheduled summer courses before it closed at the end of August. Most important, it arranged a real landing place. Lakeland University, a Reformed Church-affiliated institution in nearby Sheboygan County, signed an articulation agreement that combined a teach-out for students entering their final year with a transfer agreement for everyone else, and pledged that Holy Family students could attend at the same cost or less. Other regional colleges opened pathways as well.

For an institution that had spent 135 years forming people, the gesture mattered. The closure was a loss — of careers for faculty and staff, of a Catholic college for a region that had only a few, of a 19th-century institution from the Manitowoc landscape — but it was a dignified loss, handled the way the order's own ethic would have demanded: with enough notice that the people it had served were not abandoned. The contrast with the abrupt closures of the same era is the lesson. Holy Family ran out of money, like the others; it did not run out of decency.

The Five Factors

01
A mission-founded college is structurally under-resourced for a market
Holy Family was built by a religious order to serve a vocation, not to compete for tuition; it never accumulated the endowment that a market institution needs. When the mission's own base — the order, the local Catholic community — thinned, the college had no commercial cushion to fall back on, because it had never been designed to need one.
02
At 360 students, every recruiting cycle is existential
A college this small has no diversification and no slack: the incoming class is the budget. There is no large endowment to draw down, no auxiliary revenue to lean on, no other campus to cross-subsidize. A single disrupted admissions season is not a setback but a threat to survival.
03
The demographic cliff was the disease; COVID was the accelerant
The shrinking pool of upper-Midwest students had been pressing on Holy Family for a decade — that was the terminal condition. The pandemic did not create the problem; it collapsed the remaining margin by wrecking one recruiting cycle and one year of room-and-board revenue, turning a slow decline into a closure.
04
Tuition discounting hollows out the rescue it promises
Like nearly every small college chasing a shrinking applicant pool, Holy Family discounted heavily to fill seats. Discounting fills the class on paper while draining the net revenue the class was supposed to provide, so enrollment can look stable while the finances quietly fail beneath it.
05
Notice and a teach-out are the measure of a dignified closure
Holy Family announced in May, taught out its final summer term, and secured a transfer agreement with Lakeland University at no added cost to students. The same insolvency, handled abruptly, would have stranded its students; handled with notice, it let them finish. How a college dies is the part it most controls.

Aftermath

The students were the priority, and for the most part they were protected. The teach-out and transfer agreement with Lakeland University gave those near graduation a way to finish and the rest a way forward at comparable cost, and other area colleges opened their doors; the orderly timetable meant the human damage was real but contained. Faculty and staff were not so lucky — careers ended at a college that would not reopen, in a small city with few comparable employers. A region that had supported a Catholic college since the 19th century lost one of the institutions that anchored its identity.

The campus itself did not survive. In 2022 the buildings of the former Holy Family College were demolished, the most literal possible end for an institution — not repurposed, not sold to a successor school, but cleared from the ground it had occupied for generations. The Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity, custodians of the mission since 1885, were left to wind down what their predecessors had built. Holy Family became one of the first entries in a grim ledger the pandemic was about to fill: the small, mission-driven colleges, already living on the margin, for which COVID-19 was not a crisis to weather but the push that finished a fall a decade in the making.

Lessons

  1. A college built to serve a mission rather than a market must guard a financial cushion the mission never required, because when the founding community thins there is nothing commercial to fall back on.
  2. For an institution of a few hundred students, treat every admissions cycle as a solvency event; there is no diversification and no slack, so a single bad year can be the last one.
  3. Diagnose the disease, not the symptom: a pandemic, a ransomware attack, a failed merger may be the proximate cause, but the terminal condition is usually a decade of demographic decline meeting an empty reserve.
  4. Watch tuition discounting as closely as enrollment, because a class that fills only by deep discounting is a class that drains the revenue it was meant to supply.
  5. When closure is unavoidable, owe the students notice and a real teach-out; Holy Family's orderly wind-down and transfer agreement are the model that the era's abrupt collapses are measured against.

References