Marylhurst University — The Adult-Learning Pioneer the Market Caught Up To

Summary

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.

Timeline

Mary's Woods

The institution that closed in 2018 traced its line to a journey made in 1859, when the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary completed a seven-thousand-mile passage from Quebec to the Oregon Territory and set about the work their order existed to do: teaching. They founded academies in Portland, and in 1893 the state granted them a charter to confer baccalaureate degrees — making their college, in time, the first liberal-arts college for women in the entire Pacific Northwest and the oldest Catholic university in Oregon. In 1930 the college moved to a wooded property south of the city that the Sisters christened Marylhurst, joining Mary's name to the old word for woods, and took the place-name as its own.

For its first eighty years Marylhurst was what most Catholic women's colleges were: a small, mission-driven institution offering the liberal arts to young women under the care of a religious order. Then, in 1974, it did something that would define the rest of its life and ultimately frame its death. It went coeducational and rebuilt itself around the adult learner — the working person, often years out of high school, coming back to finish or begin a degree on a schedule that accommodated a job and a family. It was one of the first institutions in the country to make that bet, and for decades the bet was good. Marylhurst's students skewed old by design — an average age in the mid-thirties for undergraduates, older still for graduate students — and a large share studied online or in the evening, in a model the rest of higher education had not yet thought to copy.

The Market Catches Up

For a long stretch, being first was an advantage. Marylhurst had built genuine expertise in serving nontraditional students, and when the financial crisis of 2008 threw millions of working adults out of jobs and back toward school in search of new credentials, the university was positioned to receive them. Enrollment climbed toward 2,000, with the online MBA program alone accounting for more than 800 students at its peak — a remarkable figure for a small Catholic university. For a few years the recession made Marylhurst's decades-old wager look prescient.

It was the recovery that exposed the trap. As the economy healed, the supply of anxious working adults seeking degrees thinned — the very population Marylhurst depended on was, by definition, countercyclical, and the cycle had turned. Worse, the larger and wealthier universities had finally noticed the online adult market and entered it at scale, armed with marketing machines and brand recognition that a small institution could not begin to match. The online MBA that had carried more than 800 students in 2010–11 fell to about 222 by 2017–18 — a three-quarters collapse. President Melody Rose summarized the dynamic without flinching: everyone caught up to us. The pioneer's advantage had been precisely that no one else was doing this; once everyone was, Marylhurst's small scale became a fatal disadvantage in a contest decided by marketing spend.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The students fared better than those caught in the era's abrupt closures, precisely because Marylhurst saw the end coming and planned for it. Of the roughly 405 enrolled at the close, about 81 graduated that summer and the institution worked to transfer the remaining 324 — a manageable number, handled with notice, for a student body that skewed older and more place-bound than most. The damage fell hardest on the faculty and staff who lost their careers and contested the decision on the way out, and on the alumni who watched the oldest Catholic university in Oregon vanish after 125 years.

The campus came home to the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, who had chartered the college in 1893 and now reclaimed the 50 acres their order had named Mary's woods, free to align its future with their mission. Within higher education, Marylhurst became a frequently cited case in the debate over online learning and the adult-student market — the cautionary example of an early innovator overtaken by the scale and marketing power of the institutions that copied it. Its closure carried a lesson larger than its own size: that being right early is not the same as being able to survive being imitated, and that a small institution which invents a market may not be the one that gets to keep it.

Lessons

References

• Marylhurst University To Close Amid Shrinking Enrollment Oregon Public Broadcasting
• Market Changes, Missteps and Marylhurst's Closure Inside Higher Ed
• Marylhurst Faculty Challenge Decision To Close University Oregon Public Broadcasting
• Marylhurst University Wikipedia