Marymount California University — A Failed Merger, Then a Closure on the Doorstep of Fall

Summary

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.

Timeline

A Marymount on the Pacific Bluffs

The Marymount name belonged to a network of schools founded by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, an order whose California presence dated to a Westwood college in 1932. The Palos Verdes institution that became Marymount California University grew from that lineage, established in 1968 as a Catholic junior college on a spectacular site — bluffs above the Pacific on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, the kind of campus a brochure writes itself around. For most of its life it was a two-year college, a stepping stone that prepared students to transfer onward, and within that modest role it served its students well for decades.

The ambition to become more came late, and at the worst possible moment in the demographics of American higher education. In the 2010s Marymount added bachelor's and graduate degrees, completing a transition to a four-year university and taking the name Marymount California University in 2013. The transition was a bid for relevance and revenue — a four-year university can charge four years of tuition and grant degrees a junior college cannot — but it also reset the institution as a small, freshly minted, tuition-dependent four-year school just as the sector entered a decade of contraction. Enrollment peaked near 1,179 students around 2014–15, almost exactly when the four-year model came fully online, and then it fell. A college that had just enlarged its cost structure to match a four-year mission watched its student body shrink by more than half over the following years.

The Merger That Was the Plan

By the early 2020s Marymount was where many small private colleges found themselves: enrollment down by half, costs up, the pandemic compounding everything, and a tuition-dependent budget with no endowment cushion to ride out the storm. The institution's answer was not retrenchment but rescue-by-merger. In July 2021 it announced plans to merge into Saint Leo University, a Catholic institution in Florida, with the combination targeted for completion by January 2023. A merger into a larger, healthier Catholic university was, on paper, the soft landing — the dignified exit that would preserve the students' continuity and the Marymount mission inside a stronger parent.

The plan ran into the wall that has stopped many such mergers: the accreditor. Saint Leo's accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, declined in December 2021 to approve the deal, finding that Saint Leo had not offered a sufficient plan to show the merger would meet the commission's standard for responsible budgeting. In plain terms, the regulator was not persuaded that absorbing Marymount was financially sound — which was, of course, the same judgment about Marymount's finances that had made the merger necessary in the first place. The parties limped along for a few more months under an extended timeline, then formally called the deal off on April 20–21, 2022, agreeing, in Saint Leo's words, to part ways amicably. Marymount had bet its survival on the merger. It had no second bet.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

For Marymount's roughly 500 students, the summer of 2022 was a forced migration. The university's transfer agreements with more than sixty institutions gave them landing spots, and most found a fall home somewhere — but somewhere was not Marymount, and the abrupt timeline meant lost continuity, scattered credits, and the disruption of starting over at a new institution on a few weeks' notice. The roughly 140 full-time employees lost their jobs at summer's end. A young university that had spent fifty-four years on the Palos Verdes bluffs, and only a decade as a four-year institution, simply dissolved between one academic year and the next.

The campus, unlike the people, landed beautifully. UCLA's $80 million purchase of the oceanfront property — beating out 40 other bidders — turned Marymount's bluffs into expansion capacity for a public university overwhelmed with applications and short on housing. It was a clean, fast, lucrative resolution for the real estate, and a pointed illustration of the recurring pattern in college closures: the buildings find a future faster than the students do, because the buildings are the asset and the students are the obligation. Marymount became a frequently cited example of the small-college closure done on too short a clock — and a cautionary tale about staking institutional survival on a single merger with no contingency behind it. The Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary's half-century on the California coast ended on August 31, 2022, and by September the bluffs belonged to UCLA.

Lessons

References

• Marymount California will close after failed merger Inside Higher Ed
• Marymount California University to shut down following merger attempt Higher Ed Dive
• Struggling Marymount California University to close Global Sisters Report
• UCLA Buys Closed Marymount California Campus Inside Higher Ed
• Marymount California University Wikipedia