Notre Dame College — A Century-Old Catholic College Closed by Debt and a Failed Merger
Summary
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.
Timeline
A Women's College That Learned to Grow
The Sisters of Notre Dame, a German-rooted teaching order, founded Notre Dame College in the summer of 1922 as a college for women in Cleveland, and moved it in 1928 to a leafy 48-acre campus in the suburb of South Euclid, where it would spend the rest of its life. For most of the twentieth century it was what its founders intended: a small Catholic women's college, mission-driven and modest, of the kind the American church maintained in cities across the country to educate Catholic daughters and to carry the order's charism into the world. It was never large and never wealthy, and it shared a name — entirely by coincidence — with a far more famous university in Indiana, a confusion its students learned to correct and its development office surely learned to resent.
The institution's most consequential decision came in 2001, when it admitted full-time male students and became fully coeducational. The move worked, at least at first: backed by the addition of athletics — the college fielded Division II teams, including football — and new programs, enrollment doubled in a decade, from under 1,000 in 2001 to over 2,000 by 2010, cresting around 2,300 by 2014. For a small Catholic college facing the same demographic headwinds as its peers, that growth was a genuine achievement. But growth fueled by athletics and tuition-paying enrollment depends on the enrollment continuing, and the residential, athletics-heavy model it had built carried fixed costs that assumed the students would keep coming. They did not.
The Long Slide and the Vanishing Order
After 2014 the climb reversed into a decline, and the decline did not stop. Total fall enrollment fell from roughly 2,300 in 2014 to about 1,440 by 2022 — a drop of nearly 37 percent over eight years — and every lost student was lost tuition at an institution that depended on tuition to function. The forces behind the slide were the same ones thinning small private colleges across the industrial Midwest and Northeast: a shrinking pool of traditional-age students, families increasingly skeptical of private-college sticker prices, and rising costs that no amount of belt-tightening could fully offset. Notre Dame met all of them with the structural disadvantages of its size — no large endowment, no pricing power, and a debt load taken on in better days that now had to be serviced from a shrinking revenue base.
In 2023 the institution lost something less tangible than enrollment but no less important. The Sisters of Notre Dame, the religious order that had founded and sponsored the college for a century, ended their sponsorship, explaining that their own declining numbers made it impossible to continue leading the school. A Catholic college's sponsoring order is its origin, its identity, and historically a source of subsidy, donated labor, and patient institutional will. The orders that built American Catholic higher education are aging and shrinking across the country, and as they withdraw, the colleges they founded lose not only a benefactor but much of the reason for their existence as religious institutions. Notre Dame entered its final year having lost both its students and its founders.
The Merger That Didn't Save It
By late 2023 the college's leadership was doing what a board does when the numbers no longer work: hunting for a partner. They met with administrators at Cleveland State University, the large public institution nearby, to explore a merger or acquisition — the kind of arrangement that, done well, can be a soft landing, folding a struggling college's students and some of its programs into a stronger institution rather than simply closing the doors. The talks went on for months and did not succeed. The reasons were not made fully public, but the result was unambiguous: there would be no rescue, no continuation under another name. The college would have to close.
The board announced the decision on February 29, 2024 — leap day, for a closure that would come only once. The statement named the now-standard causes: declining enrollment, a shrinking pool of traditional-age students, rising costs, and significant debt the college could not satisfy despite, as the announcement put it, heroic efforts at fundraising, debt refinancing, and federal pandemic relief — efforts not enough to close the financial gap in time to meet the debt obligations. The college would graduate its final class and cease operations on May 2, 2024. The athletics program, central to the enrollment growth of the prior two decades, was a particularly stark casualty: the football team had welcomed its 2024 signing class just three weeks before the announcement, recruiting athletes to a college that, the administration already knew, was negotiating its own survival.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
The students were not abandoned, which in the closure era counts as a measure of grace. Notre Dame arranged teach-out and transfer agreements with nine institutions — among them Cleveland State, John Carroll, Kent State, Baldwin Wallace, and Ursuline — guaranteeing admission and comparable net tuition for students with enough credits, and held a partner-college fair in March 2024 to move them along. Roughly 1,400 students still had to leave the college they had chosen, and about 370 faculty and staff lost their jobs. The athletes whose recruitment had been part of the college's growth story scattered to find new programs, the football signees among them sent looking for a team only weeks after committing to one.
The South Euclid campus, the roughly 48 acres the Sisters had occupied since 1928, entered a contested afterlife: an initial sale stalled amid litigation, and the property eventually went to auction. For South Euclid, the loss meant an institutional anchor and an employer gone; for the broader Catholic higher-education world, the college joined a lengthening list — Marylhurst, Cardinal Stritch, Holy Names, Fontbonne — of century-old institutions undone as their founding orders aged and the enrollment math turned against them. Notre Dame College of Ohio ended as it had largely lived: overshadowed by its more famous namesake, but, in its own city and to its own graduates, an irreplaceable thing now gone.
Lessons
- Size your fixed costs to durable enrollment, not to a peak: growth built on athletics and tuition raises permanent obligations that a later enrollment decline cannot pay.
- For a small tuition-dependent college, the enrollment cliff and rising costs form a vise with no relief absent an endowment cushion — build reserves and diversify revenue before the squeeze arrives.
- A Catholic college should plan for the day its founding order can no longer sponsor it, because aging religious communities are withdrawing across the country, taking subsidy and identity with them.
- Pursue a merger early and treat it as a real contingency, not a last resort — a deal that fails at the eleventh hour leaves closure as the only option, with no time to arrange anything better.
- Do not recruit students or athletes into an institution whose survival the board is actively negotiating; signing a class three weeks before announcing closure breaks faith with the people most harmed by it.
References
- Notre Dame College to close its doors at end of spring semester Ideastream Public Media
- Notre Dame College to close after spring semester Higher Ed Dive
- Notre Dame College in South Euclid will close at end of Spring Semester 2024 News 5 Cleveland (WEWS)
- Notre Dame College Wikipedia