
“Attention all alumni! Tomorrow (FRIDAY, JULY 19) is the last day for the sale of religious items/statues.”
Throughout the summer of 2024, an alumni page for Notre Dame College in South Euclid, Ohio, advertised the sale of countless pieces from the college archives: crosses and crucifixes, statues of the Virgin Mary in a dozen styles, and issues of the college’s literary journal going back as far back as 1952.
It all had to go. Notre Dame College would not be matriculating students for the 2024–2025 school year. The Board of Trustees and their “heroic efforts were not enough to close the financial gap in time to satisfy debt obligations.” The fire sale of what hadn’t been transferred to Notre Dame College’s institution of record, Lake Erie College, or what wasn’t taken by the Sisters of Notre Dame, would, according to the college’s alumni page, “pay our many bills/vendors so we can close with dignity.”
The small liberal-arts college’s attempt at a strategic partnership with Cleveland State University failed. Notre Dame College faced such dire financial straits that they even had issues mailing final paychecks to staff.
The closure of Notre Dame College had to be a shock to nearby Ursuline College in Pepper Pike, near Cleveland, only ten minutes away by car. Ursuline’s actions in the past few months show the lessons learned from Notre Dame’s closure. In September 2024, Ursuline College and Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, announced their plan for a “strategic partnership.” They made sure to mention that it was being done from a position of strength, and both institutions, administrators promised, would retain their identity. Ursuline College, much smaller and less well-off financially, stood to gain not only the stability of a larger school’s resources, but also get a critical opportunity to preserve the legacy of the Ursuline Sisters, who had started the first Catholic women’s college in Ohio.
Notre Dame, Ursuline, and Gannon had no choice but to confront the cyclone of issues threatening institutions of higher education across the country. They aren’t the only Catholic institutions under threat. In the suburbs of Philadelphia, Villanova University subsumed neighboring Cabrini University in a move that left some mourning the loss of the latter’s identity. Fontbonne University in Clayton, Missouri, cited enrollment decline and long-term effects of Covid as the reasons for its closure; the College of St. Rose in Albany closed in June 2024 after facing issues with accreditation over its financial instability.
Christian institutions of other denominations aren’t spared the pain, either. In New York City, the King’s College cancelled all fall 2024 classes, saying that it “has decided to not offer courses while leadership focuses on a long-term solution.” On its website as of time of writing, King’s followed up the statement with a plea for donations. Birmingham-Southern College, over 160 years old, was affiliated with the United Methodist Church; the 2024 school year was its last. The evangelical Alliance University, formerly Nyack College, closed in 2023.
Closures of higher-education institutions are now widespread. According to the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit newsroom reporting on inequality and innovation in education, 2024 was a calamitous year for higher ed: on average, one university or college announced plans to close or merge per week. That’s twice as many as in 2023, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
The primary reason these institutions, Catholic or otherwise, cited for their financial ruin involved the long-anticipated “demographic cliff” in enrollment. In 2025, the number of Americans graduating from high school will peak at about 3.5 million. After that, the number of potential college students could dwindle by as much as 15 percent, cutting something like half a million students out of the pool of available graduates for college recruitment. Fewer students means less tuition. Schools without solid financial positions, like large endowments or a generous donor base, will suffer downstream demographic damage from the financial crisis of 2008–2009: young people who would have been married and had children at that time simply put it off. One analyst warned, “By 2030, our nation will have far fewer colleges than it does now.”
There’s a host of other issues at play. FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, underwent a transition to a new online system in the spring of 2024. Delays in system implementation wreaked havoc on the tight scheduling involved in college recruitment. Colleges received student financial information far later than usual, delaying student decisions and deposits. Institutions looking for certainty in planning their next academic year struggled.
The Government Accountability Office found in fall 2024 that the Department of Education had “failed to meet promised deadlines and provide colleges with sufficient notice of changes” during the rollout. One administrator said that she felt as if she was being “gaslit” by the Department of Education because of the lack of transparency and backtracking on commitments to students. Data indicates that the FAFSA issues with enrollment have hit prospective lower-income students the hardest.
Another underappreciated factor is the comparatively higher interest rate for student loans today. Federal student loan rates start at 6.53 percent for direct subsidized loans and top out at 9.08 percent for Direct PLUS loans (those taken out by graduate students or the parents of undergraduate students). Compare this to the 2010s, when rates got as low as three percent and only as high as 4.5 percent for subsidized loans. Those rates look like free money compared to what undergraduates now face. In the private market, the interest rates can be a tough sell. Sallie Mae offers a fixed-rate student loan for an undergraduate degree starting at 3.69 percent but topping out at a whopping 15.49 percent, depending on the borrower’s creditworthiness. Combine these increased borrowing costs with the ever-increasing cost of higher education, and students may believe they can do better starting their adult lives in the job market rather than college. Unpredictability in enrollment trends have troubled statistical prognosticators, with the National Student Clearinghouse radically revising its predictions of major drops in enrollment in Fall of 2024 to a slight increase year over year. Whatever the numbers show, today’s education landscape is a far cry from previous certainty of a college-bound future for most high school students, and revised statistics won’t open the doors of any closed colleges.
Although Catholic institutions of higher education share many of the issues facing all such institutions, they have their own set of weaknesses as well as strengths. Dr. Donna M. Carroll, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU), said in an email that ten institutional members of the ACCU have closed in the last five years. “As you may know, most of our Catholic colleges and universities are small, (well) under 5000 students.” Small institutions of that size are “substantially tuition-driven, established to educate local, often immigrant communities,” said Carroll.
She added, “Our mission is both our strength and a vulnerability. That is, we (successfully) educate the poor in larger numbers, first-generation students, students in need of extra support, which often results in tight financial margins.” That creates vulnerability to outside risks like Covid, FAFSA issues, and economic realities.
Spread across eight states, there’s no single state-specific issue involved in these closures, according to Carroll. Instead, wider migration patterns across the country appear to be contributing: since 2020, Americans have been migrating to places like the South in greater numbers, meaning fewer prospective students are local to these predominantly Northern institutions.
Add to this the fact that areas like the Southeast have less Catholic “infrastructure” to speak of, including Catholic primary and secondary schools. As a result, the pipeline of Catholic primary and secondary schools to these Catholic institutions continues to weaken. In New York City alone, the archdiocese closed twelve schools in 2023; nationally, a total of seventy-five Catholic schools closed that year.
Carroll emphasized that Catholic institutions are adjusting to the times and remaining competitive: “Some of our larger Catholic universities are opening new campuses in growth areas, like Creighton’s medical school in Arizona. We are also beginning to see hopeful mergers rather than closures/acquisitions…with a steep learning curve, according to colleagues.” Additionally, Catholic institutions are looking at nontraditional learning paths. “There are a number of Catholic trade schools being established, apprentice-like programs with a Catholic studies core,” said Carroll. Catholic Hispanic-serving institutions have also gained market share, with Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, welcoming its largest freshman class in its history. Carroll noted that over a third of ACCU’s members are Hispanic-serving as defined by the U.S. Department of Education.
Catholic schools have other questions of mission and identity to reckon with. Some complain that Catholic institutions, attempting to draw a less religious population, can no longer claim religious affiliation as a strategic differentiator. That is, adding a few theology courses to what is otherwise a curriculum a student could get at a state school or another secular school might not be attractive to high-school graduates more interested in saving money. Catholic institutions have also had to face intra-Church turmoil over different positions on abortion after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. Traditionally, higher-education institutions are more liberal, so a pro-life position creates tension with the political beliefs that might be enshrined in the wider culture of higher education. Because of these unique challenges, Catholic schools may be facing an even harder fight to survive than their non-Catholic counterparts.
But Catholic institutions of higher education might find some relief in the wider umbrella of the Church. The Villanova/Cabrini merger and Ursuline/Gannon partnership show that schools with the same roots might be able to stanch the bleeding and face an uncertain future for higher education together. Absent collective action, colleges would need to weather the storm alone. Many simply don’t have the capacity to do that.
Given the severity of the problems facing higher education, it’s hard to see a future without more college failures, both in secular and in Catholic institutions. Losses will involve countless students and thousands of jobs for educators and administrators. But there’s a less quantifiable threat too: the loss of faith-based institutions may continue to erode the strength of faith communities across the country.
Many of the United States’ Catholic institutions were founded in the nineteenth century, a result of an immigration-fueled rise in Catholicism. This century will challenge the same institutions with demographic and economic trends just as powerful.