Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Will Your (Christian) College Close?

Will Your (Christian) College Close?

Last updated on: February 25, 2020 at 1:55 am by Chris Gehrz

Will Your (Christian) College Close? 2020-02-24T20:58:24-04:00 Chris Gehrz

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

It’s not the kind of headline you hope to see in the Chronicle of Higher Education, but there it was earlier this month: “Will your college close?”

Writers Robert Zemsky, Susan Shaman, and Susan Campbell Baldridge hastened to reassure readers that “Closings will not be nearly as prevalent as some prognosticators have predicted.” Based on a market stress test they developed, Zemsky, Shaman, and Baldridge estimate that 60% of America’s thousands of colleges and universities “face little to no risk” of closing anytime soon. But 30% “are likely to struggle,” and one in 10 is expected to simply cease operations.

As a college professor, I can’t say I like those odds. But as a historian, I need to acknowledge that college failure is a regular theme throughout the history of American higher education. What we face is not without precedent, though a 10% closure rate would be significantly higher than what higher ed has experienced in its modern era. To explain, let me briefly revisit and update a 2013 series from my own blog.

Using data collected by Ray Brown, former institutional research director at Westminster College (MO), I considered just how common it was for colleges, universities, seminaries, and other postsecondary institutions in the United States to close. Here’s the graph I posted in 2013, showing closures decade-by-decade as a share of the overall number open at the start of each period.

Seven years ago, I could start my analysis of that data on a (relatively) optimistic note, emphasizing “that it’s a relatively rare thing for a college, university, seminary, law school, or other institution of higher learning to close in the 20th and (so far) 21st centuries. Moreover, [those] 1200+ closures and mergers have done little to slow the expansion of higher education since 1900.” With the exception of one such period, over 95% of colleges open at the start of each decade between 1940 and 2000 remained open ten years later.

Then there was the 1970s, when the closure rate spiked over 8%. In part that was because some niche categories—teacher’s colleges, women’s colleges, independent medical and nursing schools—saw a rash of closures and mergers, to the point that they were rendered obsolete, or very nearly so. (And the single-sex colleges that survived have been among the first to risk closure in more recent years.) Other institutions that failed in the 1970s had been founded in the midst of the flush times after WWII, when financial aid became much more readily available to a postwar generation, and never secured the stable finances that would let them survive the economic challenges of the Seventies. Indeed, 36% of the institutions that closed between 1950 and 1979 had been established after 1945.

But ominously, I found that virtually the same percentage (37%) of institutions that had closed since 1980 had been open since before 1910. “Now, none of these is especially well-known outside of its region, alumni group, etc.,” I wrote, too dismissively. “But for those of us who work at private four-year colleges, it is unsettling to see how many long-lived schools of that type have expired of late, most even before the Great Recession and explosion of MOOCs got talk of a burst bubble bubbling.” Those “massive open online courses” turned out not to be the disruptive innovation that some desired or feared. But looking back with seven years of hindsight, it seems obvious that the bubble is leaking air, if not bursting.

What happens if you apply my 2013 method to the decade that just finished? How many American institutions of higher learning survived the 2010s? According to Ray Brown’s ever-lengthening list, 208 closed or were absorbed in mergers between 2010 and 2019 — out of 4,634 that the Chronicle reported for 2010.

That closure rate of 4.5% would be the highest (by my admittedly rough method) for any decade since the Seventies. And it seems to be accelerating: when I first did this exercise, only 1.6% of the schools open in 2000 had closed by 2013.

Now, more than half of the closures in the 2010s came in the for-profit sector, which has less regulation (and vastly higher student debt) than the non-profits. And we’re still not even halfway to the 10% closure rate suggested in this month’s Chronicle article.

But a recent series of closures suggests the pace is quickening, and that my particular sector of higher ed may face unique challenges.

Entrance to the campus of Cincinnati Christian University, which closed at the end of 2019 – Wikimedia/public domain

I’m not sure if institutions like my employer are at greater risk than others. You don’t have to have a religious identity and mission to be nervous about being an expensive, tuition-dependent, low-endowment institution that needs to keep raising its discount rate to attract a shrinking pool of students from an overcrowded regional marketplace.

But having a distinctively Christian mission — much as I might value it — certainly doesn’t protect a school from the risk of closure. Just consider some very recent history:

Of the 10 non-profit schools on Brown’s list that closed in 2019, half had church connections: Baptist Seminary in Richmond, Hiwassee College, and three small Catholic schools (Marygrove, New Rochelle, and St. Joseph).
Faced with the loss of its accreditation, Cincinnati Christian University closed as 2019 turned to 2020.
Earlier this month, theologian Myles Werntz shared on Twitter that his employer, Logsdon Seminary of Hardin-Simmons University, would be closing after the 2020-2021 year. (Later in the month, Hardin-Simmons itself eliminated programs and faculty and staff positions.)
A couple days after Werntz’s post, Concordia University in Portland, Oregon abruptly announced its board’s decision to close the school this May, prompting a class action lawsuit by students who say they would not have come back for the spring semester had they known it was to be the school’s last.

Like most of our contributors’ employers, Concordia is a member of the Lilly Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities. While small colleges have been the most likely to close so far, Concordia’s Portland campus is home to 1,800 undergraduate and graduate students (plus thousands more in online programs), large enough to make me less certain that a well-established Christian college like Bethel is “too big to fail.”

In fact, it’s possible that religion adds extra layers of “market stress” that won’t be captured by Zemsky, Shaman, and Baldridge’s method.

First, in a time when higher ed is increasingly expected to respond to the needs of the market, Christian colleges (necessarily) have a complicated relationship with the economy. A recent Cardus study confirmed that alumni of private religious colleges earn lower salaries than their public and private nonreligious peers — perhaps because they’re more likely than other college graduates to define their calling in terms of helping others and somewhat less likely to emphasize making money. That seems to accord with the assumption that fundraising at my institution tends to lag behind its competitors because so many of our alumni labor in relatively underpaid professions like teaching, nursing, ministry, and social work. In an economy that continues to squeeze the middle class, will such Christian college alumni be able to donate to their alma maters, or to afford private college tuition for their own children?

Of course, religious colleges do churn out alumni who enter lucrative careers and become major givers. More and more of our students are pursuing high-paying careers in business, engineering, scientific research, and medicine. And universities like Bethel are working as hard as their non-religious competitors to forge partnerships with corporations and other employers. But there’s an inherent tension. Much as a school like Bethel depends on attracting the resources of those who benefit most from our economy, its religious and educational mission as a Christian liberal arts college demands that our faculty and students ask hard questions about the inequalities and injustices of that same economy.

And that’s not the only kind of tension that may complicate the future of religious schools. No doubt enrollment and fiscal issues did much to doom Concordia-Portland and Logsdon Seminary. But there may have been other reasons, more particular to the institutions’ religious affiliations. In the case of Logsdon, Baptist News Global reported that “a small but influential group of individuals has been working behind the scenes to convince trustees that the school aligned with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is too liberal to be trusted in today’s Baptist General Convention of Texas.” And The Oregonian reported that the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod tied financial support to Concordia hewing more closely to the conservative denomination’s stance on gender and sexuality.

Hagen Campus Center at Concordia University in Portland, OR – CC BY-SA 4.0 (Another Believer)

At one time, having ties to a denomination or other well-defined religious constituency might have helped a private college or seminary to weather an economic downturn, since it could count on recruiting and fundraising from an affinity group with strong loyalty to the institution. But schools like mine now receive hardly any money from their sponsoring denominations, whose individual members feel increasingly comfortable sending their children and donations to (and hiring their pastors from) a wider array of educational alternatives.

Yet the denomination can still feel entitled to police the religious boundaries of the college or seminary. And as the reporting on Concordia-Portland and Logsdon suggests, denominational leaders — or a smaller subset of conservative constituents — might even use the present economic urgency as leverage: stop “trending left,” or else.

As it happens, Bethel is going to announce a new president this Thursday morning — two months before it announces the elimination of up to 30 faculty positions. I can only hope that our search committee has selected someone who will make it possible for the professors who remain to keep doing everything that I extolled in my open letter about Christian higher ed. Because if our new president isn’t someone who combines forward-thinking vision with an abiding commitment to the mission of the Christian liberal arts, and if she isn’t someone who spends more time expanding our pool of families and donors than assuaging the unfounded religious anxieties of a shrinking base, then it’s possible that her chief legacy will be to preside over yet another Christian college closure.

Previous Post

February 24, 2020

Tradition, Tradition, Tradition

Next Post

February 26, 2020 Burning Corsets at a Free Methodist Revival

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe guest post Guest Post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What was Nehemiah's royal position?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Governor Priest Soldier Cupbearer