When colleges close, the fallout for students can be catastrophic. It’s happening more often.
Over 500 private, nonprofit four-year institutions have closed in the last 10 years, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. That is three times what it was in the decade prior. Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO, estimates at least 1.25 million students were affected by these closures. (Many more for-profit institutions have closed in this period as well.)
In the middle of her freshman year, Sam Marshall decided she wanted to be closer to home, so she transferred to Mount Ida College in Massachusetts. She had only spent a semester there when the college suddenly announced it would be closing down.
Marshall searched for a nearby school with an interior design program. When she landed at Newbury College, she emailed the admissions office: Was the school financially stable?
They told her they had no plans to close, so she enrolled. A few months later, a familiar email landed in Marshall’s inbox: Newbury would be closing its doors at the end of the school year.
“I really wanted to drop out,” Marshall said. “But then I would have all this debt and nothing to show for it.”
The reasons for a stark rise in closures are myriad, but the rising cost of higher education is playing a role. The number of college-bound students has declined since 2011 with colleges often buckling under the strain of tuition losses.
The pace of closures is expected to continue as federal COVID-19 funding dries up and applications drop due to a reduced birth rate, according to analysts and educators. The rise in prices is also one reason many young Americans are re-evaluating the overall value of a four-year degree.
Most at risk of closing are rural liberal arts schools with fewer than 1,000 students. Students are often drawn to their niche programs, tiny class sizes, and defined sense of community.
“These small institutions get students emotionally,” said Laura De Veau, who had been Mount Ida College’s vice president of student affairs.
Ayden Farrar-Hines, 19, knew Iowa Wesleyan University had some financial troubles. When he arrived at the campus in January 2023, he noticed the heat sometimes gave out and toilet paper wouldn’t be replenished for days.
Still, he had teachers who helped him with his assignments in the library and friends who slept over in his dorm room. It had been a long time since Farrar-Hines, who was placed in foster care in high school, felt like he had a family.
When the school announced its closure in March 2023, he thought, “This isn’t real.”
The next semester, he transferred to the University of Dubuque. The school was twice as big as Iowa Wesleyan and when he reached out to Dubuque students, they didn’t reciprocate, he said. His anxiety and depression flared. He started drinking and stopped eating, losing 50 pounds over a semester.
“I’m just drained from trying to make friends,” he said. “I’m not as extroverted as I used to be.”
He decided not to return to Dubuque this fall. Instead, he’ll take classes at a community college and enroll in a four-year university in a few years.
The uptick in college closures has brought on more skepticism about the cost and value of a four-year degree.
“It reinforces the scrutiny around whether a higher-ed degree is worth it, whether schools know what they’re doing, whether they’re managing themselves and students’ educations,” said Emily Wadhwani, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, a credit-ratings firm.
Marshall, who twice experienced college closures, graduated from Suffolk University in 2022. She now works as an interior design assistant and wishes she had instead gone to a trade school. She accrued over $100,000 in student loans across her four universities, spending an extra year at Suffolk because her previous credits didn’t all transfer. She can’t afford to move out of her childhood home.
“It’s hard right now to live the life I want to live,” she said.
Less than half of the students whose schools closed between 2004 and 2020 continued their education, according to a SHEEO study. Students whose institutions closed abruptly were even less likely to re-enroll.
In May, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia announced it would be closing in a week, citing declining revenue and enrollment. The school had been in existence for nearly 150 years.
Jade Gilliam, a senior with 18 credits left to graduate, felt betrayed. She decided not to continue her education for now, instead taking a year off to work.
“I put all this money and energy towards a piece of paper in a place that doesn’t care about me,” she said. “It’s really hard to sign up for that again at this point.”
Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama had been on the brink of financial crisis for years. When it officially shut down on May 31, its baseball team was miles away in Ohio. They were vying for an intercollegiate World Series championship.
Players joked they would have to switch to plain white jerseys, without the name of a school that no longer existed.
“I thought somebody was going to come along and pay off all this debt,” said Carter Tyus, a member of the team who had just finished his junior year. “Nobody could do that, even if they wanted, but I still was having prayers and thoughts that it would happen.”
Reality didn’t sink in until the team’s elimination two days later. Tyus stood in the stadium’s parking lot eating a slice of pizza and thought, “Man, I’m really not going back.”
Tyus won’t be playing baseball at his new school, Samford University in Homewood, Ala., where he plans to graduate with a marketing degree in the spring. Other schools’ teams reached out with offers for him to play, he said, but they couldn’t assure him that all his credits would transfer.
Instead, he decided on a new plan for next year: He’s going to take up golf.
Certain parts of the country have seen an influx of young, rich households.
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If you saw our map showing where America's high-income households are moving, you'll know that Florida was the top destination for big earners — but are the country's young and wealthy choosing the same spots?
Using IRS data for the 2021 and 2022 tax years, SmartAsset ranked the US states based on the net migration of households aged 26 to 35 and with incomes of $200,000 or more.
Two states attracted more than double the number of young and rich households than anywhere else. Florida saw a net inflow of 1,786 young households earning at least $200,000 a year, while Texas saw 1,660.
Of the top ten states gaining the most high-earning young people, half don't charge state income tax: Florida, Texas, Washington, Tennessee, and Nevada.
California lost more young, rich households than anywhere else in the country, with a net migration of −3,226.
Via SmartAsset.