Robert Kelchen, Dubravka Ritter, Douglas Webber:
“How did you go bankrupt?” one American expat asks another in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. “Two ways,” his friend responds. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
The most dramatic college closures tend to follow a similar arc. A century-old, beloved liberal arts institution abruptly shuts its doors, sending students and staff scrambling as it succumbs at last to the financial challenges dogging schools that rely on tuition dollars. But the forces creating those challenges—declining enrollment, punishing operating costs, and anemic endowment returns—typically accumulate over a period of years if not decades. In recent years, these forces have all been featured players in the final chapters of small nonprofit schools like Wells College (New York), Northland College (Wisconsin), Iowa Wesleyan University (Iowa), Finlandia College (Michigan), and more than three dozen others. This growth in closures has followed a massive reorganization of the for-profit college sector, where enrollment fell by more than half in the 2010s.
Research and policy discussions often focus on the negative effects of college closures on students, but that’s only part of the story. Colleges also serve as anchor institutions—local economic and cultural engines whose sudden disappearance can leave regions flat-footed. Communities with colleges have higher levels of educational attainment, employment in human capital-intensive industries, economic mobility, and local economic output. Colleges also function as cultural hubs, by supporting civic engagement and the arts, and by providing entertainment and a range of educational and enrichment opportunities for their neighbors. Closures affect entire communities, far beyond campus borders.