By Elizabeth Rembert, Amanda Albright and Marie Patino
The Big Take
Trinity Christian College, Siena Heights University and Sterling College couldn’t pull through.
In 2025, they succumbed to a fundamental problem killing colleges across the US: not enough students. The schools will award their final degrees this spring, stranding students not yet ready to graduate and forcing faculty and staff to hunt for new jobs.
David Bergh knows this pain all too well. He was the final president of Cazenovia College, which held its last, bittersweet graduation ceremony in 2023. Tucked in a small upstate New York town, Cazenovia survived the Civil War and the Great Depression but couldn’t overcome the one-two punch of falling enrollment and the Covid-19 pandemic. The school shuttered just shy of its bicentennial.
“Closing Cazenovia was an incredibly heartbreaking experience. It was torturous,” Bergh said. “And unfortunately, there will be more of it.”
Even before President Donald Trump launched his campaign against America’s colleges and universities, the industry faced an existential threat.
The country’s tumbling birth rate is pushing schools toward a “demographic cliff,” where a steadily dropping population of people in their late teens and early 20s will leave desks and classrooms empty. Many smaller, lesser-known schools like Cazenovia have already hit the precipice. They’re firing professors, paring back liberal arts courses in favor of STEM — or closing altogether.
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Choose life.