The Demise of College May be Exaggerated, But Opportunities Are Presenting Themselves
At the time of year when many college students are thinking about semester exams and final essays, the news cycle has highlighted the chaos rocking prominent schools such as Columbia and UCLA. As if that was not enough to make one question sending junior off to college, The Washington Post turned heads April 26 announcing that colleges are closing at an alarming rate. The article was originally published by The Hechinger Report, entitled “Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week. What happens to the students?” The bulk of the story concerns the fates of students who must pick up the pieces when schools close, painting a depressing story for higher education in America.
Exactly where The Hechinger Report gets its data is unclear. But the website Higher Ed Dive has a constantly updated article that records information about college closures, including reports that summarize official statements and the history of particular schools. In “A look at trends in college consolidation since 2016,” there is an interactive map which can even be narrowed by state to show how things are shaking out closest to one’s home. But looking at this data, the claim of “one per week” could be seen as misleading.
Part of the problem stems from the definition of terms. The original report from Hechinger does note, towards the end of the essay, that not all schools are closing completely. There are three options for higher ed institutions that find themselves unable to continue their work. They can 1) close, sending students and faculty to other schools, 2) merge with other institutions, continuing to serve their students and retain their faculty, and 3) they can restructure into a different institution, usually with some higher ed adjacent projects in mind. The numbers show that from January 1, 2020, to May 1, 2024, 38 schools have closed or announced they will close, while 28 schools have merged, and four have restructured. Mergers and restructuring are not ideal situations for those involved, but are typically better than outright closures. The timeline is also an issue. Of the 38 closures mentioned above, only 9 have occurred in the Spring term of 2024. That cuts the initial claim of one per week in half; not exactly a comforting clarification, but an important distinction.
But at the root of this argument is a question of value. The colleges announcing closures this Spring are facing long-term problems rather than new ones. Some schools have been experiencing financial issues for over a decade, or have been on probation by their accrediting agency since before the COVID pandemic. And a surprising number of these schools served fewer than one hundred students when they closed. It is hard to convince an American public with waning confidence that degrees from an unstable institution offers much value. If colleges cannot even keep their own budgets balanced or persuade new students that the school has something to offer, can those who do attend be certain they’ve learned anything of worth? Are the college closures really a crisis as it is being portrayed?
There is another way of looking at this situation. What if this is more of a natural consequence than an alarming crisis? If a college has financial woes from mismanagement or a lack of student interest, should the closing be a source of panic? Or if a college cannot offer a clear mission regarding the education they give their students, either because they’ve drifted from their original mission or because they tried to “adapt” to changing situations and failed, is that cause for great lament? Is it all the federal government’s fault, as some colleges have claimed? Could there be other things at work? It is worth noting that 49% of schools closing or merging from 2020-2025 are religious in nature. And many of the private schools were once religiously affiliated. This is a helpful reminder that it is not State-funded schools which find themselves in this situation, but primarily Christian or formerly-Christian schools.
Given the number of Christian schools which are closing, we need to think differently about these closures. A better way of approaching this comes from perhaps an unlikely source, the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper. Kuyper founded a university in the Netherlands and met serious opposition for doing so. In his Our Program: A Christian Political Manifesto (1879), Kuyper notes that when “the government pays almost the whole bill it might as well run the school, and so the school becomes the apple of discord for the politicians.” Kuyper’s point proved prescient, as colleges in the United States today have been forced to follow intricate, contradictory rules if they hope to receive money from the federal government. The Dutch theologian warned that if the government converted the religious schools into public ones, the consequences would be unavoidable: “With one stroke of the pen, gone will be all burdens, worries, and slander and abuse. You can depend on it, well-nigh all our Christian schools would succumb to the temptation.” Many of the schools that have closed since 2020 have been able to last as long as they did due to the influx of COVID money from D. C. Without that Federal aid, the closing would surely have happened sooner. Some of the curricular changes noted previously also stemmed from meeting FDOE requirements, something that Kuyper had warned the Christians in the Netherlands to avoid: “For whether I say that you may run your school as freely as you like, and I will hardly ever impose the slightest bit of my supremacy—the question is and remains: Whose flag will be flying at the top? Who ultimately will be in charge? Who in the end will be the boss of the show? Who will, now and in the future, have the right to draw up regulations for the school? Whose prerogative will it be to say: this is how things will have to be done!”
If schools want to thrive in the twenty-first century, they will need to reckon with the behemoth of the Federal Department of Education. What is encouraging in the midst of colleges closing in 2024 is the realization that a counter-movement is already underway. And that movement has far more in common with Kuyper than might be imagined. For, Kuyper argued that the best way to provide an education would come through a system formed around independence, particularly independence from the government. While recognizing the State has a vested interest in education, Kuyper feared that eventually a government run school would infringe upon the rights of conscience and the rights of parents. It’s clear that Kuyper saw the landscape better in the 1870s than many see it in the 2020s. But just as Kuyper offered his proposal out of a place of hope, there is reason to have a similar hope today.
The countermovement, which shares affinities with Kuyper’s program, could be said to begin in the early 1980s, when Hillsdale College voluntarily stopped accepting federal funds as did Grove City College. This idea picked up steam in the mid-90s as two new colleges were founded: Gutenberg College and New Saint Andrews College in 1994, and Ave Maria University in 1998. Another school, New College Franklin, opened in 2006. But beginning in 2019, a spate of new schools have opened which aim to provide their students with something of real value without bowing down to the idol of the Federal DOE. Ralston College in Georgia welcomed their first students in 2022. Hildegard College located in Southern California did the same in 2023. In 2024, Redeemer School of the Arts and the University of Austin will open their doors. And New College Aberdeen will bring in their first group of students in 2025. Of these new institutions, only Ralston and UATX explicitly state they are not a religious institution. But all of these schools reject the status quo in significant ways, keeping the FDOE at arms’ length as they build new institutions that have an unclouded vision for education.
It might be tempting to see this as a revolution in the making, but that would be counter to Kuyper’s ideas. If Kuyper is a reliable guide, then the current movement in establishing these newer, clear-eyed institutions is better thought of as anti-revolutionary. For “the anti-revolutionary disapproves of every form of state subsidy and demands, if subsidies cannot be avoided, that they always be granted on the basis of . . . poor relief and never on the basis of . . . education” (199). And so, while we should not rejoice in the closing of so many colleges, we should, like Kuyper, recognize that in such a moment there is a real chance to declare that Christ is Lord of higher education too.
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