In January 2023, high school senior Katherine Gaffney toured Cabrini University, a school in suburban Radnor, Pennsylvania. “You would have thought that it was a perfectly good school, and I loved it when I showed up. So I decided to go there,” she explained. But less than six months later, in June 2023, Katherine received an email informing her that Cabrini would be shutting its doors the following year. The 2023-2024 school year would be its final operating year. “I actually thought it was a joke,” Gaffney explained. “The fact that a college can close is not something that I ever thought could be possible.”
Instead of a freshman year focused on orienting herself to a new campus, Gaffney’s was spent scrambling to research transfer options. While Gaffney received support from Cabrini, she felt limited by the few “partner schools” that worked with Cabrini to accept students’ credits. “Those schools kind of weren’t meant for everybody,” she explained. “I’m on the golf team. Not all of them had golf teams. I’m a Criminology major. Some of them didn’t even have Criminal Justice, and none of them had Criminology.” These limitations left Gaffney and many other students feeling like they had to fend for themselves when it came to determining their next steps. In fact, the closure ended up cutting off some students’ educational journeys entirely. “I know there were quite a few freshmen who didn’t end up going to school again,” said Gaffney. “I think part of that is because there was such a lack of pushing…Nobody was pushing you to be better. Nobody was pushing you to continue. They’d almost sort of given up already because they knew they were closing.”
Gaffney’s story has become more and more common as a wave of closures sweeps through the country’s small, private liberal-arts colleges. These closures are driven by several factors, including a shift in public perception about the value of higher education. Many Americans are questioning whether a traditional liberal arts education is worth the high cost.
A Gallup and Lumina Foundation report from 2024 indicated that nearly ⅓ of polled American adults possessed little or no confidence in higher education. Nearly ⅓ of those polled said that college was “too expensive,” and 24% agreed that college students are not being taught what they need to succeed. This focus on return on investment drives students away from institutions that emphasize a broad liberal arts education and not specialized, career-focused training. This is reflected in recent cuts in liberal arts programs made by both private and public schools. Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at University of Tennessee at Knoxville, feels that these cuts are underreported in comparison to the more dramatic story of college closures. While the closure of liberal arts institutions merits attention, Kelchen feels that “the bigger issue is colleges having to make big cuts to stay open and avoid closures, but this gets a lot less attention.”
Larry Schall, President at the New England Commission of Higher Education, discussed these changing sentiments about college, explaining, “A college education… has increasingly been considered a private [good]. College is a place to be prepared for the workforce.” Applicants are increasingly selecting colleges based on their ability to give students a competitive edge.
This sentiment also helps explain the rise in interest in trade schools. A National Student Clearinghouse Research Center report indicates that from 2022 to 2023, enrollment in vocational-focused community colleges increased 16%. Much of this interest comes from an expectation that trade schools, which have lower costs and offer more immediate job prospects, provide better return on investment than liberal arts education.
Michael Horn, an adjunct lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education and the author of several books on education, adds that liberal arts schools also have declining appeal since they tend to be in more rural locations. “More and more students have wanted to go to college in urban environments, because that’s where the jobs are,” Horn said.
But one of the largest empirical factors contributing to college closures is simply a decline in enrollment, which is expected to worsen in the coming years. This is due to the approaching ‘enrollment cliff‘—a demographic shift that will result in fewer college-age students in the coming years due to declining birth rates following the 2008 recession. Nathan Grawe, an economist at Carleton College who coined the term, predicts that between 2025 and 2029, the population of students attending college will decrease by 15%. Small colleges are especially sensitive to enrollment fluctuations. “If you have a first year class of, say, 200 students, and you miss targets by 20 students. That’s 10% of your first year budget potential,” Horn explained.
Colleges that have recently closed their doors, like Cabrini University, Cazenovia College, and Birmingham Southern College, all cited declining enrollment as a major factor. Cazenovia, which shut its doors at the end of June 2023, faced $25 million in debt partially caused by declining enrollment. Former president David Bergh specifically mentioned the aforementioned demographic shifts as the issue. “There are far fewer 18 and 22 year olds out there, and that’s especially pronounced in the Northeast and the Midwest, where a ton of small, traditional, often rural, liberal arts colleges are,” Bergh explained.
When colleges face these issues, the question of transparency immediately becomes important. Administration must tow a narrow line between providing students and faculty adequate notice before the closure while avoiding premature panic or hastening the college’s decline. “On the one hand, you want to do everything you can as long as possible to keep the place alive,” said Bergh. “There’s no way that you can come out and announce that you’re struggling and may not make it. By that very announcement, you have kind of made the determination.”
Cazenovia only remained open for one semester after announcing its plans to close. Bergh and his colleagues dedicated that semester to helping students find transfer opportunities, despite the strange environment it brought to campus. Bergh explained, “We had college fairs on our campus in the spring, which was kind of an odd thing to be doing, to have other schools on your campus recruiting.” Bergh’s efforts were motivated by a striking reality: fewer than half of students transfer to other institutions when their college closes, leaving most students unable to complete their degrees. “Unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of closures more recently in which the announcement ends up being made late in the spring or even over the summer, and it really takes away the ability of the institution to help its students.”
College closures can be especially devastating for students in small, rural communities where the institutions long served as havens for marginalized identities. This was the case for Birmingham Southern College, which shut its doors this past spring. The college’s closure was particularly significant due to its reputation as a progressive institution known for its LGBTQ+ acceptance. Brooke Battle, a former trustee of the college, poignantly noted, “I heard one kid through a professor say, ‘Well, I guess I’ll go back in the closet.’ This is when they were trying to transfer to another school. They just really didn’t have very many options.”
Birmingham Southern’s closure also left consequences beyond the immediate school community. Brit Batlock, a Birmingham native who attended nearby Samford College, discussed the “brain drain” that occurs when communities lose these schools. “There’s a massive economic loss… the loss of jobs, the loss of opportunity, the loss of an accessible college right there in people’s hometown area,” she said.
Often overlooked in discussions about college closures are the broader ramifications these events have on their surrounding communities. Larry Schall, director of The New England Commission of Higher Education explained, “Small colleges located in small towns have sort of forever been the sort of economic anchor of that town… I think it does really have a significant impact on the broader community. That’s one thing that people don’t talk about so much.”
While economic considerations are important, college closures also have profound social impacts on the community. Battle commented, “My daughter who’s in high school here…her favorite teacher at her high school moved because his wife was a professor at BSC and got a new job in California.”
Batlock feels that BSC in particular drove the entire city of Birmingham to become a more accepting place. “Not only was it a good economic driver inside the city, but it also became a space where racial relations could be repaired and bettered over the years,” Batlock said. She added that BSC offered a unique attraction for several intellectual thinkers that are now absent in the city, adding, “A lot of those professors probably chose BSC very carefully as the kind of institution they wanted to be at. And when you work in that world, you can’t pop from college to college. When we lose entities that were specifically attracting people with educated backgrounds, it’s to the loss of the whole state, not just the city itself.”
As the world of higher education prepares for even steeper declines in enrollment, the stories of Cabrini, Cazenovia, and Birmingham Southern serve as stark reminders of what is lost when a college closes. Beyond just students and faculty, entire communities feel the absence of these colleges, which serve as economic anchors, gateways to education, and a source of identity for towns both large and small across the United States. Gaffney is feeling that loss of community as she adjusts to her first year at nearby Arcadia University. “I definitely miss [Cabrini],” Gaffney said. “I have a piece of me that hates them because they closed, because I loved it so much.” Gaffney lives in Illinois. Moving to Pennsylvania was a big shift for her. The community at Cabrini eased this transition. “At Cabrini, I never really felt that sense of homesickness,” Gaffney said. “But after I came back to this new school…I realized that I was homesick, but I wasn’t homesick for my home. I was homesick for Cabrini.”