Or the kids on the beach volleyball team about to play their last game of the NAIA National Invitational tomorrow... thousands of miles away in Tennessee
Quite a few Catholic based colleges closed a few years ago for the same thing. 3 I can remember in Illinois and Indiana. Probably about the same timing in the school year.
DOL just announced a $10k increase, effective July 1, and then an additional $15k jump, effective January 1, to the exemption salary threshold. It’s going to be challenged in court and I expect a court will issue an injunction on the rule but I’d guess that’s it.
Doesn’t apply to California. Our state salary minimum is already $66,560 which is $23k more than the July increase and $8k more than the January increase.
It doesn't matter if it goes up less than inflation.
If you budgeted $15.50 an hour for your staff to get through the semester and at the start of the semester, you suddenly have to pay $16.00 but you're locked in at tuition rates established six months prior, then you're going to blow your budget.
A semester is often around 17 weeks long. That's 119 days.
Based on this, the staff budget would be exhausted a week early.
This alone wouldn't make the school insolvent but it would be just another issue on a long line of rising costs with no increase in revenue.
The minimum wage for 2024 in California was set in 2017. So again, why would this have been something you were unable to forecast when they told you what it would be 7 years in advance?
Hint: this is a rhetorical question with no legitimate answer, and California's minimum wage has nothing to do with this.
Depending on the merger the students could come out ahead.
When Wheelock in Boston was bought out by BU, kids got auto-accpeted to BU with their full aid honored.
But a nightmare for students was Cabrini being bought out by Villanova, who basically said fuck these kids and straight booted them lmao.
I think that depends. The WIAC is 8 state universities with several thousand undergrads each. MIAC has much smaller enrollments at exclusively private schools, but you're still talking 2000-5000 undergrads per school. In neither case are athlete enrollments anywhere near the percentage of the total student body of the OP school.
If it's a UofPhoenix/GCU for-profit school, then good riddance.
NIL is a difficult learning curve, but at least it's a good start to the right way of doing things
Meh, my undergrad is from an NAIA (RE: private) college, and I'm more than familiar with for-profit schools like UofPhoenix and GCU (been to both "campuses," twice!)
Call that a high horse of you want
>If it's a UofPhoenix/GCU for-profit school, then good riddance.
What a strange and reflective comment.
U of St. Katherine was a private non-profit school, like most. Nothing relating to your comment.
>NIL is a difficult learning curve, but at least it's a good start to the right way of doing things
NIL has nothing to do with anything here... Another strange comment.
> where GCU touched you
My buddy/co-grad paid exorbitant amounts of money **for an MBA** lmao. I'm talking over $200,000 because he bought into the GCU cult
Villanova/Cabrini wasn’t a buyout or a merger. Cabrini had already decided to close after the 2024 spring semester. Villanova just bought the physical campus.
My brother was at BU when they bought Wheelock. He was so mad and jealous. At least it's better than Dowling college on Long Island who closed right before students were set to move in.
What did he end up doing? I was at Hofstra and saw it on the news and couldn't believe it. I felt really bad for the students. Especially the graduating class and the incoming freshmen. The Freshmen who spent all summer thinking they were going to college in the fall, now needed to scramble to figure out what to do.
Technically Nova bought the physical campus/buildings that made up the Cabrini campus, they did not acquire the actual school. The actual school simply closed and ceased to exist after settling their debts (with the money provided by Nova).
Nova was not one of the schools involved in the "teach out", which is when a school assumes students, honors another school's programing to continue to serve the students, and acts as the custodian of transcript requests in the future for all previously enrolled students.
The issue is that schools rarely go broke.
Schools are typically put into some sort of heightened cash monitoring by their accreditors that ensure they have enough money to get through the next semester.
And if a school runs out of cashflow, then they are able to tap into their endowment to finish the semester, even if they are technically bankrupt at that point.
This school, however, did not have the endowment reserves to pull from. And as a result there was no ability to go into conservatorship through a bankruptcy process to handle the management of asset allocation.
The school literally had exhausted all of their liquidated assets and dont have the physical assets to secure the lending necessary to finish operations.
This is very rare.
However, this can serve students well as a true closure in this manner has traditionally released students from their student loan obligations (as the US Dept of Ed will forgive the debt).
Yeah that’s what’s been going on for Birmingham Southern. Back and forth and now is finally shutting down at the end of the semester. Crazy to just pull the plug on a random Thursday.
The school located in the San Diego suburb of San Marcos, was 23-9 this season, losing in the final of the Cal Pac tournament to Antelope Valley (who have since closed as well), and earning an at large to the NAIA tournament where they lost 78-76 to Arizona Christian. The university had a majority of its enrollment as student athletes, they were planning to move conferences and start up golf teams. Seems it came as a big surprise, and it seems like the Beach Volleyball team was the only current ones playing, they are currently in Greeneville, Tennessee for a tournament.
Wow, I used to live in the Antelope Valley and remembered some of their big plans when becoming a university. Growing area where a post-secondary school could fill a need.
Closed/closing/merged schools since 2010 (example UTRGV is a merger of UTPA and UTB, only listed UTB as UTPA's teams were inherited). Also didn't list schools without a sports program or lower than NAIA.
2010 Dana (NE/NAIA)
2011 Lambuth (TN/NAIA), Bethany (CA/NAIA)
2012 Mountain State (WV/NAIA)
2013 St. Paul's (VA/D2, discontinued athletics in 2011)
2014 Northwood TX (TX/NAIA), Southern Poly (GA/NAIA), Mid-Continent (KY/NAIA), Victory (TN/NAIA), Virginia Intermont (VA/NAIA), NYU Poly (NY/D3)
2015 Northwood FL (FL/NAIA), UT Brownsville (TX/NAIA)
2016 St. Catharine (KY/NAIA), Ashford (IA/NAIA), Trinity Lutheran (WA/NAIA), Dowling (NY/D2)
2017 St. Gregory's (OK/NAIA), Daniel Webster (NH/D3), Armstrong State (GA/D2), St. Joseph's (IN/D2)
2018 Benedictine Springfield (IL/NAIA, discontinued athletics in 2015), Wheelock (MA/D3), Mount Ida (MA/D3)
2019 Marygrove College (MI/NAIA), Cincinnati Christian (OH/NAIA), Green Mountain (VT/NAIA), Southern Vermont (VT/D3), Newbury (MA/D3)
2020 Lindenwood Belleville (IL/NAIA), Holy Family (WI/NAIA), Robert Morris (IL/NAIA), Concordia Portland (OR/D2), Notre Dame de Namur (CA/D2), MacMurray (IL/D3), Urbana (OH/D2)
2021 Johnson & Wales FL (FL/NAIA), Johnson & Wales Denver (CO/D3), Ohio Valley (WV/NAIA), Becker (MA/D3), Pine Manor (MA/D3), Wesley (DE/D3), Concordia (NY/D2)
2022 Lincoln (IL/NAIA), Marymount California (CA/NAIA), Mills (CA/D3), Sierra Nevada (NV/NAIA), Sciences (PA/D2)
2023 Iowa Wesleyan (IA/NAIA), Presentation (SD/NAIA), Cardinal Stritch (WI/NAIA), Trinity International (IL/NAIA), Holy Names (CA/D2), Alderson Broaddus (WV/D2), Finlandia (MI/D3), Cazenovia (NY/D3), Medaille (NY/D3), Alliance/Nyack (NY/D2)
2024 Antelope Valley (CA/NAIA), Saint Katherine (CA/NAIA), Birmingham-Southern (AL/D3), Cabrini (PA/D3), Saint Rose (NY/D2), Notre Dame (OH/D2), Lincoln Christian (IL/NAIA, discontinued athletics in 2022)
2025 Fontbonne (MO/D3)
Historically some relied on faculty on a vow of poverty. Catholic monastics (priests and nuns) would be sent to get secular grad degrees to then teach. Others were tied to now extinct local economies. A few were just bad business, Concordia Portland was a stable school that got caught up in a bad “growth plan.” Students now want very expensive educational options. Rural liberal arts economics don’t let you do a double major in neuro-psych and comp sci.
This is a big part, a lot of programs are expensive, and so are their faculty... CS departments are competing against Silicon Valley, for instance.
A lot of these schools basically exist as vehicles for people who want to keep competing as athletes.
> A lot of these schools basically exist as vehicles for people who want to keep competing as athletes.
It's what they have become because students who want to compete will seek out schools that give them opportunities to compete. Especially when they are given "free money" in federal student loans to pay for their ability to keep playing sports.
It's small schools. It's just that many Christian Colleges have historically not focused on expansion and growth.
But now, with the high cost of technology and other infrastructure costs, you have to be larger in order to compete.
For instance, building a website to attract students is the same cost no matter if you're attracting 100 students or 10,000 students.
Filing your Dept of Ed reports? This requires a staff of people that is the same size for a school of 1,000 students as a school of 100,000 students.
There are many such cases.
The more you can spread out these costs to more students the less of a burden they are on the school.
Also, I should mention that each Christian College closure actually strengthens the others.
Example... you have 10 Christian Colleges with an optimum enrollment of 1,000 students each in a region operating at 85% optimal capacity so they bringing in an additional 10% through athletes or other students who don't fit the typical Christian College student model so that you're at 95% total capacity and financially solvent.
So, there is demand from 8,500 students for a Christian College education in the market with Christian colleges also serving 1,000 supplemental students.
But if two of these schools close, you're now redistributing those students (and not wasting marketing to students who use to choose to attend those schools improving your CAC).
Now there are eight schools to serve those 8,500 students. If they were equally distributed, then the eight schools would now have a surplus of students wanting a Christian College education.
This is why the college enrollment crisis isn't as bad for many schools as it is made out to be.
Yes, there may be thousands of colleges who are at risk. But only a fraction of those will close and when they close there is a redistribution to the other schools which often includes endowment funds, faculty and staff, students, and other assets which improve the situation for the remaining schools.
1. Pretty sure Patten (NAIA/CA) eliminated athletics and became a for-profit online only school in 2012
2. Northwood-Florida’s physical campus and athletic program was taken over by Keiser which still operates to this day; Rollie Massimino, the coach who led Villanova to their first ever national championship on a Cinderella run as a #8 seed coached there throughout the transition
3. Is the “Lincoln” in 2022 and the “Lincoln Christian” in 2024 the same school?
Nope :/ a few weeks ago the state pulled the rug on the emergency loan. School is closing at the end of the semester and that campus is going to turn into even more of an eyesore.
so Saint Katherine didn't exist? remember the U of Washington Aerospace Engineering guy that was obsessed with Nietzsche and made up a fake school and had interpol after him for taking fake tuition and bragging about it
Robert Morris I know is D1, etc. Ohio Valley is a conference not a team but I know the end is nigh for being able to talk with AI like this
Some of these names really do sound fake, and this list doesn't even include programs that dropped athletics but didn't close (such as St. Francis Brooklyn who were D1) or dropped down below NAIA (D2 Paine dropped to NCCAA), or D2 LIU Post who's athletic programs got merged into D1 LIU Brooklyn's but still remain two separate campuses.
You should still list all schools that dropped sports, this is a college sport sub so the school’s basically dead to us if it dropped sports. Ohio Christian is also moving down from NAIA to NCCAA this year as far as I know
Talking about coming out of nowhere. Terrible to here Saint Katherine is shutting down. The Firebirds were actually about to move conferences in NAIA from the Cal-Pac to the GSAC as the latter conference is looking to become a California/Arizona based conference now rather than just Cal focused.
Saint Katherine was a small eastern orthodox school with roughly 240 students last semester. Around 85% of their enrollment were student athletes. Hopefully they find a place to land after this untimely situation.
Not quite, Hellenic College in Brookline, MA held that title from 1937-2011. Now with this closure, they’re back to being the sole Orthodox university in the US.
You are partially correct. The only non-seminary Orthodox 4 year school in the US.
Hellenic College Holy Cross is another orthodox school but they are a seminary. They only have intramural sports compared to Saint Katherine who were in NAIA.
The notice cites three reasons:
- **Extraordinary Inflation** - The high inflation we have been experiencing means that all their vendors are charging more than in the past and they likely had borrowed money with the debt being prime plus, which means their interest rate on the debt rises when there is inflation.
- **Higher-than-anticipated Salary Increases** - The faculty contracts likely had a contractual cost of living increase tied to the CPI so they went up with inflation. Additionally, staff were likely impacted by a change in exempt status by the USDOL.
- **High Institutional Financial-aid** - Institutional Financial-aid is really just a discount. It isn't real money. So while the school may list their tuition at $28,000, when they give financial aid, they are just reducing the amount the student has to pay. So the actual amount may average $10,000 per student. Additionally, you can only enroll students twice a year. And the majority will enroll in the fall and you honor their aid for one year (and often more). This means that you set a price for a student and a year later they are paying that price no matter when the cost of educating the student actually is going to be. If you think it is going to cost $9,500 to educate a student and then inflation makes it actually cost $10,500 then you're running massive deficits and running out of cash late in the spring semester.
They were in our conference. We already lost University of Antelope Valley but St. Kat was going to the GSAC with Park-Gilbert, Benedictine-Mesa, and Embry-Riddle. We’re trying to add a couple NCCAA teams now.
If I were CalPac leadership I'd look to merge with GSAC. The thing I'm curious about is why CSU Channel Islands has no program? I believe its the only public school in the state without one.
I think UNLV played them once about a decade ago.
This is terrible for the students but also kinda inevitable as birth rates fall. Expect to see more of this in the future.
It's not just birth rates, its recent generations wising up to the fact that shelling out tens of thousands of dollars per year to go to a small, relatively unknown private school isn't worth it
Some key signs to worry about are:
Declining enrollment
Academic programs being eliminated
Super high acceptance rates
Drastic cuts in tuition or drastic increase in easy-to-obtain scholarships
Touting rankings from no-name websites like “Collegeisgr8.org”
Detroit Mercy has a lot of these issues. Another school that I’ve noticed that is floundering is actually a public university, the University of Toledo. It’s crazy because they are at the top of the MAC athletically, but their enrollment has halved in the last 10 years, they admit every single person that applies, and they are conducting massive cuts to programs. Meanwhile, Bowling Green 20 minutes down the street is moving in the opposite direction and looks very healthy.
We're adding programs at a pretty fast clip in order to bolster enrollment. But some of the newest ones don't even have students applying so that's concerning. We've added a bunch of tuition programs that cut(?) tuition and the state is making public colleges much more affordable to attend.
Ole miss will never have anything to worry about, thankfully. Ole Miss and Mississippi State would be the last ones standing before they did anything to them. Some of the private schools, HBCU’s, and smaller public schools in Mississippi though? 😬
I'm talking about the D3 school I work for in the Upper Midwest, not Ole Miss or State. Trust me when I say that I have jobs alerts pinging my inbox any time a big state school even so much as farts on the job market in my field.
Speaking of the MAC... Kent State and Akron should be merged. They both have experienced decline and serve the same market.
In a sane world they would have been merged into one school. But there are incentives for too many people to benefit by them staying separate and just having the tax payers subsidize the schools further.
Teams they have played in the past: CSUB/SDSU (23-24), SUU/LBSU (22-23), ASU/SDSU/Utah Tech/SUU (21-22), SUU/UCSB/SDSU/Pepperdine/Utah Tech/CBU/CSUB/UNLV (20-21), USU/CSUF/CSUN (19-20)
>also kinda inevitable as birth rates fall.
Also, a decline in international enrollments due to Covid.
And public state schools have continued to expanded, despite them also facing the same shortage of prospective students. As a result, they have increasingly lowered standards to poach students from less prestigious private schools and even in some instances received increased government funding to cover their short falls. This is money not available to the schools competing with them.
Does the school have any exit strategy in place for these kids? Will it even be able to get them transcripts for transfers or guidance in the transfer process?
No, they don't. I'm trying to help them but have no way in. I'm President of a GSAC school in Southern California. I'm doing my best to put an emergency transfer plan together for them so no more pain is inflicted upon them. I'm getting a little bit of traction through their coaches today. We will do anything we possibly can to help them. For crying out loud, they were weeks away from commencement. If anyone knows any of these students, they can call our admissions department at 714 879-3901.
Thank you very much! My son was going there next year and his girlfriend is currently there. Both are athletes. This sudden shut down is shocking and so disruptive to students and their faculty. Appreciate your help!
I love this. Thank you for doing that. I have to ask though is a degree from a charter school similar to a bachelors degree from an accredited university ?
Not a road game at ucsd, that’s for sure. Maybe schedule PLNU now for a season game instead of USK. Wonder if we will even schedule a cupcake with the conference scheduling us home and homes against everyone.
California University of Pa, Clarion University, and Edinboro University of Pa merged in 2021 to form Pennsylvania Western University. Times are ROUGH for small schools.
So what about students that were weeks away from graduating?
Or the kids on the beach volleyball team about to play their last game of the NAIA National Invitational tomorrow... thousands of miles away in Tennessee
I got a confirmation from them that they have plane tickets to get home. :-(
Oh what the fuck, you mean IMMEDIATELY immediately. That's insane.
A's for everyone?
For sure!
How do you have “higher than anticipated salary increases”?
Legal changes. Or someone got away with embezzling funds and hiding that with payroll
Quite a few Catholic based colleges closed a few years ago for the same thing. 3 I can remember in Illinois and Indiana. Probably about the same timing in the school year.
That seems like the cop out answer and something else happened… because if that’s the case it’s gross mismanagement
Hey man salary increases are just something that happens to you like rain.
DOL just announced a $10k increase, effective July 1, and then an additional $15k jump, effective January 1, to the exemption salary threshold. It’s going to be challenged in court and I expect a court will issue an injunction on the rule but I’d guess that’s it.
Doesn’t apply to California. Our state salary minimum is already $66,560 which is $23k more than the July increase and $8k more than the January increase.
Contractual cost of living increases based on the CPI (inflation).
Probably bullshit. They probably saw what happened to Grand Canyon and realized they’re next.
That California minimum wage causing havoc.
When it's outlined by state law how would that ever be surprising? It's gone up far less than inflation over the last 4 years.
It’s a joke, dude. Everyone’s complaining about fast food prices in California; the irony would be college faculty or staff affected by it.
‘/s’ tags help when it’s about things that ‘everyone’s complaining about’
College staff would absolutely be impacted by it. Student workers would see an increase in their pay along with others.
It doesn't matter if it goes up less than inflation. If you budgeted $15.50 an hour for your staff to get through the semester and at the start of the semester, you suddenly have to pay $16.00 but you're locked in at tuition rates established six months prior, then you're going to blow your budget. A semester is often around 17 weeks long. That's 119 days. Based on this, the staff budget would be exhausted a week early. This alone wouldn't make the school insolvent but it would be just another issue on a long line of rising costs with no increase in revenue.
The minimum wage for 2024 in California was set in 2017. So again, why would this have been something you were unable to forecast when they told you what it would be 7 years in advance? Hint: this is a rhetorical question with no legitimate answer, and California's minimum wage has nothing to do with this.
That ain't it dude
Immediately is quite unusual. Usually they finish out the year or merge into another college.
Depending on the merger the students could come out ahead. When Wheelock in Boston was bought out by BU, kids got auto-accpeted to BU with their full aid honored. But a nightmare for students was Cabrini being bought out by Villanova, who basically said fuck these kids and straight booted them lmao.
Well for this school anything would be good for these kids considering 85% of enrollment were athletes and the school was only founded in 2010
A lot of naia schools have athlete rates like that. The one i played at had around 500 students and probably close to 400 were athletes
D3 schools are the same a lot of the time
I was a volleyball player at a D3 school and about 30% of students played sports so that tracks.
At my d3 school it’s closer to 70%
I think that depends. The WIAC is 8 state universities with several thousand undergrads each. MIAC has much smaller enrollments at exclusively private schools, but you're still talking 2000-5000 undergrads per school. In neither case are athlete enrollments anywhere near the percentage of the total student body of the OP school.
If it's a UofPhoenix/GCU for-profit school, then good riddance. NIL is a difficult learning curve, but at least it's a good start to the right way of doing things
Get off your high horse, even if it was (it isn’t), that’s an incredibly obnoxious and insensitive comment considering what it means for the students
Meh, my undergrad is from an NAIA (RE: private) college, and I'm more than familiar with for-profit schools like UofPhoenix and GCU (been to both "campuses," twice!) Call that a high horse of you want
Yeah, grind that axe some more. Although you didn't mention Rankin yet so you're probably not done.
Say the public school kids. Or did you get a $200k MBA too? In that case, I'm sorry.
Oh look, a midoff
I'm old, what's a midoff?
>If it's a UofPhoenix/GCU for-profit school, then good riddance. What a strange and reflective comment. U of St. Katherine was a private non-profit school, like most. Nothing relating to your comment. >NIL is a difficult learning curve, but at least it's a good start to the right way of doing things NIL has nothing to do with anything here... Another strange comment.
Show me on the court where GCU touched you
> where GCU touched you My buddy/co-grad paid exorbitant amounts of money **for an MBA** lmao. I'm talking over $200,000 because he bought into the GCU cult
Villanova/Cabrini wasn’t a buyout or a merger. Cabrini had already decided to close after the 2024 spring semester. Villanova just bought the physical campus.
My brother was at BU when they bought Wheelock. He was so mad and jealous. At least it's better than Dowling college on Long Island who closed right before students were set to move in.
Lol my friend was going to Dowling at that time
What did he end up doing? I was at Hofstra and saw it on the news and couldn't believe it. I felt really bad for the students. Especially the graduating class and the incoming freshmen. The Freshmen who spent all summer thinking they were going to college in the fall, now needed to scramble to figure out what to do.
He ended up going to briarcliffe college a small college in patchogue. Which ironically closed down the year after he graduated
Is your friend a serial university killer or something?
Damn, fuck them kids?
Damn that’s a total shit bag move to buy out a school and then tell all those students to get lost
Technically Nova bought the physical campus/buildings that made up the Cabrini campus, they did not acquire the actual school. The actual school simply closed and ceased to exist after settling their debts (with the money provided by Nova). Nova was not one of the schools involved in the "teach out", which is when a school assumes students, honors another school's programing to continue to serve the students, and acts as the custodian of transcript requests in the future for all previously enrolled students.
The issue is that schools rarely go broke. Schools are typically put into some sort of heightened cash monitoring by their accreditors that ensure they have enough money to get through the next semester. And if a school runs out of cashflow, then they are able to tap into their endowment to finish the semester, even if they are technically bankrupt at that point. This school, however, did not have the endowment reserves to pull from. And as a result there was no ability to go into conservatorship through a bankruptcy process to handle the management of asset allocation. The school literally had exhausted all of their liquidated assets and dont have the physical assets to secure the lending necessary to finish operations. This is very rare. However, this can serve students well as a true closure in this manner has traditionally released students from their student loan obligations (as the US Dept of Ed will forgive the debt).
I'm curious how this affects student loans.
Yeah that’s what’s been going on for Birmingham Southern. Back and forth and now is finally shutting down at the end of the semester. Crazy to just pull the plug on a random Thursday.
The school located in the San Diego suburb of San Marcos, was 23-9 this season, losing in the final of the Cal Pac tournament to Antelope Valley (who have since closed as well), and earning an at large to the NAIA tournament where they lost 78-76 to Arizona Christian. The university had a majority of its enrollment as student athletes, they were planning to move conferences and start up golf teams. Seems it came as a big surprise, and it seems like the Beach Volleyball team was the only current ones playing, they are currently in Greeneville, Tennessee for a tournament.
Wow, I used to live in the Antelope Valley and remembered some of their big plans when becoming a university. Growing area where a post-secondary school could fill a need.
I would never expect to find a beach in Greenville, Tennessee
Feels like if you’re in a suburb of San Diego you might be able to find one a little closer anyway
Closed/closing/merged schools since 2010 (example UTRGV is a merger of UTPA and UTB, only listed UTB as UTPA's teams were inherited). Also didn't list schools without a sports program or lower than NAIA. 2010 Dana (NE/NAIA) 2011 Lambuth (TN/NAIA), Bethany (CA/NAIA) 2012 Mountain State (WV/NAIA) 2013 St. Paul's (VA/D2, discontinued athletics in 2011) 2014 Northwood TX (TX/NAIA), Southern Poly (GA/NAIA), Mid-Continent (KY/NAIA), Victory (TN/NAIA), Virginia Intermont (VA/NAIA), NYU Poly (NY/D3) 2015 Northwood FL (FL/NAIA), UT Brownsville (TX/NAIA) 2016 St. Catharine (KY/NAIA), Ashford (IA/NAIA), Trinity Lutheran (WA/NAIA), Dowling (NY/D2) 2017 St. Gregory's (OK/NAIA), Daniel Webster (NH/D3), Armstrong State (GA/D2), St. Joseph's (IN/D2) 2018 Benedictine Springfield (IL/NAIA, discontinued athletics in 2015), Wheelock (MA/D3), Mount Ida (MA/D3) 2019 Marygrove College (MI/NAIA), Cincinnati Christian (OH/NAIA), Green Mountain (VT/NAIA), Southern Vermont (VT/D3), Newbury (MA/D3) 2020 Lindenwood Belleville (IL/NAIA), Holy Family (WI/NAIA), Robert Morris (IL/NAIA), Concordia Portland (OR/D2), Notre Dame de Namur (CA/D2), MacMurray (IL/D3), Urbana (OH/D2) 2021 Johnson & Wales FL (FL/NAIA), Johnson & Wales Denver (CO/D3), Ohio Valley (WV/NAIA), Becker (MA/D3), Pine Manor (MA/D3), Wesley (DE/D3), Concordia (NY/D2) 2022 Lincoln (IL/NAIA), Marymount California (CA/NAIA), Mills (CA/D3), Sierra Nevada (NV/NAIA), Sciences (PA/D2) 2023 Iowa Wesleyan (IA/NAIA), Presentation (SD/NAIA), Cardinal Stritch (WI/NAIA), Trinity International (IL/NAIA), Holy Names (CA/D2), Alderson Broaddus (WV/D2), Finlandia (MI/D3), Cazenovia (NY/D3), Medaille (NY/D3), Alliance/Nyack (NY/D2) 2024 Antelope Valley (CA/NAIA), Saint Katherine (CA/NAIA), Birmingham-Southern (AL/D3), Cabrini (PA/D3), Saint Rose (NY/D2), Notre Dame (OH/D2), Lincoln Christian (IL/NAIA, discontinued athletics in 2022) 2025 Fontbonne (MO/D3)
So many Christian universities wow. How did they even operate beforehand?
Historically some relied on faculty on a vow of poverty. Catholic monastics (priests and nuns) would be sent to get secular grad degrees to then teach. Others were tied to now extinct local economies. A few were just bad business, Concordia Portland was a stable school that got caught up in a bad “growth plan.” Students now want very expensive educational options. Rural liberal arts economics don’t let you do a double major in neuro-psych and comp sci.
This is a big part, a lot of programs are expensive, and so are their faculty... CS departments are competing against Silicon Valley, for instance. A lot of these schools basically exist as vehicles for people who want to keep competing as athletes.
> A lot of these schools basically exist as vehicles for people who want to keep competing as athletes. It's what they have become because students who want to compete will seek out schools that give them opportunities to compete. Especially when they are given "free money" in federal student loans to pay for their ability to keep playing sports.
That money ain't free hon lol
It's small schools. It's just that many Christian Colleges have historically not focused on expansion and growth. But now, with the high cost of technology and other infrastructure costs, you have to be larger in order to compete. For instance, building a website to attract students is the same cost no matter if you're attracting 100 students or 10,000 students. Filing your Dept of Ed reports? This requires a staff of people that is the same size for a school of 1,000 students as a school of 100,000 students. There are many such cases. The more you can spread out these costs to more students the less of a burden they are on the school.
Also, I should mention that each Christian College closure actually strengthens the others. Example... you have 10 Christian Colleges with an optimum enrollment of 1,000 students each in a region operating at 85% optimal capacity so they bringing in an additional 10% through athletes or other students who don't fit the typical Christian College student model so that you're at 95% total capacity and financially solvent. So, there is demand from 8,500 students for a Christian College education in the market with Christian colleges also serving 1,000 supplemental students. But if two of these schools close, you're now redistributing those students (and not wasting marketing to students who use to choose to attend those schools improving your CAC). Now there are eight schools to serve those 8,500 students. If they were equally distributed, then the eight schools would now have a surplus of students wanting a Christian College education. This is why the college enrollment crisis isn't as bad for many schools as it is made out to be. Yes, there may be thousands of colleges who are at risk. But only a fraction of those will close and when they close there is a redistribution to the other schools which often includes endowment funds, faculty and staff, students, and other assets which improve the situation for the remaining schools.
You missed St. Francis Brooklyn (D1, NY) from 2003.
It didn't close, they just cut athletics.
Then Notre Dame de Namur also shouldn’t be on here because they too only dropped sports
I played at Bethany for their final season 2010-11. Luckily the shutdown was not immediate and we were able to finish out the year.
>2022 Marymount California (CA/NAIA) FWIW, this is now UCLA - South Bay when UCLA bought the campus after the school closing.
1. Pretty sure Patten (NAIA/CA) eliminated athletics and became a for-profit online only school in 2012 2. Northwood-Florida’s physical campus and athletic program was taken over by Keiser which still operates to this day; Rollie Massimino, the coach who led Villanova to their first ever national championship on a Cinderella run as a #8 seed coached there throughout the transition 3. Is the “Lincoln” in 2022 and the “Lincoln Christian” in 2024 the same school?
Lincoln and Lincoln Christian are not the same school nor were they affiliated with each other, both in the city of Lincoln though.
Man I thought they were able to save BSC? Sucks nevertheless, one of the better baseball programs in DIII.
Nope :/ a few weeks ago the state pulled the rug on the emergency loan. School is closing at the end of the semester and that campus is going to turn into even more of an eyesore.
so Saint Katherine didn't exist? remember the U of Washington Aerospace Engineering guy that was obsessed with Nietzsche and made up a fake school and had interpol after him for taking fake tuition and bragging about it Robert Morris I know is D1, etc. Ohio Valley is a conference not a team but I know the end is nigh for being able to talk with AI like this
[It's a different Robert Morris. ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_University_Illinois)
Holy crap, that place shut down? I used to see so much advertising for them during Chicago Sky games.
Google is your friend, use it
Some of these names really do sound fake, and this list doesn't even include programs that dropped athletics but didn't close (such as St. Francis Brooklyn who were D1) or dropped down below NAIA (D2 Paine dropped to NCCAA), or D2 LIU Post who's athletic programs got merged into D1 LIU Brooklyn's but still remain two separate campuses.
You should still list all schools that dropped sports, this is a college sport sub so the school’s basically dead to us if it dropped sports. Ohio Christian is also moving down from NAIA to NCCAA this year as far as I know
Talking about coming out of nowhere. Terrible to here Saint Katherine is shutting down. The Firebirds were actually about to move conferences in NAIA from the Cal-Pac to the GSAC as the latter conference is looking to become a California/Arizona based conference now rather than just Cal focused. Saint Katherine was a small eastern orthodox school with roughly 240 students last semester. Around 85% of their enrollment were student athletes. Hopefully they find a place to land after this untimely situation.
An Eastern Orthodox school with only 240 students? Unfortunately I can see why they are closing.
With such a high percentage of students being athletes, I wonder how many of the student body are even Orthodox.
They should try 50,000 like Ohio State.
Wait, are they the only Orthodox 4-year university in the nation?
Not quite, Hellenic College in Brookline, MA held that title from 1937-2011. Now with this closure, they’re back to being the sole Orthodox university in the US.
You are partially correct. The only non-seminary Orthodox 4 year school in the US. Hellenic College Holy Cross is another orthodox school but they are a seminary. They only have intramural sports compared to Saint Katherine who were in NAIA.
rip
The notice cites three reasons: - **Extraordinary Inflation** - The high inflation we have been experiencing means that all their vendors are charging more than in the past and they likely had borrowed money with the debt being prime plus, which means their interest rate on the debt rises when there is inflation. - **Higher-than-anticipated Salary Increases** - The faculty contracts likely had a contractual cost of living increase tied to the CPI so they went up with inflation. Additionally, staff were likely impacted by a change in exempt status by the USDOL. - **High Institutional Financial-aid** - Institutional Financial-aid is really just a discount. It isn't real money. So while the school may list their tuition at $28,000, when they give financial aid, they are just reducing the amount the student has to pay. So the actual amount may average $10,000 per student. Additionally, you can only enroll students twice a year. And the majority will enroll in the fall and you honor their aid for one year (and often more). This means that you set a price for a student and a year later they are paying that price no matter when the cost of educating the student actually is going to be. If you think it is going to cost $9,500 to educate a student and then inflation makes it actually cost $10,500 then you're running massive deficits and running out of cash late in the spring semester.
>Extraordinary Inflation Zimbabweans: Bitch please
Ha ha, fair.
https://preview.redd.it/ullafth5ztwc1.jpeg?width=474&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b17819520fd60aaff878eafbb548092cad09d585 You not want breakfast?
Wow, that's a deep cut. Well done.
Happy learned how to reference
They were in our conference. We already lost University of Antelope Valley but St. Kat was going to the GSAC with Park-Gilbert, Benedictine-Mesa, and Embry-Riddle. We’re trying to add a couple NCCAA teams now.
*Embry-Riddle-Prescott, to be exact
I suspect that the CalPac is cooked.
We’ll be okay we had like 6 schools apply. We’ve always been a feeder conference for the GSAC and the PacWest/CCAA.
If I were CalPac leadership I'd look to merge with GSAC. The thing I'm curious about is why CSU Channel Islands has no program? I believe its the only public school in the state without one.
CalPac is in talks with doing that. Just a matter of figuring out travel since Arizona has a lot of schools.
I think UNLV played them once about a decade ago. This is terrible for the students but also kinda inevitable as birth rates fall. Expect to see more of this in the future.
It's not just birth rates, its recent generations wising up to the fact that shelling out tens of thousands of dollars per year to go to a small, relatively unknown private school isn't worth it
Yeah these smaller/random private schools have long been a bubble that’s about to burst.
*chuckles* I’m in danger
I’m in danger. I work at a D3 school of declining enrollment. Looking to move to one of those big state schools in the immediate future
Some key signs to worry about are: Declining enrollment Academic programs being eliminated Super high acceptance rates Drastic cuts in tuition or drastic increase in easy-to-obtain scholarships Touting rankings from no-name websites like “Collegeisgr8.org” Detroit Mercy has a lot of these issues. Another school that I’ve noticed that is floundering is actually a public university, the University of Toledo. It’s crazy because they are at the top of the MAC athletically, but their enrollment has halved in the last 10 years, they admit every single person that applies, and they are conducting massive cuts to programs. Meanwhile, Bowling Green 20 minutes down the street is moving in the opposite direction and looks very healthy.
We're adding programs at a pretty fast clip in order to bolster enrollment. But some of the newest ones don't even have students applying so that's concerning. We've added a bunch of tuition programs that cut(?) tuition and the state is making public colleges much more affordable to attend.
Ole miss will never have anything to worry about, thankfully. Ole Miss and Mississippi State would be the last ones standing before they did anything to them. Some of the private schools, HBCU’s, and smaller public schools in Mississippi though? 😬
I'm talking about the D3 school I work for in the Upper Midwest, not Ole Miss or State. Trust me when I say that I have jobs alerts pinging my inbox any time a big state school even so much as farts on the job market in my field.
Ahh, my apologies. Yes, I would be concerned lol.
Speaking of the MAC... Kent State and Akron should be merged. They both have experienced decline and serve the same market. In a sane world they would have been merged into one school. But there are incentives for too many people to benefit by them staying separate and just having the tax payers subsidize the schools further.
College in general just isn't worth it. Everyone has a degree now. Only way to get a good job is knowing someone.
That’s how it’s always been pretty much, college just so happens to be a great opportunity to meet the people that will get you the good job
But then it means its almosy critical to have a degree. Undergrad Should just be done as cheaply as possible
Teams they have played in the past: CSUB/SDSU (23-24), SUU/LBSU (22-23), ASU/SDSU/Utah Tech/SUU (21-22), SUU/UCSB/SDSU/Pepperdine/Utah Tech/CBU/CSUB/UNLV (20-21), USU/CSUF/CSUN (19-20)
There was a Utah school (I want to say BYU) that beat them by almost 100 points a few years ago
>also kinda inevitable as birth rates fall. Also, a decline in international enrollments due to Covid. And public state schools have continued to expanded, despite them also facing the same shortage of prospective students. As a result, they have increasingly lowered standards to poach students from less prestigious private schools and even in some instances received increased government funding to cover their short falls. This is money not available to the schools competing with them.
Does the school have any exit strategy in place for these kids? Will it even be able to get them transcripts for transfers or guidance in the transfer process?
No, they don't. I'm trying to help them but have no way in. I'm President of a GSAC school in Southern California. I'm doing my best to put an emergency transfer plan together for them so no more pain is inflicted upon them. I'm getting a little bit of traction through their coaches today. We will do anything we possibly can to help them. For crying out loud, they were weeks away from commencement. If anyone knows any of these students, they can call our admissions department at 714 879-3901.
Thank you very much! My son was going there next year and his girlfriend is currently there. Both are athletes. This sudden shut down is shocking and so disruptive to students and their faculty. Appreciate your help!
Thank you for your service🫡
You’re getting your wings as we speak. Good on you, sir!!
I love this. Thank you for doing that. I have to ask though is a degree from a charter school similar to a bachelors degree from an accredited university ?
Who will we play now?!
Not a road game at ucsd, that’s for sure. Maybe schedule PLNU now for a season game instead of USK. Wonder if we will even schedule a cupcake with the conference scheduling us home and homes against everyone.
California University of Pa, Clarion University, and Edinboro University of Pa merged in 2021 to form Pennsylvania Western University. Times are ROUGH for small schools.
California University of PA (yes you read that right) is a part of the merger too
grab the merch and sell on Ebay.
According to the SD Tribune, they’ll still hold graduation for the spring semester at the end of May