Glass doors lead into the bright lobby of a red brick and limestone chapel at one end of a grassy field, where lectures and receptions were held and students testified to their faith.
Original artwork hangs on the walls on the path to the music department, chaplain’s office, and recital hall, along with copper “sheets” listing the names of past financial promoters in the shape of a tree.
This visit to Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois, isn’t real. It’s virtual, captured just before the college closed in May so students and alumni can remember the campus, which is being sold to repay more than $26 million in debt and other responsibilities.
“Instead of being wiped off the map, this is a way of honoring the legacy” of the college, said Shalom Nwaokolo, who with his wife Ashley created permanent digital preservation of it.
Commemorating colleges and universities in virtual reality is one of the most sentimental responses to the accelerating rate at which they are closing and expected to close.
This trend, however, has become so pronounced that it is also leading to larger measures that reflect the growing threat of falling enrollment, rising debt and other problems.
The federal government is promising to streamline the process whereby struggling universities are taken over by healthier competitors, for example. States are increasing consumer protections when campuses close anyway, and there is a proposal to do the same at the federal level. Lawsuits are increasing, brought by students and employees against schools that have closed. And institutions are trying to identify new sources of revenue.
Twenty-two states now require private higher education institutions to contribute to “tuition recovery” funds, typically requiring that a percentage of tuition collected be set aside in state accounts from which students could be compensated if colleges close. Although many of these funds were launched to protect students at for-profit schools, nearly half have been extended to nonprofit, degree-granting colleges.
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“This is an opportunity for states to protect students in the event of shutdowns, because we’re likely to see more of them,” said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. called for the federal government to do the same thing.
In Massachusetts, where 26 colleges have closed their doors since 2014 and a 27th announced its closure at the end of this year, a state law now requires private colleges and universities to provide financial reports to anyone who wants to see them. Regulators have begun conducting annual reviews to determine and publicly disclose whether institutions are at imminent risk of bankruptcy.
To save some schools from that fate, U.S. Department of Education officials have pledged to speed up the process that could lead to mergers between healthier and struggling institutions, a process that officials say takes so long that one or the other party often gives up.
Meanwhile, law firms have begun filing lawsuits on behalf of students, faculty and staff at already-shuttered colleges, typically accusing them of fraud and breach of contract. Three federal class-action lawsuits have been filed against the University of the Arts in Philadelphia alone, which abruptly closed its doors in 2024.
More than 440 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit colleges and universities, about a quarter of the total, are at risk of closing or having to merge in the next 10 years, according to an estimate from Huron Consulting Group; of these, more than 120 are at the highest risk, based on their enrollment, assets, debts, liquidity and other characteristics.
Related: More than a quarter of private colleges at risk of closing, new projections show
So much attention began to be paid to university closures that the Ministry of Education instructions produced for students on what to do if this happens to them. “Try not to panic,” he advises.
This could be difficult, given that less than half of students at closing colleges are continuing their education, according to the most comprehensive study on the subject, by the State Association of Higher Education Officials. Many of those who continue lose the credits they have already earned and paid for, and fewer than half ultimately earn degrees. The 442 Huron colleges whose projects are threatened have a collective enrollment of 670,000 students.
Consumers whose colleges close can at least seek forgiveness of their federal loans through two existing avenues: borrower defense until repayment programs and closed school exit programs. But it shifts the debt onto taxpayers, who have already had to pay billions of dollars in loans that will never be repaid.
More and more people are calling for institutions to set aside money to cover these costs.
“We need to think about how students are protected, so that when they have invested time and money in their degrees, they can get repayments and discharges of their college loans, and so those costs can be paid by colleges rather than taxpayers,” Cooper said.
Related: Faster, leaner: Colleges are rapidly reducing the baccalaureate degree to three years
In his proposal federal version state tuition recovery funds, schools’ contributions would be based on the amount of federal student loan money they receive. Institutions with higher risk would pay higher fees. Cooper estimates it would raise $9.5 billion over 12 years to cover the cost of loans that could be forgiven if colleges close; Critics counter that such fees would only further squeeze already cash-strapped colleges.
Despite growing pressure to prepare for the worst, many vulnerable colleges are slow to act themselves, said Brian Weinblatt, founder and principal of Higher Ed Consolidation Solutions, one of several companies that help imperiled schools resolve financial problems, merge or close.
“Almost every institution waits until it’s too late to engage in this process,” said Weinblatt, who said working with colleges that have ultimately decided to close their doors is the fastest-growing part of his business.
The company developed its own “merger runway index,” a calculation of how long a university or college has left before it needs to merge or close, he said.
“They’re waiting until it’s too late and therefore are no longer attractive to potential merger partners, because their enrollment has declined too much, they have too much deferred child support, there’s too much debt. People are burying their heads in the sand, whether they’re trustees or trustees.”
Even if they decide to merge with a healthier competitor, federal government red tape makes the process so long that they burn out. “The school that’s in the best financial situation says, ‘If it takes another year, we can’t continue to subsidize this other school that’s struggling,'” Weinblatt said.
The Department of Education is working to resolve this problem, Nicholas Kent, Undersecretary for Higher Education, said at a conference at George Mason University.
“Depending on how you count it, we have 6,000 institutions of higher education in this country, and not all of them will survive into the next decade,” Kent said. “And quite honestly, not all of them need to, or should, make it out of the next decade. And the ones that do will be the ones that adapt in various ways.”
Related: Behind ideological attacks on higher education, surprising bipartisan reforms are occurring
Some are taking at least small steps to balance their books, finding much-needed new sources of income.
Agnes Scott College in Georgia opened in June rent three historic houses he owns. Sweet Briar College in Virginia sells hydroponic lettuce grown in its greenhouses. The University of California, Davis, launched a product range olives that she grows for research purposes. University of Alaska sells permit to harvest firewood forests that belong to him. New Mexico State University has licensed his brand for coffee, whiskey and tequila; Mississippi State University for cigars; and the University of Nevada, Reno, for beef jerky.
The Nwaokolos, who produce Trinity Christian’s virtual reality tours, see the potential for a company that would do this more broadly as colleges continue to close. “It’s possible other people want this too,” Ashley Nwaokolo said.
They have already built a platform for this purpose, called Perduras – Spanish for “you endure”.
“There’s so much going on in college life,” she said. “It’s a crossroads of maturity. You have a community around you that is going through similar experiences. It creates, most of the time, good memories and attachments to this college.”
Through digital recreations, Ashley Nwaokolo said, “people can have a story to look back on.”
After all, she said, “What do you do for a ride home when there’s no place to go home?” »
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.
This story on university closures was produced byThe Hechinger reportan independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Subscribe to our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.
The article Threats of additional closures have colleges and students worried about how to save themselves appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
