Lean years ahead

AT JOHN WITHERSPOON College’s May 10 commencement ceremony, no one graduated. Still, humanities student Sarah Greeb darted around the room snapping photos: Her professors in caps and gowns. Students, alumni, and families filling rows of gray chairs. Cookies emblazoned with the school’s Latin motto, Fides quaerens intellectum (“Faith seeking understanding”). President John Swann giving his address from behind the lectern.

Nearly a year earlier, Greeb had helped professors and her fellow students unpack boxes and boxes of books in the library after celebrating the college’s move to its first permanent facility. Greeb was halfway to earning her humanities degree.

But as the 2023-24 school year drew to a close, the tiny college in Rapid City, S.D., began to suffer from a severe budget shortfall. Over the winter, Greeb’s professors urged her to pray for the college’s finances. By March 2024, funds were so tight the school canceled its annual fundraising banquet to retain money for daily operations. By March’s end, school administrators gathered everyone for the dreaded announcement: John Witherspoon College would close at the end of the semester.

Greeb remembers some joyful moments during that May 10 ceremony, which celebrated everything the college had accomplished in its 12 years of operation. They’d called it a “commencement,” but mostly, it felt like a funeral.

Faced with a perfect storm of changing demographics, the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and declining enrollment, many Christian colleges are, like John Witherspoon, buckling under the pressure. At least seven Christian colleges and universities, including Cabrini University, Lincoln Christian University, Ohio’s Notre Dame College, and John Witherspoon College, have already closed or will close this year. That follows the closure of at least 18 Christian colleges between 2020 and early 2023, according to a study by Higher Ed Dive, a research and data analysis group.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 800 Christian colleges operate in the United States. Of those, several hundred are private, nonprofit institutions. Few are as small as John Witherspoon, which had only 26 graduates in its 12-year history. But many others run on similarly razor-thin margins. That means any significant changes, especially in enrollment, can push them over a financial cliff.

COLLEGE ENROLLMENT numbers overall dipped during the pandemic: About 1.5 million fewer students enrolled in 2022 than 2019. Enrollment has inched back up for the second consecutive semester, but it’s still much lower than five years ago. And a looming demographic cliff seems set to send that rate into free fall in the next five years.

Birthrates plummeted during the Great Recession in 2007 and 2008. America’s high school graduates are expected to hit a peak of about 3.5 million in 2025. After that, the number of 18-year-old graduates is projected to drop by 15 percent during the next four years.

And many of those high school graduates may not immediately go on to college, according to Dan Nelson, chief institutional data and research officer at Bethel University. Nelson has worked in higher education for 50 years. He said that in his home state of Minnesota, just 57 percent of high school graduates immediately enrolled in college in 2022—compared with 82 percent in 2011. “And that’s true to a greater or lesser degree across the country.”

The increasing growth of online education, largely spurred by the pandemic, also has put small Christian colleges in a vulnerable position. Larger Christian schools like Liberty University, which had 115,000 online students in 2022, easily corner the market. “When a school can serve hundreds of thousands of students online … that sucks up a whole lot of the potential clientele for all of these small Christian colleges around the country,” Nelson said.

Other ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic also are contributing to the recent rash of college closures. Higher Education Emergency Relief grants from the federal government kept some institutions afloat—but just delayed the inevitable for others.

“A lot of institutions were … propped up with this additional funding. And now that that funding has expired, those institutions have not rebounded their enrollment,” said Rachel Burns, senior policy analyst for the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO). “And they are now announcing closures, when we probably would have seen that happen three or four years ago.”

Nelson said a financially healthy school should have a year-over-year increase in tuition revenue equal to the cost of inflation plus about 1 percent. Of the 50 Christian colleges he surveyed last year, only two met that standard. Twenty-two of those colleges are in the “red zone”—they’ve lost more than 15 percent of their revenue since 2018.

“The fact that schools are mostly losing that revenue does not, in and of itself, mean that they’re going to fail,” Nelson said. “It’s how they respond to it.”

He argues many struggling colleges could survive by scaling down—cutting smaller programs and unnecessary expenses. But that usually means firing faculty, “a very hard pathway to follow,” Nelson acknowledged.

Colleges could raise tuition, but that might deter enrollment even more. That’s why many colleges are responding to the pressures by discounting. Essentially, they’re reducing the cost of tuition by offering students scholarships, grants, and fellowships—in a bid to attract more enrollment. Such aid ­sometimes comes from endowments or donations—but often, colleges are actually just lowering their tuition price and losing revenue.

Nelson cited a 2022 study from the National Association of College and University Business Officers that found 341 private, nonprofit colleges and universities offered first-time students an average 56.2 percent discount on tuition. Over 90 percent of first-time students at those institutions received a grant. But more than half of the grants were unfunded—coming out of the school’s pocket.

Tuition discounting is great for students, but Nelson says it’s bad for the long-term health of their institutions. Discounting only works if it draws in enough new students to offset the reduced tuition revenue per student—and that’s not happening. “The problem is, there aren’t more and more students in the pool … so schools are competing for diminishing supply,” Nelson said.

(Not) making the grade: Tuition income growth and losses among Christian colleges

Five-year change in net tuition revenue for CCCU-member institutions among 50 responding schools*

*Must have data in either academic year 2016-17(AY17) or AY18 and have data in either AY22 or AY23. Average AY17 & AY18; average of AY22 & AY23.

JOHN WITHERSPOON College approached the cost problem from a different angle. The school charged extremely low tuition—$7,200 a year, or $600 a month—and encouraged students to use a monthly payment plan. All of its graduates earned degrees debt-free, a major selling point. Most other private Christian colleges charge an average of $32,088 per year, according to a 2023 survey conducted by Bethel University and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.

Tyler Johansen graduated from John Witherspoon College in 2023. After several brief stints at both public and private colleges, Johansen had resigned himself to never earning a degree. He couldn’t afford to take on more student loan debt. But when he heard about John Witherspoon’s low tuition rates, he decided to start over at the age of 31. Now he has a fully accredited Biblical studies degree, works as a pastor, and is earning his master’s degree at the Master’s Seminary. “[John Witherspoon] provided a blessing that I could never express my thankfulness for,” Johansen said.

The college was able to offer low tuition largely due to donor contributions from individuals who believed in its mission. But President John Swann said the college needed support from other Christian institutions, like businesses and big churches, to be able to continue—and that didn’t happen.

“It’s kind of a chicken and the egg situation,” Swann said. Often the organizations that could have supported the school discouraged students from coming because it was so new and underfunded. “But the way you get funds and stability is to have people come.”

John Witherspoon College was tiny, but Swann says its closing may have a big impact. “When you look at western North Dakota, southwestern Montana, eastern Wyoming, and northwestern Nebraska, we cover a large area geographically where there’s no other evangelical Christian education,” Swann said.

And closures of Christian colleges aren’t just leaving gaps in more rural areas. New York City has no evangelical Christian options for higher education after Alliance University and the King’s College closed last year.

“You could argue that is good, that we are directing our limited resources towards the institutions that are most likely to set students up for success,” Burns said. But the negative effects of college closure on students and communities make it “very hard to see any positive,” she added.

A 2023 SHEEO study found less than half of students who experienced a closure reenrolled in another post­secondary institution. And the majority of the students who reenrolled didn’t go on to earn a degree.

That’s not good news for Sarah Greeb and her classmates. About half are transferring to the University of Jamestown or Bethlehem College, which have made official transfer agreements with John Witherspoon. The other half, including Greeb, are taking a year off or looking for another place to transfer. Greeb is weighing the possibility of taking on heavy student loan debt in order to finish her degree.

“As I’m looking into these other colleges, I’m realizing that what John Witherspoon has in its classical education … at their price is very rare,” Greeb said.