Losing faith: Rural, religious campuses are among the most endangered

DAVENPORT, Iowa — The Catholic prayer for the faithful echoed off the limestone walls and marble floor of the high-ceilinged chapel.

It implored God to comfort the poor and the hungry. The sick and the suffering. The anxious and the afraid.

Then it took an unexpected turn.

“Lord, hear our prayer for St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy University,” the young voice said, “that the grace of the Holy Spirit may help us to follow God’s plan for our new partnership.”

The speaker was talking about ongoing efforts to unite St. Ambrose University, where this weeknight Mass was being held, with fellow Catholic university Mount Mercy. Small religious schools in rural states are shutting down at an accelerating rate, a fate these two are attempting to avoid.

“Lord, hear our prayer,” responded the congregation of students in St. Ambrose-branded T-shirts and hoodies.

The heads of both St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy, which is in Cedar Rapids, said they’ve watched as nearby religiously affiliated colleges, athletic rivals and institutions that employed their friends and former colleagues closed.

With falling numbers of applicants to college — especially in the Midwest — “we just don’t have the demographics anymore,” said St. Ambrose President Amy Novak. Now, as fewer graduates emerge from high schools, combining forces is a way to forestall “the reality that we might all see in five or seven years,” Novak said.

For many other small religiously affiliated institutions, time has already run out.

See a list of religiously affiliated colleges that have closed, been merged, or announced that they are closing or merging.

More than half of the 77 nonprofit colleges and universities that have closed or merged since 2020, or announced that they will close or merge, were religiously affiliated, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of news coverage and federal data. More than 30 that are still in business are on a U.S. Department of Education list of institutions considered “not financially responsible” because of comparatively low cash reserves and net income and high levels of debt.

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Some small, religiously affiliated institutions that are not on these lists are also showing signs of strain. Saint Augustine’s University in North Carolina, which is Episcopal, has 200 students, down from 1,100 two years ago, and has lost its accreditation. The 166-year-old St. Francis College in New York, which is Catholic, has sacked a quarter of its staff. Catholic Saint Louis University in Missouri laid off 20 employees, eliminated 130 unfilled faculty and staff positions and sold off its medical practice after running a deficit.

Bluffton University in Ohio, which is Mennonite, is looking for a new partner after a planned merger fell through in February and the president resigned. Catholic St. Norbert College in Wisconsin is eliminating 11 majors and minors and 21 faculty positions. And Georgetown College in Kentucky averted closing only after an alumnus gave it $16 million, which, along with another $12 million in donations, was enough to pay off crippling debt that was costing the small Baptist institution $3 million a year just in interest.

Other religiously affiliated schools are also taking steps to buttress themselves against demographic and financial challenges. Ursuline College in Ohio, for instance, which has fewer than 1,000 students, has agreed to merge with larger Gannon University, 95 miles away. Both are Catholic. Spring Hill College in Alabama and Rockhurst University in Missouri, both also Catholic, are teaming up so they can jointly offer more academic programs, though they will remain independent.

More than a fifth of colleges and universities in the United States, or 849 out of 3,893, are religiously affiliated, according to the most recent figures from the National Center for Education Statistics.

The threats to them are getting new attention. Presidents of 20 Catholic universities and colleges met in November in Chicago at a conference sponsored by DePaul University and held at the offices of the Deloitte consulting firm, which collected data to help them figure out solutions to the challenges they face.

“The intent was to think about a blueprint for the future of Catholic higher education,” including more partnerships, shared services and other kinds of alliances, said Donna Carroll, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. “Survival of the fittest is not the strategy that will advance the common good of Catholic higher education. We have to work together.”

The American Council on Education last year launched a Commission on Faith-Based Colleges and Universities, with leaders of what has since grown to 17 institutions including Pepperdine, Brigham Young and Yeshiva universities and the University of Notre Dame.

The idea of the commission, which is scheduled to meet in Washington in June, is “to increase visibility for the important contributions of religious and faith-based colleges and universities and to foster collaboration” among them.

Some religious colleges and universities are doing fine, and even posting enrollment gains — at least in part because of growing political divisions, campus protests and ideological attacks on secular institutions, said David Hoag, president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.

Parents are “wanting to put their son or daughter at a safe place that’s going to have a biblical worldview or a way to look at challenges that’s not polarized,” Hoag said. “At our institutions, you’re not going to be seeing protests or things that are happening at many of these [other] universities and colleges. You’re going to see them rallying together, whether it’s for a sporting event or for a revival or baptisms.”

Other trends also offer some hope to religiously affiliated colleges and universities. A long decline in the proportion of adults who consider themselves affiliated with a religion appears to have leveled off, the Pew Research Center finds. And while enrollment at parochial schools that feed graduates to Catholic universities fell more than 10 percent from 2017 to 2021, the most recent year for which the figure is available, the number of students at other kinds of religious primary and secondary schools is up.

Even religiously affiliated institutions confronting the realities of falling enrollment and financial woes fill a critically important role, their advocates say. They often serve low-income students who are the first in their families to go to college and are reluctant to enroll at large public universities.

Related: The number of 18-year-olds is about to drop sharply, packing a wallop for colleges — and the economy 

Many are in rural areas where access to higher education is more limited than in urban and suburban places and is becoming less available still as public universities in rural states have merged or closed or cut dozens of majors.

Attending a small rural, religiously affiliated institution “is, I think — especially for rural students — a great opportunity,” said Todd Olson, president of Mount Mercy, above the sound of trains crossing Cedar Rapids outside his window. “I know kids from very small towns around Iowa,” like the one where he grew up, Olson said. “This campus is a much more comfortable place for them.”

When Jacob Lange arrived at St. Ambrose from East Dubuque, Illinois, and attended a Mass on campus, “all of a sudden all these new people I had never met were kind of chatting with me and it was really kind of nice. It felt like I was kind of included and I didn’t really think I would be originally,” he said. “You figure, ‘I’m probably going to sit in the back and probably not talk to anyone all night,’ and then I showed up, and I walked out here and all of a sudden they’re, like, ‘Here, come join our group.’ ”

His parents also liked that he decided to go to a Catholic university, Lange said. “You know, you go to one of these big schools with 25,000 kids, and you’re kind of worried about your kid — like, what kind of dumb things is he going to get up to?”

Catholic universities in particular have a slightly higher four-year graduation rate than the national average, according to the Center for Catholic Studies at St. Mary’s University in Texas. Graduates have a stronger sense of community purpose, the center found in a survey. Alumni are 9 percentage points more likely to say they participate in civic activities.

Related: See Hechinger’s list of all college closures since 2008

More students at religiously affiliated than at secular institutions receive financial aid, the American Council on Education says. Three out of five get scholarships from the colleges themselves, compared to fewer than one in four at other kinds of schools. At both Mount Mercy and St. Ambrose, which have about 1,450 and 2,700 students, respectively, 100 percent get financial aid.

But these benefits for students can be vulnerabilities for budgets, said Novak, at St. Ambrose.

“We serve the poor. We educate the poor,” she said. “That is a risky financial proposition at the moment for small, regional institutions that are largely tuition-driven.”

The threats to smaller religiously affiliated institutions in rural areas stem largely from the downturn in the already short supply of high school graduates choosing to enroll. The proportion of such students going straight to college has fallen even more sharply in many largely rural states.

While they’re generous with their financial aid, religiously affiliated colleges are also generally more expensive than many other higher education institutions, at a time when many families are questioning the return on their investments in tuition. Median tuition and fees average $25,416 a year, according to the American Council on Education.

Related: ‘Easy to just write us off’: Rural students’ choices shrink as colleges slash majors

St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy, about 90 minutes away, are teaming up from positions of relative strength. Publicly available financial documents suggest that neither faces the immediate enrollment or financial crises that threaten many similar institutions. But their leaders say that they’re trying to fend off problems that could arise later. By joining forces, each can increase its number of programs while lowering administrative costs.

Reaction among students and alumni has been mixed.

Combining with St. Ambrose “was kind of nerve-racking at the beginning because it’s, like, ‘Oh, this is a lot of change,’ ” said Alaina Bina, a junior nursing major at Mount Mercy.

She picked the university in the first place because she liked the small, hilly campus.

“I came from a small town, so I didn’t really want to go bigger,” she said. “Even when I came here on a tour, people would say ‘Hi’ to each other. You just know everyone, and that’s kind of how it is in a small town, too.”

Students were worried about what name would appear on their degrees (the degrees will still say “Mount Mercy”) and whether sports teams that once competed against each other would be merged. Novak and Olson promised to keep their athletics programs separate and even add a sport at Mount Mercy: football, beginning in 2026.

Combining sports teams “would not be wise at all from a business perspective,” Olson said the two agreed, because they are “a powerful enrollment driver” for both schools.

“Honestly, this was probably the biggest student concern,” said Nasharia Patterson, student government president at Mount Mercy, who was wearing a brace on her wrist from an awkward back tuck basket catch during cheer practice. Keeping the athletics teams “gives us a piece of Mount Mercy specifically to just hold on to.”

Among alumni, meanwhile, “there’s mixed feelings” about what’s happening to their alma mater, said Sarah Watson, a leadership development consultant who graduated from Mount Mercy in 2008.

Still, she said, “I know the great challenges that higher ed is facing right now. It’s not just Mount Mercy. It’s not just St. Ambrose. It’s the bigger schools, too. Enrollment numbers have dropped. The desire to go to a traditional four-year college is just not quite what it used to be.”

For Mount Mercy, which was founded by an order of nuns in 1928, Watson said, “If we don’t do this, what’s the alternative? We want to be around for another hundred years.”

After all, said Novak, the St. Ambrose president, “to watch universities close across the heartland because we can’t make it work will leave our communities fallow.”

Carroll, of the Catholic colleges and university association, said that many other religiously affiliated institutions are closely watching what’s happening at St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy.

“It’s a leap of faith,” she said. “And who better to take a leap of faith than a Catholic institution?”

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556 or jmarcus@hechingerreport.org.

This story about religious colleges and universities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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