The article caught my attention. “Times are hard on the campus of Notre Dame. Not the famous University of Notre Dame, home to Fighting Irish football and more than 13,000 students – little Notre Dame College, a less prestigious Roman Catholic school in the Midwest” (St. Louis Post Dispatch, March 11; A5). I perked up because I knew Notre Dame’s last president. It’s closing because its enrollment has dropped by a third in the last decade. Most colleges, and many seminaries too, depend upon tuition for their revenue.
The next day comes word close to home. Fontbonne University, also a Roman Catholic institution, will close in 2025. Same reason, declining enrollment, now 874 students, and therefore insufficient revenue. This closure especially grieves me. Fontbonne is immediately north of Concordia Seminary. During my almost 16 years as president, I visited regularly with Fontbonne’s presidents. Administrators from both schools would sometimes meet to discuss the challenges and opportunities of higher education.
In my Lutheran denomination, three universities have closed in recent years and several more are rumored to be on the financial brink. In the United States, there are about 850 colleges and universities struggling to survive. Many seminaries, a unique subset of American higher education, are also struggling. A school’s business model is key. If a school depends upon tuition for its needed revenue, a downturn in enrollment, a smaller pool of potential students, a pandemic, can spell disaster. Besides tuition, you have to have endowments and donations.
Another challenge can be bureaucracy, government but also ecclesiastical. “Logan Zielinski…is committing to enroll and play (football) at one of those (smaller) schools, Concordia University Ann Arbor, without having any idea how much it will cost. The federal government hasn’t yet sent colleges any information about applicants’ family finances, which the schools need to make financial-aid offers” (Wall Street Journal, March 13; A1, 10).
Unresponsive bureaucracies, inadequate funding models, but especially a failure of people. “Look closely and I think you will see that when institutions fail, it is mainly a matter of people failing institutions. People fail institutions by failing to think and act with due regard to the valued purposes embodied in institutions. To repeat an earlier point, the failure does not consist in simply making mistakes, errors, and miscalculations. It consists in failures of being” (Hugh Heclo, “On Thinking Institutionally,” 126-127)