Mount Ida College, a small private college in Newton, Massachusetts, founded in 1899, told its roughly 1,500 students on April 6, 2018 that it would close at the end of that spring semester — about six weeks later. There was no teach-out year, no orderly wind-down, no time to plan. Students weeks from graduation, and others who had just paid deposits for the fall, learned almost overnight that the institution issuing their degrees would not exist by autumn. The abruptness, more than the closure itself, is why Mount Ida became the defining cautionary tale of the American college-closure era.
The mechanics were brutally simple. Mount Ida was tuition-dependent with little endowment to cushion a downturn, and it was carrying significant debt into a shrinking market for traditional-age students in the Northeast. A planned merger with nearby Lasell College — an orderly combination that would have protected students — fell through. With its options exhausted, the college sold its campus to the University of Massachusetts Amherst for roughly $70 million (UMass assuming the debt), turning the Newton property into a Boston-area satellite, and directed its stranded students to transfer to UMass Dartmouth, a different and struggling UMass campus more than 70 miles away.
The deal optimized for the buyer’s geography, not the students’ degrees. UMass Amherst wanted a beachhead near Boston; Mount Ida’s students wanted to finish what they had started, and many found their credits, financial aid, and specialized programs did not transfer cleanly to a distant campus. Faculty and staff lost their jobs with little notice. Students sued, alleging the college had concealed how close to the edge it was while still collecting their money; the suit was largely dismissed, but the grievance it named — a duty to warn — became the episode’s lasting legacy.
Massachusetts investigated, and in 2019 enacted first-in-the-nation rules requiring financially at-risk colleges to notify the state and prepare contingency plans before they collapse — the “Mount Ida law,” in effect. The college itself was gone, one of the first of a wave that would take Newbury, Southern Vermont, and dozens more. What Mount Ida left behind was not a campus but a template, and a warning: that a 119-year-old institution can vanish in six weeks, and that the students who trusted it are the last to be told.
Green Mountain College, a small liberal-arts college in Poultney, Vermont, traced to a Methodist academy founded in 1834, announced on January 23, 2019 that it would close at the end of that academic year, and held its final commencement that May after 185 years. It was not an obscure school. By the 2000s Green Mountain had remade itself into one of the most recognized environmental and sustainability colleges in the country — a place that built its whole curriculum around environmental literacy, that won national sustainability awards, that declared carbon neutrality, and that drew students specifically because it practiced what it taught. It was, by reputation, the greenest college in America. It could not make the arithmetic work.
The arithmetic was the familiar Vermont arithmetic. Green Mountain was tiny, deeply tuition-dependent, and had no meaningful endowment to cushion a downturn. Enrollment, which had stood above 800 around 2009, eroded to roughly 430 by the end — a loss of nearly half the student body in a decade — as the pool of college-age students in the Northeast shrank and the competition for them intensified. The college also carried heavy debt, including roughly $19 million owed to the U.S. Department of Agriculture on refinanced loans. For an institution living on this year’s tuition to pay this year’s bills, a sustained enrollment slide is not a problem to be managed; it is a countdown.
Green Mountain spent some eighteen months trying to avoid the end, hunting for a partner, a merger, a buyer — anything that would keep the Poultney campus open. The search failed. What the college did secure, in lieu of survival, was a soft landing for the people: it arranged teach-out agreements with seven institutions, and partnered with Arizona’s Prescott College — a sister school in environmental education — to admit Green Mountain students, hire some of its faculty, and host a Green Mountain Center to carry the name and mission forward. Roughly 140 students transferred to Prescott; others finished at Castleton, Sterling, Marlboro, and elsewhere.
What was lost was a college and a town’s anchor. Poultney, a village of a few thousand in the Vermont slate country, lost its largest employer and roughly $7 million in direct payroll. The campus sat empty, sold at auction in 2020 for $4.5 million, its future uncertain for years. And the broader lesson stung precisely because of who died: not a poorly run school, but an admired, mission-driven one. Green Mountain proved that doing the work well — being beloved, being green, being right — is no defense against a balance sheet with no reserve and a market with fewer students every year.
Newbury College, a private career-focused college in Brookline, Massachusetts, founded in 1962, announced on December 14, 2018 that it would close at the end of the 2018–19 academic year, and shut its doors after that spring. It was a relatively young institution by New England standards — fifty-seven years old — and a practical one, built to put students into careers rather than to chase prestige. It had once been substantial. In 1996 Newbury enrolled roughly 5,384 students. By 2016 that figure had fallen to 751, and by the fall of 2018 it stood at about 627 — a decline of more than 86 percent in two decades. A college does not survive losing that many students; it simply takes a while to admit it.
The mechanism was the enrollment cliff in its purest form, with no fraud, no scandal, and no single villain to blame. Newbury was tuition-dependent and thinly endowed — its endowment of roughly $2 million was described as tiny even for a school its size — which left it no buffer as the Northeastern student pool shrank and competition for the survivors sharpened. President Joseph Chillo named the cause plainly: the weighty financial challenges pressing on liberal-arts colleges across the country, driven by major changes in demographics and costs. In June 2018 the regional accreditor placed Newbury on probation over its finances; by December the board concluded there was no path forward and chose to close while it could still wind down on its own terms.
Newbury did at least plan the end. Rather than strand students with weeks’ notice, it announced the closure two semesters out and arranged for students to continue elsewhere, with nearby Lasell University serving as the institution of record for transcripts and enrollment verification after the college was gone. The final commencement came in spring 2019, and the winding-down proceeded in an orderly fashion through the year.
The campus told the rest of the story. Newbury’s roughly eight-acre site on Fisher Hill — bought decades earlier from a former Catholic women’s college — was put up for sale, reviewed by the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, and sold in September 2019 for $34 million to Welltower, a senior-housing developer, to become a luxury retirement community. The proceeds more than covered the college’s debt. A campus built to start young people’s careers would spend its next life housing the end of other people’s. What closed was not a famous institution but a workmanlike one, and its death said something quieter and more general than scandal ever could: that a small, tuition-dependent college can be perfectly honest, perfectly useful, and still run out of students.
Southern Vermont College, a small liberal-arts college near Bennington, Vermont, with roots reaching to 1926, announced on March 4, 2019 that it would close at the end of that academic year, and ceased operations after the spring semester. It was a college defined by whom it served. A large share of its students were first-generation and Pell-eligible — young people for whom Southern Vermont, perched on the 371-acre former Everett estate above Bennington, was an academic home they might not have found anywhere else. That is what made its closure sting more than the numbers alone: the institution most exposed to the demographic collapse was also the one serving the students with the least margin to absorb a disruption.
The decline was steep and the finances were thin. Enrollment, which had peaked around 500 in 2012, fell to roughly 330 by 2019, and the college projected the next class would be smaller still — internal forecasts cut expected enrollment from 365 to 275. Southern Vermont carried a roughly $2 million deficit and had spent years recovering from earlier financial setbacks, including the lingering damage of an embezzlement episode and the loss of accreditation for its nursing program. As a tuition-dependent college with no real endowment cushion, it had no way to absorb a shrinking class on top of standing debt.
The decisive blow was accreditation. In January 2019 the New England Commission of Higher Education caught the college off guard, voting to require Southern Vermont to show cause why its accreditation should not be withdrawn or it be placed on probation — over the financial-resources standard the college could no longer meet. A show-cause hearing followed in late February. The day after, the trustees concluded there was no way forward and voted to close. President David Rees Evans called it devastating: a great institution whose kind of greatness had become very difficult to keep going fiscally.
The college arranged teach-out partners — among them Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Castleton University, and Norwich University — so its roughly 330 students could finish their degrees elsewhere. Bennington lost an employer and a point of access to higher education for its first-generation families. NECHE formally withdrew the college’s accreditation effective August 31, 2019, the bureaucratic full stop on a 93-year institution. What closed was not a failing diploma mill but a mission-driven college doing demanding work with the students who most needed it — proof that in the enrollment-cliff era, serving the vulnerable and being financially fragile are too often the same condition.
The College of New Rochelle, a private college in New Rochelle, New York, founded in 1904 as the first Catholic women’s college in the state, closed in the summer of 2019 after a financial concealment that its own trustees did not discover until the man responsible had already retired. It was, by the end, a secular-operating institution serving a substantially adult and minority student body, much of it through a network of branch campuses in New York City. Roughly 3,000 students were enrolled when the board announced, in February 2019, that the college would not survive the year.
The mechanism was not the familiar enrollment cliff but a fraud. The college’s longtime controller, Keith Borge, had for years failed to pay over more than $20 million in federal and state payroll taxes while falsifying the college’s financial statements to hide the hole. When he retired in 2016 and trustees brought in outside accountants, the investigation surfaced roughly $31 million in misappropriated funds and concealed liabilities — unpaid taxes, a drained endowment, federal grant money spent on operating costs, donations counted twice. Borge pleaded guilty in 2019 to securities fraud and failure to pay over payroll taxes and was sentenced to three years in prison. By then the institution could not be saved.
What followed was, by the grim standards of the closure era, a comparatively humane landing. Mercy College — a larger neighbor in Westchester and the Bronx — entered a teach-out agreement in March 2019, registered nearly 1,700 New Rochelle students for the fall, made offers to roughly 70 faculty and staff, leased three of the campuses, and took custody of the alumni transcripts and history. The College of New Rochelle held its final commencement on August 20, 2019, ceased operations, and entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September with some $80 million in liabilities.
What was lost was not only an institution but a particular kind of access. The School of New Resources had been built in 1972 expressly to bring a liberal-arts degree to working adults who had been shut out of one; its students were disproportionately Black, Latino, and older than the traditional undergraduate. They did not run the college’s books, and they had no warning of what was on them. The dry edge of this story belongs to the concealment — a single officer who falsified the ledgers of a 115-year-old college for years. The students belong to the sober part.
Dowling College, a private college in Oakdale on the south shore of Long Island, founded as a branch campus in 1955 and chartered as an independent institution in 1968, closed in the summer of 2016 after years of declining enrollment and roughly $54 million in debt it could no longer service. It granted its last degrees and ceased operations on August 31, 2016 — the day the Middle States Commission on Higher Education’s withdrawal of accreditation took effect — and filed for bankruptcy three months later. Its closing was chaotic even by the standards of a college collapse: it announced its end, rescinded the announcement days later, and then closed for good a few weeks after that.
The arc was the familiar one of the small Northeastern regional college, compressed and accelerated. Dowling had once enrolled close to 6,746 students at its 1999 peak; by 2016 it was down to roughly 2,400, an enrollment that had fallen 53 percent in the four years before it defaulted on its bonds in July 2015. The college carried about $54 million in debt — including some $47 million in tax-exempt bonds issued through local industrial development agencies — against an endowment of under $2 million. There was no cushion. A college that thin cannot ride out a single bad year, and Dowling had strung together many.
Its survival strategy was to find a partner, and for a while it seemed to have one. In early 2016 Dowling reached an arrangement with Global University Systems, a for-profit international education company, that was meant to keep it open. On May 31, 2016, the college announced it would close in three days; on that same day, with talks reportedly revived, it rescinded the closure. The reprieve did not hold. On July 13 the board confirmed the Global deal had collapsed, and with Middle States set to revoke accreditation on August 31, the end was fixed.
Roughly 2,400 students had to find somewhere else to finish; the federal government’s closed-school provisions and transfer arrangements caught some of them. Faculty and staff lost their jobs. The Oakdale campus — anchored by a Gilded Age mansion on the Connetquot River — emptied out and, in the years after, fell to vandalism and neglect, a grand and decaying monument to a college that ran out of both students and money at the same time.
Burlington College, a small alternative college in Burlington, Vermont, founded in 1972, closed on May 27, 2016, brought down by debt it took on to buy a lakefront campus far larger than its few hundred students could ever support. The board of trustees, citing the “crushing weight of debt,” voted to shut the college’s programs, and with its accreditor declining to renew accreditation, Burlington graduated its final class — 55 students — and ceased to exist after 44 years.
The college had always been tiny and unconventional. It began as the Vermont Institute of Community Involvement, an experiment for adult learners and veterans that, in its early days, met in its founder’s living room. Even at its largest it enrolled only around 200 students, and by the fall of 2015 that had fallen to roughly 123 full-time students. It had no endowment cushion and no margin; it was, in the language of higher-education finance, a college with almost nothing behind its tuition.
The decisive event was a real-estate purchase it could not afford. In 2010, under then-president Jane O’Meara Sanders, Burlington bought a roughly 32-acre lakefront property on North Avenue — the former headquarters of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington — for about $10 million, financing it with bank loans and a note to the Diocese. The acquisition was premised on donations that had been pledged but not yet collected and on enrollment growth that was projected but never arrived. The pledged gifts came up short, the new students did not materialize, and a college of a couple hundred students found itself carrying roughly $11 million in debt against a campus it had bought for a much larger institution it never became.
What followed was a slow strangulation. Burlington sold off portions of the land to pay down the debt and reduced the balance over several years, but the financial damage and the loss of confidence had been done; its accreditor placed it on probation in 2014 over financial resources, and in 2016, when a bank declined to renew a $1 million line of credit, the college could not go on. These are the facts of a financial mechanism — an overlarge purchase financed against money that did not arrive — and they are stated here without reference to the political controversy that later attached to them.
MacMurray College, a small liberal-arts college in Jacksonville, Illinois, founded in 1846 and for most of its life a women’s college, told its students on March 27, 2020 that it would close at the end of that spring semester. After 174 years — through four name changes, a century as a women’s institution, and a postwar shift to coeducation — its Board of Trustees voted unanimously that the college had no viable financial path forward. Roughly 500 students were enrolled at the end; about 101 faculty and staff would lose their jobs, with no severance, by their final workday on May 25.
The cause was not a single catastrophe but a long arithmetic. MacMurray was tuition-dependent with a small endowment, and it had been running deficits; the closure year would have been its third consecutive year in the red. Its enrollment had fallen by roughly two-thirds from a high-water mark above 1,500 to under 600 in its final stretch, leaving too few tuition-paying students to cover rising costs in a brutally competitive market for traditional-age undergraduates in the Midwest. The board spent more than a year hunting for new capital — a partner, a donor, a lifeline — and found none.
The timing made the diagnosis murky to outsiders, because the announcement came in the first chaotic weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. But MacMurray’s leadership was careful to say the virus was not the cause; it was, at most, the last weight on a structure already failing. The college had flunked the U.S. Department of Education’s financial-responsibility test years earlier, in 2011, 2012 and 2013 — an early, documented warning that the books would not balance forever.
What was lost was a fixture of small-town Illinois. Jacksonville is a town of some 18,000, and MacMurray had been part of it since before the Civil War, educating generations of women teachers, nurses and social workers. The students were steered toward transfers at seven regional colleges; the campus was carved into parcels and sold at auction that November, raising barely enough to pay down a sliver of the college’s debt. A 174-year-old institution closed quietly, in a season when the whole country was distracted, and left a town with one fewer reason to exist.
Wells College, a small liberal-arts college in the village of Aurora, New York, on the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake, founded in 1868 by Wells Fargo and American Express co-founder Henry Wells, told its students on April 29, 2024 that it would close at the end of that spring semester. After 156 years — most of them as a women’s college, the last two decades coeducational — the institution announced it could not continue, and it ceased operations on June 30, 2024. Roughly 350 students and 38 faculty members were affected.
The cause was the demographic and financial vise that has crushed dozens of small colleges: an enrollment cliff that left Wells with too few tuition-paying students to sustain itself. The college’s enrollment had peaked at 574 in 2007, two years after it admitted men, and had fallen to about 350 by its final year. A small college this size, tuition-dependent and carrying a modest endowment of roughly $29 million, has almost no room to absorb that kind of shrinkage. In the year before the closure, Wells posted a net loss of about $3.2 million, the latest in a string of operating deficits stretching back years.
There had been warnings. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education placed Wells on probation in 2019 over concerns about its financial and human resources; the college clawed its way off probation in 2021 when its finances briefly improved, but the reprieve proved temporary. The leadership blamed the familiar litany — the pandemic, the shrinking national pool of undergraduates, inflation, and a souring public sentiment toward higher education — and for once each item on the list was a real contributor.
What stung the Wells community was not only the closure but the speed of it: about a month’s notice, mid-spring, for a 156-year-old institution. Students mid-degree scrambled to transfer; faculty and staff lost their careers; the village of Aurora, which had grown up around the college, faced the loss of its anchor. A teach-out plan eventually steered a large majority of students to other colleges, and in early 2026 the 127-acre lakeside campus found an unexpected second life as the home of a new tribal college — but the institution that Henry Wells built was gone.
Cazenovia College, a private liberal-arts college in the village of Cazenovia, New York, southeast of Syracuse, founded in 1824 as the Seminary of the Genesee Conference, announced on December 7, 2022 that it would close at the end of the following spring semester. The institution graduated its final class on May 13, 2023 and ceased operations on June 30 — closing a year and a half short of its 200th anniversary. It was one of the oldest colleges in the region, and its end came down to a single, unforgiving piece of arithmetic: it could not refinance roughly $25 million in debt that had come due.
The college had defaulted on that bond obligation in the autumn of 2022, after a payment extension lapsed. Behind the default lay the same slow erosion that has felled small colleges across the Northeast: enrollment had peaked near 1,042 students in the fall of 2016 and had fallen by more than 40 percent to about 746 by fall 2021. Fewer students meant less tuition, less tuition meant deficits, and deficits meant the college could neither service nor refinance the debt it had taken on. The board concluded it would not have the funds to operate for the fall of 2023 and beyond.
The leadership pointed to a stack of contributing pressures: the pandemic’s costs and disruption, inflation, volatile bond and stock markets, the long demographic decline in college-age students, and competition from New York’s Excelsior Scholarship, which offers free public-college tuition to many middle-income families and drew students away from a private college that could not match the price. Each pressure was real; together they made the debt impossible to carry.
Cazenovia handled the closure relatively well, given how little room it had. It assembled teach-out agreements with two dozen institutions so that its students — and there were on the order of 700 — had documented paths to finish their degrees. The campus, more than 270 acres and 500,000 square feet of buildings including a noted equestrian center, went up for sale and found an interim tenant in the New York State Police, which used it as a training academy. But the institution itself, a fixture of central New York since 1824, did not survive to its bicentennial.
Birmingham-Southern College, a selective liberal-arts college perched on a hilltop on the western edge of Birmingham, Alabama, traced its lineage to 1856 and ceased operations on May 31, 2024. It was not a marginal institution drifting toward irrelevance. BSC was a nationally ranked college with a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, a Methodist heritage that had long since softened into a broadly secular liberal-arts identity, and a reputation as one of the better small colleges in the South. What killed it was not obscurity but arithmetic — an endowment spent down over more than a decade until there was nothing left to spend, and a last-ditch rescue that the state of Alabama, having designed it, declined to fund.
The mechanism was a slow bleed dressed as a strategy. The college operated at a deficit in eight of its final ten fiscal years and covered the gap by drawing on its endowment, which fell from a peak above $110 million to roughly $51 million by fiscal 2022. An endowment is supposed to be the cushion a tuition-dependent college lands on in a bad year; BSC instead treated it as an operating account, and enrollment, which had topped 1,500 in 2010, slid to 731 by the fall of 2023. By then the college needed not a cushion but a rescue: it estimated it would have to raise some $200 million to restore long-term viability.
The rescue very nearly came from the state. In 2023, Alabama created a $30 million bridge-loan program for distressed private colleges — legislation tailored, everyone understood, to keep BSC alive. But the program routed approval through the state treasurer, Young Boozer III, who in October 2023 denied the application, ruling that the college had failed the statutory collateral requirement and was, in his words, a “terrible credit risk.” BSC insisted it had met the qualifications and offered the state a first-security position; it called the denial a betrayal of good faith. A 2024 bill to amend the program and route around Boozer’s veto failed in the Alabama House.
When the bill died, so did the college. The board voted to close, folding a campus that claimed a $90 million annual economic impact on Alabama. Nearly all of roughly 150 faculty and the rest of the staff lost their jobs; the students were left to transfer, their BSC scholarships not guaranteed to follow them. A 168-year-old college had been engineered a lifeline by its own legislature, and then watched that legislature decline to extend it.
Lincoln College, a small private college in the rural central-Illinois town of Lincoln, was founded in 1865 — its cornerstone laid on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday that February, while the president for whom it was named was still alive — and it closed for good on May 13, 2022, after 157 years. By the end it had become a predominantly Black institution recognized as such by the U.S. Department of Education, serving a heavily first-generation, lower-income student body. It died of two compounding wounds: the enrollment and revenue damage of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a December 2021 ransomware attack that crippled the very systems it needed to recruit its way out of the hole. Lincoln became the first U.S. college whose closure was attributed, in part, to a cyberattack.
The financial pressure was already severe. Like most tuition-dependent small colleges, Lincoln depended on each incoming class to fund the year, and the pandemic hammered both recruitment and the auxiliary revenue — housing, dining, events — that a residential college relies on. Enrollment had crested near 1,330 in the mid-2000s; by the pandemic the college was working to keep numbers from sliding further. It was wounded but not yet fatally so. Then, on December 19, 2021, came the ransomware.
The attack, which the college traced to Iran, locked Lincoln out of the systems that ran admissions, recruitment, retention, and fundraising for more than a month. The timing could hardly have been worse: this was precisely the window in which a college recruits and confirms its next fall class. Lincoln paid a ransom — under $100,000 — and regained access in March 2022, but by then it had lost the recruiting cycle and could not see its own enrollment pipeline. When the data came back online, the picture was grim: projections for fall 2022 fell “woefully short” of what the college needed to survive, and leadership estimated it would take as much as $50 million, or a transformational partnership, to keep the doors open.
There was no $50 million and no rescuer. President David Gerlach told staff the institution would close on May 13, 2022, and a GoFundMe appeal raised only a few thousand dollars against a far larger need. The closure stranded a student body that small colleges like Lincoln exist precisely to serve — first-generation students, many of them Black, in a part of Illinois with few alternatives nearby — and emptied a campus that had stood since the Civil War. A college named for the president who saved the Union outlasted him by 157 years and was finished, in the end, by a virus and a hacker.
Goddard College, the famously experimental progressive college in Plainfield, Vermont, was chartered in 1938 — on the older root of an institution dating to 1863 — and announced on April 9, 2024 that it would close at the end of that spring semester, after 86 years. Few small colleges have left a larger mark relative to their size. Goddard pioneered the low-residency degree, a model since copied across American higher education, and built a faculty that at times included writers such as David Mamet and the poet Louise Glück; its alumni run from Mamet and the actor William H. Macy to the members of the band Phish. What it could not do, in the end, was find enough students to pay for itself. Enrollment had fallen from a peak near 1,900 in the early 1970s to roughly 220 by 2024, and the board, facing what it called looming financial insolvency, judged closure the only responsible choice.
Goddard was the work of Royce “Tim” Pitkin, a student of progressive education at Columbia’s Teachers College in the tradition of John Dewey, who founded the college in 1938 as an experiment in self-directed, democratic learning — partly as a bulwark, as he saw it, against the authoritarianism then rising in the world. Students designed their own curricula and received written narrative evaluations instead of grades. In 1963 Goddard developed the intensive low-residency model for its MFA in creative writing — short, concentrated on-campus residencies bracketing long stretches of independent study at a distance — and that innovation rippled outward into MFA and adult-education programs nationwide.
The same independence that made Goddard influential left it financially exposed. It was tiny, tuition-dependent, lightly endowed, and built on a model that, ironically, made physical enrollment optional. By the 2020s roughly 70 percent of its students were choosing the fully virtual path over the in-person residencies, eroding the residency revenue the model assumed and accelerating an enrollment decline already decades old. The college had been placed on accreditation probation in 2018 (lifted in 2020), and in early 2024 it shifted entirely online before concluding that even that could not save it.
The closure stranded about 220 students and eliminated roughly 90 jobs. To soften the landing, Goddard arranged for students to continue at Prescott College in Arizona — a kindred progressive institution — at their current tuition rate, backed by a transition scholarship fund. It was a more graceful exit than many closing colleges manage. But the institution itself was gone: an 86-year-old laboratory of progressive education, whose ideas outran its enrollment, closing in the Vermont hills where it had taught generations to design their own learning.
The University of the Arts, a private arts university in central Philadelphia whose roots reached back to schools founded in the 1870s and which took its university name in 1987, told its community on the evening of Friday, May 31, 2024 that it would close the following Friday, June 7 — about a week later. There was no teach-out year, no semester to wind down, no warning the public could see. Roughly 1,100 students, and close to 700 faculty and staff, learned in a single announcement that the institution awarding their degrees and signing their paychecks would not exist in eight days. The suddenness, more than the closure itself, is what made UArts the East Coast’s Mount Ida — proof that a 148-year-old institution can vanish in a week.
The collapse was financial, and it had been building for years. UArts was deeply tuition-dependent in a shrinking market for arts education; enrollment had fallen from roughly 2,000 in 2013 to 1,149 by the fall of 2023. A successful 2018–2022 capital campaign had raised more than $67 million and grown the endowment past $60 million, but those funds were largely restricted and could not pay operating bills, and the university entered most years with about a single month of cash on hand. By the spring of 2024, leadership later said, it would have taken roughly $40 million to keep the doors open, and the money was not there.
What turned a financial crisis into a scandal was the accreditation. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education said it learned of the university’s intent to close only on May 29 — days before the public announcement — and on June 1 it withdrew the university’s accreditation, faulting UArts for failing to inform the commission in time or to plan an orderly closure with a teach-out for students. An accredited university effectively ceased to be one overnight. President Kerry Walk resigned on June 4; the board hired a turnaround firm to manage the shutdown; and in September 2024 the university filed for Chapter 7 liquidation.
What was lost was a pillar of Philadelphia’s cultural life and a rare thing in American higher education: a standalone, comprehensive arts university, with schools of art, design, film, dance, music, and theater clustered along the Avenue of the Arts. Students scattered to teach-out partners, faculty and staff sued over the lack of notice, the Pennsylvania Attorney General opened an inquiry, and the campus — nine buildings in the heart of the city — was sold off piece by piece in bankruptcy.
New College of California, a small progressive college in San Francisco’s Mission District founded in 1971, ceased operating in early 2008 after its regional accreditor moved to strip its accreditation and the U.S. Department of Education cut off its access to federal student aid. It was, for most of its life, exactly the institution it set out to be: an activist, humanities-centered alternative college with a law school dedicated to public-interest practice, programs in poetics and women’s spirituality, and a faculty that at various times included figures of the American left. It trained progressive lawyers and writers and organizers for nearly four decades. Then governance and money failed it, and the bodies that certify a college as a college withdrew their certification.
The decline was long and, by the end, fully documented. The Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) had warned New College repeatedly across decades — over curriculum, governance, and finances — and in the summer of 2007 launched an investigation that found serious, long-standing deficiencies across every area it reviewed and placed the college on probation. By late 2007 the college was losing tens of thousands of dollars a month, had stopped paying faculty, and let health benefits lapse. After discovering record-keeping and financial-aid improprieties, the Department of Education placed New College on heightened cash monitoring and then, in early 2008, revoked its eligibility for federal aid — the financial oxygen a tuition-dependent college cannot live without.
The end was not a clean closing date but a quiet asphyxiation. Spring classes that were supposed to begin in mid-January 2008 were postponed and then never really started; with federal aid frozen, there was no money to run a semester. WASC revoked the accreditation in February 2008, and the college simply stopped functioning. The most viable parts were transplanted: the law school’s students moved to John F. Kennedy University in April 2008, and the women’s spirituality master’s program migrated to a graduate institute in Palo Alto. What remained was debt, unpaid staff, and a building on Valencia Street that had been, for a generation, one of San Francisco’s training grounds for the activist left.
New College’s story is not the demographic enrollment cliff that would claim so many small colleges a decade later. It is an older, plainer failure: a mission-driven institution whose internal governance and financial controls decayed until the external authorities that vouch for a college could no longer do so. When accreditation goes, federal aid follows, and for a college that lives on tuition, that is the end.