Some rural religious colleges seek mergers, consolidation : NPR

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

The prayer 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, a student, was talking about 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 her classmates, many in St. Ambrose-branded T-shirts and hoodies.

The two universities are among the many religiously affiliated colleges that disproportionately serve rural America and are facing declining enrollment and financial challenges. The troubles threaten to further diminish access to higher education for rural students, who say they appreciate their colleges’ personal touch and religious values.

“I came from a small town, so I didn’t really want to go bigger,” said Alaina Bina, a junior majoring in nursing at Mount Mercy. She said she picked the university because she liked its small, hilly campus. “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.”

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

A mix of financial and demographic challenges

But the heads of both St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy, which is 90 minutes away in Cedar Rapids, said they’ve watched as other religiously affiliated colleges — athletic rivals and institutions that employed their friends and former colleagues — closed.

With falling numbers of college applicants, 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.”

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

More than half the 79 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. Education Department list of institutions considered “not financially responsible” because of comparatively low cash reserves and net income and high levels of debt.

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 City, has sacked a quarter of its staff. Saint Louis University in Missouri, one of the United States’ oldest Catholic universities, laid off 20 employees, eliminated 130 unfilled faculty and staff positions and sold off its medical practice after running a deficit.

Other religious campuses making cuts or facing financial headwinds include Bluffton University in Ohio, St. Norbert College in Wisconsin and Georgetown College in Kentucky.

Among those that are also merging to buttress themselves against demographic and financial challenges are Ursuline College in Ohio and Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania. Both are Catholic. Spring Hill College in Alabama and Rockhurst University in Missouri, also both Catholic, are teaming up to 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.

Efforts to work together on solutions

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.

“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, the principal association of universities and colleges, 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 commission’s goal 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 & 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% from 2017 to 2021, the most recent year for which a figure is available, the number of students at other kinds of religious primary and secondary schools is up.

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

Many are in rural areas where access to higher education is limited and is becoming even scarcer as public universities in rural states merge or close, or cut dozens of majors.

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

When Jacob Lange arrived at St. Ambrose from East Dubuque, Ill., 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,” he said. “It felt like I was kind of included.”

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 than their counterparts at nonreligious universities and colleges.

More students at religiously affiliated than at secular institutions receive financial aid, the American Council on Education says. Three out of 5 get scholarships from the colleges themselves, compared with fewer than 1 in 4 at other kinds of schools.

At both Mount Mercy and St. Ambrose, which have about 1,450 and 2,700 students, respectively, 100% get financial aid.

But these benefits for students can be vulnerabilities for budgets, said Novak, of 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.”

Combining means Mount Mercy and St. Ambrose will be able to streamline their administrations, consolidate their purchasing and offer a larger collective number of majors and courses, including graduate programs that students from one can continue into at the other.

The threats to these campuses 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.

What students pay in net tuition and fees averages $25,416 a year, according to the American Council on Education. That compares with an average net tuition and fees of $16,510 at private, nonprofit four-year institutions overall.

St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy 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 they’re trying to fend off problems that could arise later. By joining forces, each can increase its number of programs while lowering operating costs.

The reaction among students and alumni has been mixed.

Keeping separate sports teams

Students worried about what name would appear on their degrees and whether sports teams that once competed against each other would be merged. The degrees will still say “Mount Mercy” or “St. Ambrose,” and 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, because they are “a powerful enrollment driver” for both schools.

“Honestly, this was probably the biggest student concern,” said Nasharia Patterson, the 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 asked, “If we don’t do this, what’s the alternative? We want to be around for another hundred years.”

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

Carroll, of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, 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.