Campus cuts, mergers, and closures from spring 2025

Greetings from early June.  I’m home now and Virginia’s starting to turn up the summer heat. Bicycling is now more of a workout.  I water the plants early, before the sun cooks the water right off. Our cats demand time outdoors, but soon retreat inside for blessed air conditioning.

Today’s topic is campus cuts, closures, and mergers.  Last year I did a series of these grim posts (March 1, March 20, March 28, April, May, June, July, September, November 2024), but I’ve fallen out of the habit over the past few months.  My last post along these lines was in February, it seems.  The next few months were devoured by finishing my latest book, wrapping up a great seminar, making videos about Trump versus higher ed, participating in on the ground politics, and a lot more.  I am trying to catch up now.  Consider this post a sketch of some of American post-secondary education’s attempts to reduce themselves or survive.

Below are accounts of campuses taking negative or risky strategic steps.  I’ve organized them under the headers of closures, mergers, cuts to programs and people, and budget crises which might cause cuts in the near future, followed by a few reflections.  This is also more telegraphic than my previous posts, as I don’t want to repeat myself and because this is a lot of material.

One note: the Trump administration’s actions are starting to be felt along these lines.  I have been describing and analyzing this in a YouTube series.

One caveat: this is by no means a comprehensive list.  It’s a sample from our time, a gathering of documentary evidence.

1 Closing colleges and universities

The Penn State University system will close seven of its campuses (DuBois, Fayette, Mont Alto, New Kensington, Shenango, Wilkes-Barre, and York).  The reasons include “declining enrollment, stagnant state funding, rising operational costs, and shifting student demographics,” reasons very familiar to my readers.  

Northland College (private, Wisconin) announced it would close due to fatal economic problems:

“[W]e no longer have the resources needed to navigate the economic and demographic storms endangering small, liberal arts institutions today,” said Ted Bristol, Chair of the Northland College Board of Trustees. “With declining enrollment and soaring costs, it takes more to operate the College than we raise in tuition. Even after enacting aggressive measures to cut costs and raise revenues, Northland College has no sustainable path forward.”

Declaring financial exigency and shrinking in 2024 did not save the college.

Saint Andrews University (private, North Carolina) closed due to financial reasons and losing accreditation.  They posted a farewell message but that link, and their whole website, are now gone as of this writing.  Limestone University (private, South Carolina) announced it would close, due to declining enrollment and rising financial problems.

Bastyr College (private, alternative medicine) is selling its Washington state campus “in an effort to stabilize its shaky finances.”  Georgian College (technical, Ontario) shut down its Collingwood campus due to financial pressures.

2 Mergers

A state authority directed East Georgia State College and Georgia Southern University to merge. Rosemont College and Villanova University will merge by 2028.

A planned merger between Bluffton University and University of Findlay ended when the latter’s board called it off. Bluffton’s president then stepped down.

3 Campuses cutting programs and jobs

Johns Hopkins University (private, Maryland) cut more than 2,000 jobs, mostly at overseas locations, after it lost $800 million in funding from the US Agency for International Development. Johnson and Wales University (private, Rhode Island and North Carolina) will lay off 90 faculty and staff, “about 5% of its workforce,” due to declining enrollment.  Clark University (private, Massachusetts) is laying off “30% of faculty and 5% of staff,” due to an enrollment drop.   Ivy Tech Community College (Indiana) will lay off 200 workers following state budget reductions.  Bard College (private liberal arts, New York) is laying off 116 faculty and staff as it moves one campus to another state.  Catholic University is laying off 66 staff, or 7% of its workers, due to “declining enrollment revenue and rising costs.” Roberts Wesleyan University (private, New York) will cut 20% of its faculty and staff in addition to cutting programs.  University of Maryland, Baltimore will lay off 30 staff and reduce compensation for some others.  The University of New Hampshire laid off 35 people. Purdue University Fort Wayne (public, Indiana) is ending 45 unspecified positions.  Linfield University (private, Oregon) is laying off 27 faculty.

SUNY Buffalo State University is making multiple cuts:

The university will cut the equivalent of 63 full-time staff members through termination of temporary appointments, nonrenewals, retirements and cost-cutting layoffs. Buffalo State will also cut 19 additional programs that have an average of nine students over six bachelor’s degree and two master’s degree programs. It also will merge its schools of Education and Professions, starting this fall.

The reason is a persistent budget deficit worsened by low student numbers: “In the last 10 years, student headcount at Buffalo State has fallen by 43%, with a 25% reduction in the last five years. While the enrollment decrease was 43%, staffing decreased by only 22%.”  

Butler County Community College (Pennsylvania) facing in-person enrollment collapse, shifted operations online. 

The University of Toledo suspended admissions to a series of programs largely in response to a new, anti-DEI state law, BAs in Africana Studies, Asian Studies, Data Analytics, Disability Studies, Middle East Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Spanish, and Women’s and Gender Studies.  The University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School withdrew all admissions for its fall 2025 class in response to Trump cuts to biomedical research.

Bryn Athyn College (private, Pennsylvania) is cutting athletics.  Specifically, “all 11 NCAA Division III sports teams will be transitioned into clubs.”

Virginia’s governor stopped $626 million in college and university construction projects because of worries about future budgets.   Would-be building examples include:

Virginia State University… plans to renovate Virginia Hall because of multiple infrastructure issues, and Virginia Commonwealth University, which plans to acquire the Altria research building to expand its lab space…

The Virginia Community College System… plans to renovate Amherst and Campbell Halls at Central Virginia Community College (CVCC) in Lynchburg, which are the core classroom spaces for the college. Amherst Hall was built in 1968 and Campbell Hall was completed in 1974. Neither has had a significant renovation since then.

One potentially significant detail in one story of financial stress: Indiana University at Bloomington is asking faculty members who take buyout agreements not to criticize the institution.

One unsigned agreement said the faculty member must “not defame, or otherwise disparage, the University” or any of its “current or former trustees, officers, employees, agents, representatives, attorneys, or insurers.” It also said the employee must agree “not to make negative statements of any kind regarding the University.”

4 Budget crises, programs cut, not laying off people yet

University of Illinois-Chicago leadership is talking about cutting language programs or more. 

Duke University announced it was starting budget cuts. Princeton University’s leadership warned the campus to expect cuts of 5-10%. The University of Arizona’s administration ordered a 3.2% budget cut, although its applications are uneven:

The preliminary budget plan would make the deepest cuts to university support and administration, reducing those areas by 7.5% overall. Student support would be cut by 2.8%, and the aggregate budget for the university’s colleges would be reduced by 2.2%. It would also decrease facility and utility spending by 1.1% while increasing community outreach by 0.7%.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln extended a hiring freeze and has cuts in the works.  Colorado State University is implementing a “hiring chill” in anticipation of state and federal budget cuts.

A court ordered Saint Augustine’s University (historically black, North Carolina) to pay a telecommunications company more than $20 million in unpaid bills.  SAU was already suffering from years of financial turmoil, accreditation issues, and legal problems.

Reflections

What can we learn from this litany of cuts, closures, terminations, and endings?

The Bloomington story intrigues me.  How many campuses already require faculty and staff to sign non-disparagement language right now?  How many more will follow suit?

Campus mergers still seem fairly scarce.  They are not easy to do, as we see from one failure. Cuts are politically easier.

Penn State closing seven campuses struck me.  Closures are more often seen in the private, both for- and non-profit sector.  State governments don’t want to bear the political costs of shutting down public institutions.  Yet Pennsylvania did.  That state is not suffering unusually; we should not be surprised to see similar states consider similar plans, especially in rural districts.

State budget politics have a strong influence on public institutions, obviously. While there has been some spending recovery since the 2008 Great Recession there are still challenges. Those are likely to become worse as the Trump administration continues to go after higher ed.

Trump: I won’t rehearse my video series here. Suffice to say that if this president retains his focus on higher ed (by no means guarantees, given his wandering attention and shambolic administration) we should anticipate more financial and political hits, which will translate into more cuts and so on.  How might the academy effectively resist this?  So far legal challenges seem to have had the most traction, so we may expect more of these to come.  So far I have seen little appetite for collective action across the sector, but I retain some hope.

I want to end by reminding the reader of the humanity of these stories.  The linked accounts point to students whose studies have been shunted aside, staff and faculty losing jobs, careers stymied or ended.  Surrounding communities can also suffer as a result, losing the interaction, business, and vibrancy of campus community members.

Finally, I’d like to invite anyone with information on a college or university’s plans to close, merge, or cut to share them with me, either as comments on this post, as notes on social media, or by contacting me privately here.  I write these posts based largely on public, open intelligence (news reports, investigations, roundups) but also through tips, since higher education sometimes has issues with transparency.  We need better information on these events.

(thanks to Karl Hakkarainen, Peter Shea, Marc Sims, Ed Webb; thanks to Higher Ed Dive and Inside Higher Ed for doing solid work)