Dive Brief:
- Saint Joseph's College in Rensselaer, Indiana, which closed in 2017, will team up with nearby Marian University to open a two-year college starting next summer in Indianapolis, according to WIBC.
- Initially, the new Saint Joseph's College of Marian University-Indianapolis will be housed in a facility adjacent to the Marian campus and offer associate degrees in liberal arts, information technology and business, according to Inside Indiana Business.
- Officials at the two Catholic colleges hope the partnership will not only give Saint Joseph's new life but also expand throughout the state, including at the original Saint Joseph's campus. They are aiming for first-year enrollment of 75 to 125 students.
Dive Insight:
At a time when many small nonprofit colleges are struggling and some have been forced to close, institutions with a religious affiliation are finding it especially hard. Small endowments combined with pressure to discount tuition or limit increases has depleted their coffers, Religion News Service reported, causing some to close and others to consolidate.
Along with St. Joseph's, last year Grace University, a private Christian institution in Omaha, Nebraska, shut its doors and Marygrove College, a Catholic institution in Detroit, ended its undergraduate offerings in 2017 and this year transferred its buildings and property to a nonprofit. Another Catholic college, Saint Gregory's University in Oklahoma, also closed last year.
The Boston Globe recently called attention to two religious colleges in New England that are struggling: Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts, and the College of St. Joseph in Vermont, where tuition accounts for 90%of revenue but only covers 58% of expenses annually.
Like the partnership between St. Joseph's and Marian, public colleges are collaborating in new ways or merging. In Connecticut, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania plans for mergers have been discussed or adopted. In one of the biggest of such efforts, Georgia consolidated 35 public higher education institutions into 26.