Years of slumping enrollment, combined with crushing debt, caught up to Limestone University this week. Board members announced the college needs a cash infusion of $6 million immediately or it will be forced to go online-only or completely shutter.
“The Board’s priority is to preserve the Limestone mission of education and service on our campus in addition to online. But without this financial lifeline, we will have no choice but to move all operations online, which means closing our physical campus,” said Randall Richardson, chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees, in a press release.
The board will meet next week to discuss the next steps. Administrators and board members did not return interview requests from The Chronicle.
Limestone’s students now find themselves in a bind. The window to submit transfer applications has already closed for most colleges, leaving students to decide whether to leave or wait and risk the university closing for good.
Just last week, Limestone, in South Carolina, hosted its admitted-students day, where prospective students visit campus and learn more about the university. “Can’t wait to see these future Saints back on campus soon!” read a university post on X.
About half of Limestone’s students are athletes, a common strategy among small colleges struggling to boost enrollment. The university’s Division II athletic program features about a dozen sports and has won a handful of NCAA championships in the past two decades.
But the sports program, too, has been beleaguered by financial strain. In February, the university launched a $1.5-million fundraising campaign to update its facilities and had already raised $235,000 at that point, according to a news release. “This campaign will ensure the continued success and sustainability of Limestone Athletics,” said Hailey Martin, Limestone’s vice president for intercollegiate athletics, in a February news release.
Facing the prospect of a defunct campus, Limestone’s sports teams are shuttering. Some coaches announced their looming unemployment on X, while players are entering the transfer portal to find new homes.
Jamarcus Hester, 18, had committed in December to playing football at Limestone this fall. After touring the campus and athletic facilities — he particularly liked the cafeteria — he felt like he “had a home,” he told The Chronicle.
Now, Hester will likely ditch four-year college and join a two-year junior college where he can gain playing time. Most four-year team rosters have already been filled, he added.
“At first, I was kind of selfish with it, because I was like, ‘Dang, why does that happen to me?’” Hester said. “But then I looked at the bigger outset, like this just ain’t happening to me. This happened to a bunch of other kids.”
This is the second time in recent years the university has said it needs a massive influx of funds to stay open. In 2023, the then-president and chief financial officer departed following news that the college faced a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall. A few months later, the interim president announced that the campus needed to raise $10 million in donations in a matter of weeks. The governing board publicly backed the interim leader, Monica Baloga, but she resigned the same year and the request for funds was pulled.
Limestone also owes the U.S. Department of Agriculture $27.2 million from a loan it took in 2020, according to the latest audited financial statements for the year ending June 30, 2024. It also owes a local bank $3.2 million on a loan, according to the same financial statements. If the college closes and defaults on the loan, the USDA would take ownership of much of the college’s land and buildings, which were pledged as collateral on the loan.
Limestone has suffered declining enrollment since 2015, federal data shows, when enrollment declined from about 2,300 undergraduate students in 2014 to about 2,250 students. Then the bottom fell out. By 2023, the latest numbers available, undergraduate enrollment was 1,312.
As enrollment slid, administrators had an ambitious plan to reverse the enrollment slide. The university borrowed $34.5 million from the USDA, using a loan program designed to help rural colleges unable to get loans from traditional sources. A 2024 Chronicle investigation showed
enrollment has not increased at a majority of the colleges receiving funds, and many of those campuses have increased financial pressures because of the increased debt.
Limestone spent the money on expanding the size of a planned new library and student center. It also allowed the university to buy a residence hall that it had been leasing and refinance debt. College administrators hoped that buying the dorm would increase money coming into the college from students instead of sending the payments to a private company that owned the residence halls. They also hoped they could rent out space in the new building.
“This new building, even while under construction, and certainly when completed, will be one of the most important student-recruitment and -retention tools that Limestone has ever enjoyed,” the then-president, Darrell Parker, said during the January 2020 ground-breaking ceremony. “That means Limestone is about to embark on a path to growth unlike anything we have ever experienced.”
That didn’t happen, and the university’s finances began to plunge downward, financial records show.
Limestone’s finances took a nosedive starting in 2022, continuing into the subsequent years. In order to stem the tide of lost enrollment and tuition dollars, the university increased advertising spending by 43.3 percent, financial records show, from just over $480,000 in the 2022-23 fiscal year to just over $690,000 in the 2023-24 fiscal year, the latest year publicly available.
That didn’t work either, and the losses continued to pile up. Financial records show the university finished the 2022-23 fiscal year with a $14.8-million loss. The next fiscal year was somewhat better, but still ended with a $7.6-million loss.
In October 2023, the university took an extraordinary step in order to try to stabilize the finances. It signed a consent agreement with the South Carolina attorney general allowing it to siphon off money from its endowment, including from the principal of the fund. Normally, universities just use a portion of interest earned on investing the endowment to help cover some costs in the general-fund budget. Limestone promised to pay back the money it took from the endowment in five years, if it was still around. That freed up about $8.4 million to be spent. It’s unclear how much of that total was actually spent.
But that didn’t work either.
In its audited financial statements from June 30, 2024, the university’s independent auditors said they had “substantial doubt” Limestone would be able to continue as a going concern.
Founded in 1845, Limestone is in Gaffney, which is about 55 miles southwest of Charlotte and 50 miles northeast of Greenville. In 2024, James A. Taylor, the city administrator, told The Chronicle Limestone’s economic impact — everything from parents buying students meals at local restaurants during visits to jobs provided to local residents — is key to the city’s economy.
But the impact extends beyond that. If it went away, it “would be a huge economic blow to Gaffney, but also a psychological blow,” Taylor said then. “The pride of having a four-year institution is important. It is a very important institution to our community. It’s an old college. It survived the Civil War. It survived the Great Depression. It’s a key part of Gaffney.”
Dan Bauman, a Chronicle senior reporter, contributed to this story.
