The Endangered Small College

Anthony Boyle came 1,200 miles from the very big, conservative state of Texas to go to Northland College, a very small institution on the shores of Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin, known for its “progressive focus on the environment and sustainability.” Initially, his college choice was based less on Northland’s mission and more on the fact that it was close to his grandparents’ house.

“I ended up coming up here, talked to a baseball coach, got a tour around campus, and I was like, OK, I’ll give it a shot,” says Boyle, wearing a bright blue Texas Rangers jersey, standing outside a residence hall. When he arrived, he didn’t know what to make of the college’s prominent solar-panel installations, composting efforts, and environmental vibe.

But for Boyle, a transformation happened — of the sort often romanticized about small colleges like these. He started engaging in discussions about energy, ecology, and climate change in his courses and with his friends at this campus of fewer than 600 students, a place where people frequently say it’s impossible not to form connections to peers and professors.

“I got in this community where people truly valued it,” says Boyle. Now a junior, he has decided to major in climate science. Northland’s community orientation and focus on ecology may not have been reasons he came here, he says, “but that’s definitely been a part of why I’ve chosen to stay.”

Just how long Boyle and other students at Northland would be able to stay became the key question of this spring semester. In March, the college issued an emergency call for donations totaling $12 million, but got only about $2 million — enough to remain open and form a plan to restructure. With a new curriculum, emphasizing Northland’s identity as an unusual, tiny, environmental institution, college leaders now say that they have the donations to operate next year and attempt to rebuild.

A niche in higher education is an important differentiator, but it won’t necessarily save an institution from the converging set of stressors now threatening to cull the most fragile. A number of the colleges that closed in recent years had no real niche to claim, other than offering local students a common set of liberal-arts or pre-professional programs from a church perspective — like Cardinal Stritch University and Holy Family College, two that closed in Wisconsin since 2020. Other institutions were distinctive, yet still succumbed to the pressure: Green Mountain College, for example, was consistently named the greenest college in the country by multiple media outlets, an institution that turned its athletic fields into a petroleum-free working farm, where students might raise and slaughter their own livestock — yet it still closed in 2019. Mills College, absorbed by Northeastern University in 2022, devoted itself to an unusual, lauded, and sometimes-controversial version of education for women and students who identify as women.

Or consider Goddard College — the alma mater of the actor William H. Macy, the writers David Mamet and Walter Mosley, key members of the band Phish, and many other notable people — founded in 1938 by Royce S. (Tim) Pitkin, an acolyte of John Dewey. The college allowed students to choose what they wanted to study and how they wanted to study it, in keeping with the learner-driven ethos of progressive education. And students could determine how to show what they had learned, an approach that now has echoes in competency-based education and the ungrading movement. In 1963, the college invented the low-residency model, which has been copied by dozens of institutions. But despite its innovative angle on education, Goddard was always tiny, fragile, and fraught with struggles, and announced its closure in April.

The environment and ecology form Northland’s particular angle, and it’s a useful metaphor for higher education’s current predicament: Colleges increasingly operate in an environment of scarcity, where the sector’s already-intense competition is forcing adaptation or extinction. For those who see the market in Darwinian or Schumpeterian terms, this period of evolution or creative destruction is a painful but necessary reality that will yield entities more fit for what students want or the workplace needs.

Or you could see higher education facing a loss of biodiversity — drifting toward a monoculture, as an ecologist might name it, where an environment is shaped to prefer only a handful of dominant, genetically similar organisms. That environment not only lacks the attractive variety of a healthy ecosystem, it is also deprived of the genetic diversity necessary to ward off pestilence and help the whole system evolve.

The question is, are critically endangered institutions like Northland (or extinct institutions like Pine Manor and Marlboro Colleges, or Holy Names University) just ill-evolved creatures whose loss may be sad but ultimately inconsequential? Or do they offer something to the whole of higher education — a different kind of place for students to land, an unusual pedagogy or distinctive mission, or a regional twist on the college experience?

Yes, some colleges have outlived their usefulness or their mission. But among the institutions closing or in trouble, a number were either founded on revolutionary ideas, or were offering something new to people who needed a different approach to be successful in college, says Kevin R. McClure, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. “It’s possible that we’re not just in a process of losing kind of extraneous stuff — we’re actually in a process of homogenizing,” he says. “In some regions, it is entirely plausible that the quality of thought, the creativity, innovation, and the possibility for all people to find a place to flourish goes down with that.”

This loss of biodiversity is especially acute in postindustrial and rural areas, where populations have hollowed out and institutions may struggle to draw students. McClure warns that allowing institutions to die in some of these regions might be shortsighted. “Populations can change again,” he says. In an era of climate change and economic upheaval, the deindustrialized and abandoned areas of the country could be places that people flock to in a decade or more. “We will have neglected and failed to invest in that place — there’s no postsecondary-education options or fewer postsecondary-education options, and we’re all the worse for it.”

Place plays a central role in Northland’s reinvention plan and its fate, as it often does for colleges. Northland’s home in Ashland, Wis., is quite remote, but also surrounded by stunning natural beauty. Ashland sits between the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest and a broad band of state wildlife areas and parks to the south, and just to the north, the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. The largest freshwater lake in the world is only a quarter mile from campus.

“This is an incredibly dynamic region from an environmental or biodiverse standpoint,” says Chadwick L. Dayton, who became president of the institution in 2023 after serving on the college’s Board of Trustees for several years. The college started focusing on the environment in the 1970s, around the time it needed a reinvention, and over the years this northern region of Wisconsin has become a site for real-world research in fisheries, forestry, or geology, as well as a lure for students who love the outdoors. During a campus tour in mid-May, an admissions guide told a group of high-school boys that one of the residence halls has a facility in the basement where students can clean fish or butcher deer.

“Certainly, our current student body, they don’t want to go anywhere else,” Dayton says. “Where there is truly a love of place, in the broadest possible term, that’s hard to replicate.”

The challenge is to find more of those kinds of students. Dayton, a member of Minnesota’s prominent Dayton family, was recruited to the college’s board in 2015; he worked for and served on the boards of various environmental organizations over the years, after starting a career teaching college English. Immediately upon arrival, he says, it was clear that Northland faced headwinds. Costs of operations had been growing, and enrollment had been in decline, despite the efforts of various deans of admissions. To survive, says Dayton, the institution started borrowing from its endowment — a source that is now tapped out. Its development operation had become overly reliant on a handful of generous donors.

Under the restructuring plan, the college cut its offerings from 40 majors and minors down to eight majors, all focused on environmental sciences — “a distillation of what we do and what we do best,” Dayton says.

“If we were just a traditional, general liberal-arts college, I’m not sure that we would have been able to last as long as we have — or have identified not only an operational path but secured the funding,” he says. “Part of my confidence in where Northland is headed stems from the fact that we’re not reinventing the wheel at all. We’ve taken this crisis and these challenges and decided that the best path is to really distill and lean into who we always have been.”

This clarity will allow the college to focus on that outdoorsy, environmentally committed student, with admissions counselors based in Chicago and the Twin Cities. The college’s centralized, more-scattershot enrollment strategies of the past to attract athletes or draw students on a less-defined liberal-arts curriculum negatively affected retention rates, Dayton says.

The college lost nine faculty members out of about 40 in the restructuring; among the other changes to operations, the college’s primary savings came from making its janitorial, campus-safety, and facilities-and-maintenance divisions part of its internal operations. The outsourcing model relies on economies of scale that didn’t work for tiny Northland, Dayton says.

The college set a goal to enroll fewer students — 385, down from 450 — in the fall of 2024, a number that is “clear-eyed,” Dayton says, given the publicity around the college’s struggles. In a sector where the pressures push institutions to scale, Northland’s goal is to grow conservatively, to about 550 students, to maintain the college’s “residential and relational” setting. At a time when many students need support for mental health, “there is a role for smaller, residential colleges,” says Dayton.

A strategy hinged on attraction to place, relationships, and institutional identity may seem sentimental, but colleges have built turnarounds on some version of that. More than a decade ago, G.T. (Buck) Smith leveraged the intimate environment at Davis & Elkins College, in West Virginia, to help that college stabilize. (That turnaround, like those at other small colleges, depended on a charismatic leader with a vision.)

In conversations across campus, students and faculty members consistently bring up the college’s intimate community as one of the reasons they sought out Northland or decided to stay once they had found it.

“If Northland College closes, I won’t go teach at another institution,” says Meghan Salmon-Tumas, an assistant professor of climate science, who says her specialty in using satellite data to measure large-scale changes in vegetation would allow her to easily transfer to corporate and research jobs. She says she wanted to teach only if she knew the students personally.

“That’s what makes teaching rewarding for me — I have no interest in going to teach at a school where I am lecturing to a class of 50 or more.” Many students at Northland are “highly functioning but have unique needs,” struggling with anxiety. She has been able to pick up on the students who started working nights, or got sick, or got dumped — and reach out to offer help.

“If they’re in an environment where they don’t have a way to catch up — to say, Oh, what did I miss? — then they just fall through the cracks,” Salmon-Tumas says.

Elaina Majetich, standing outside the library with her friend Elijah Winterbower, grew up in Ashland and started at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where she felt lonely and isolated before coming back home. “There were so many people all around, but it was a lot harder to connect,” Majetich says. Her aunt said Majetich was “a Northland kind of person” and encouraged her to check out the college.

“It really has changed my life,” Majetich says. “You actually get to develop friendships with your professor, and they understand how to work with you and your unique needs.”

Both Majetich and Winterbower are art students, a major that had been cut. They weren’t sure about their future with Northland, and said that the college’s emergency call for $12 million had spurred some gloomy and confused reactions among their peers, who wondered how the college would land the funds.

“Especially coming from a small town, I mean, $12 million, that’s a crazy amount of money to me,” says Majetich. “I can’t even conceive of that.”

“And then, after you get the $12 million,” adds Winterbower, “what happens when you run through that money?”

Innovative, unusual colleges are often very small — smallness is frequently baked into the model and helps to provide part of the educational identity, as it does at Northland. But it’s a difficult identity to maintain when all the pressures encourage institutions to grow and scale.

Larry Goldstein, who has had a long career in higher education as a chief finance officer and president of a management-consulting firm, says maintaining large numbers of students might be burdensome organizationally and financially, but a larger enrollment can provide insulation.

Small colleges — many of them founded in rural areas, now depopulated — have been particularly vulnerable to the recent declines in student numbers. A small college’s latest entering class could be only a few hundred students, numbers easily wiped out if a local regional public or aggressive private expands enrollment, looking to steal market share from neighbors. And with numbers so tiny, even small fluctuations in enrollment can cause havoc.

A small college has to support many of the functions that a larger college has to support, with a smaller tuition base to cover the costs. A big research university or elite college can create a position to solve a problem, Goldstein jokes, while financial pressures often require small colleges to give another duty to someone on campus.

With such constraints, small colleges also struggle to attract talent in key staff positions. “That’s what’s plaguing these smaller private institutions: They don’t have people who are well-suited to the job,” says Goldstein. Everyone focuses on leadership — and certainly the experience and foresight of the president or chief financial officer can steer a college out of trouble or into a ditch.

But for many small colleges, says Goldstein, the bulk of the money is coming from gifts and student enrollment, meaning that the chief advancement officer and the chief enrollment officer could be the decisive roles — and disastrous if the people in those roles are under par.

“And candidly,” says Goldstein, “they are at many of these institutions. They don’t know what they’re doing.” These small colleges also cannot afford many of the advisers and consultants who bring tools and data to navigate a much more complicated environment. And small private institutions tend to be far less prolific fund raisers than their larger counterparts. The median amount of private gifts raised by private colleges enrolling 1,000 or fewer students was about $875,000 in 2022, according to federal data. For private colleges enrolling between 1,000 to 5,000 students and those with 5,000 or more, the median was $6 million and $18 million, respectively.

“The advancement people at many of these institutions,” says Goldstein, “basically they’re alumni who love the place but don’t have a clue how to go about strategizing for fund raising.”

Enrollment operations are even more lost at many institutions, with the rise of enrollment-management companies, argues Mark Salisbury, founder and chief executive of TuitionFit and an expert on college enrollment. Many deans of admissions and vice presidents for enrollment got into the profession long after some of these influential enrollment firms had started with the institutions.

“Now the Borg runs the system,” Salisbury adds. “The people actually running it — wearing those name badges — they don’t know how to do it any other way.”

Salisbury believes that the patterns in enrollment reflect a broader sea change: the decades-long shift from higher education’s role as a public good to a private one. That shift has ramped up the competition among institutions, to play to features and qualities that help the college move up the rankings or get more applications. The competitive tactics commonly favor wealthy and well-known institutions, but colleges with less money or less sophistication in leadership imitated them. The clearest example, Salisbury says, has been the high-price, high-discount tuition model, which has only confused parents and students, who’ve come to believe that little-known private colleges are far more expensive than state institutions.

“That’s certainly killing them,” says Salisbury.

Campus leaders have contributed to these trends — as when a president arrives on a campus to put up some buildings (and accumulate debt) before heading off to another, more-prestigious institution within a few years. And students and parents have been caught up in the race between colleges, too, buying into some of the prestige signals and encouraging competitive behavior in the sector.

Small institutions can nimbly rejigger the curriculum or come up with a new business model, especially when survival is on the line. Take Goddard College as an example: Pitkin, the college’s founder, did not believe in building an endowment, on the notion that wealth would make the institution complacent and hamper innovation. In the 2000s, during yet another one of the college’s financial crises, Goddard turned the low-residency program it invented into a survival strategy: The institution closed its frail undergraduate program on campus, and instead brought in rotations of student cohorts in its various academic majors for a week at a time, growing enrollment and scaling the carrying capacity of the campus. The low-residency program not only allowed Goddard students to juggle school and work, it also helped those students apply their coursework to activities in the places where they lived. The reinvention plan worked for a while, until the college encountered more leadership troubles and enrollment dropped again.

“The cultural characteristic of these institutions is that they are so close to the edge that they don’t have any time to think about innovation,” says Goldstein. “They are literally just trying to ensure that they make payroll, or can afford to recruit a class to come in, or can fix the boiler that blew up.”

Innovation also takes investment, when money is in short supply at many of these institutions. Many are just seeking to maintain a long-held commitment to women’s education, or Catholic education, or some other mission. “It’s certainly a flawed business model, that everything’s predicated on the decision-making capability of 18-year-olds,” Julee Gard, vice president for administration and finance at the University of St. Francis, in Illinois, says wryly. She sees in her own college-aged children how online marketing and social media “completely change the rules of engagement.”

Gard says survival has to be about effectively communicating that mission, which may seem esoteric to an adolescent who is thinking more about friends or college brand. “I don’t think we have blinders on, but I do think it’s completely different than maybe a Southern New Hampshire University,” Gard says. “We’re hungry for the relational aspect of that undergraduate experience.”

And small colleges have to adopt stringent financial discipline. For her dissertation through the University of Pennsylvania’s higher-education program, Gard developed a financial-viability index that applies especially to small- to medium-sized private institutions. Gard’s method calculates three years of financial data from the Federal Audit Clearinghouse, and then color-codes the score from viable blue to green, yellow, orange, and troubling red. Gard designed the index to give college leaders a sense of the trend lines of their own institutions, not to predict closures. But when she tested the formula on private colleges that had closed since 2016, 95 percent were in the bottom two viability brackets, with three-quarters in the red zone.

When she ran Northland’s numbers, the college landed in the bottom tiers over the past five years, with the lowest numbers in the 2023 fiscal year. Northland has reported growing debt, from a line of credit, in the past two years, and the college’s net assets have gone from $58.5 million in 2015 to $35.1 million in 2023. The college’s measure of earnings before interest, depreciation, and amortization — or EBIDA, essentially the college’s cash earnings — took a hard downward turn in the past two years, with a deficit of $2.6 million in 2022 and $5 million in 2023.

In a footnote of the 2023 report, Northland clarified the value of the endowment, with all but $4 million of the $33 million locked up in “underwater investments” and “borrowings used to repay debt and fund operations.”

“That, as you well know, is taking a cash advance on your Visa to pay off your American Express card — doesn’t work,” Gard says. “So that, to me, is horrific.”

Gard may not be in the business of predictions, but “seeing they were red the last two years and then seeing this, they’re beyond on borrowed time.”

Those who predicted a die-off among colleges in the past decade are now on social media proclaiming their prescience. (Rarely mentioned are the impacts of the pandemic and a historic federal financial-aid flub.) Others project a gloomy sense of inevitability about the impending demise of many locally important colleges — even saying colleges should just throw in the towel to avoid the chaotic college closure like Mount Ida or University of the Arts. Robert Kelchen, in a recent Chronicle article about small colleges’ prospects for survival, notes Northland’s recent struggles and dings the administration for “kicking the can down the road.”

Kelchen, a professor and head of the department of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, points out that mergers might be able to preserve some colleges — that is, if the merger doesn’t wipe out the character and mission of the smaller institution. For example, during a visit to Mills College last spring, administrators walked around campus, pointing to the various campus projects and mothballed buildings that were being revived, the legacy of Mills preserved. But in conversations in the dining hall, the new students at “Mills College at Northeastern University” took a markedly different perspective from the legacy Mills students, still hanging around, finishing out their degrees: The new Northeastern students made no mention of women’s education, or gender issues, or social justice in Oakland; instead, most said they were happy to get into a top-choice university like Northeastern, although they didn’t like the food and hoped they would eventually get transferred to the “real” campus in Boston.

Mergers, like Northland’s reinvention strategy, are highly dependent on place. A struggling college’s campus, its main asset, is “often of limited value to others,” Kelchen writes. “This is a particular issue for rural colleges in areas with declining populations, as there is little interest in trying to start a new endeavor in areas already facing demographic challenges.” Places like Ashland, Wis.

One could argue that these small, stressed colleges are destined to die in the first place, that they have outlived some usefulness. McClure, the professor from UNC-Wilmington, points out that American higher-education institutions have a long history of operating near the edge. Those still around either got lucky or got something right. “Some of the places that we look to now as these kind of paragons of stability were themselves often on the brink.”

But Salisbury, who lives in the Quad Cities of Iowa and Illinois, believes that if there is any reason to save a small college, location might be it, for the role that colleges play in the redistribution of wealth, youth, and ideas. In small towns in Iowa, a college is often one of the biggest and better-paying employers, with a range of positive cultural impacts.

“That’s the only reason a gay couple can walk down the street holding hands,” says Salisbury. “And the reason why any sort of entrepreneurship grows or emerges in that small town is at least indirectly attributable to that college.”

Take that college away, and “you basically throw kerosene on the tribalism fire,” he says. Without the moderating effects of the college, that vacuum could be filled with attitudes that are more anti-intellectual, homogenous, and authoritarian — “all the stuff that is an anathema to democracy.”

Managers and owners of businesses on Main Street in Ashland all spoke to the importance of students as customers and a source of employees. But many also talked about the cultural impact. Steve Vavrus, who went to Northland briefly in the 1980s and works at the Chequamegon Food Co-Op, listed the various ways: The co-op itself, the local farmer’s market, the coffee shop, the bike shop, the local craft brewery, boutiques, pop-up restaurants and food trucks, the murals on downtown buildings, the glass mosaics on the light poles and garbage cans, and the painted park benches enlivening downtown — all involved Northland students as founders or drivers.

“This keeps our community from becoming really stagnant,” Vavrus says. “Some rural communities tend to get a little lopsided in the culture because they don’t get new blood — literally.” Even though Vavrus never graduated, he knows many people who did and then stuck around, with that college education bringing more cultural depth to the everyday interactions in town. “To some, it’s an investment in your intellect. I’m not just a farmer; I’m not just a cook. I have a degree and know about things, too.”

Small communities, with fewer people and more needs, can also offer opportunities to students who have more competition in bigger cities with larger institutions.

Izzy Peters, from Idaho, and Grace Smathers, from Colorado, both came to Northland because of the small campus, the interdisciplinary curriculum, and the college’s connections to Ashland. Peters came to Northland to play softball and graduated this spring with a degree in natural resources. She first planned to work for the National Park Service, but now has decided to stay in Ashland and work in community outreach and development for a mainstream business.

“It was just the most beautiful place I’d seen,” Peters says. “I don’t have any family here, but I just love Ashland, how small it is and the community that I’ve kind of been able to embed myself in.”

Smathers sought out Northland’s program in sustainable community development because she knew she could get research and hands-on experience in town. “Just seeing how faculty and staff talked about the Ashland area — and how coming to Northland wasn’t just coming to this campus but coming to the community as a whole — was something that was really important to me,” she says.

Smathers now may have to transfer to finish her minor in geographic information systems and graduate. Seeing Northland stumble has been difficult but also inspiring. When the crisis and cuts were announced, many people on campus questioned how the institution wound up in this spot, but the college community didn’t turn on itself, she says.

“If those faculty hadn’t come together and put together a plan, and if alumni and students hadn’t fought for Northland, it wouldn’t be here,” she says. “It was really cool to have taken classes about community organizing, leadership, and power, and to actually see that come into play on campus. It’s kind of a case study for community building.”

Brian O’Leary contributed data analysis.