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St. John’s University in New York is the third largest Catholic university in the United States. Its current enrollment is just under 20,000 students.
I started college at St. John’s in 1985. In the 1980s, St. John’s was probably the largest Catholic university in the United States.
The main operation of the university was in Queens, but I worked on the Staten Island campus. The Staten Island campus had been taken over by St. John’s from Notre Dame College in 1971. Notre Dame was a small Catholic women’s college that by the early 1970s was suffering from a significant drop in enrollment. Cardinal Terence Cooke didn’t want to lose another Catholic institution in the Archdiocese of New York, so he worked with the Vincentians of St. John’s, turning Notre Dame College into the campus of Staten Island University.
Fast forward to fall 2023. St. John’s University webpage features its convocation of freshmen. But this note quietly the fact that St. John’s University in Staten Island has just started its final academic year. When the spring semester ends next May, so does school.
Cardinal Cooke bought a 53-year life lease on what was once Notre Dame College, but the university announced a year ago that it would cease operations on Staten Island. It decided to remain open these two years to allow students from upper classes, presumably already enrolled in their specializations, to complete their programs.
Why is he dying? Numbers.
When I was at St. John’s Staten Island, the institution typically had over 2,000 students on campus. Staten Island has a considerable Catholic population (approximately 33% of the borough is of Italian origin). Tuition fees were generally affordable for working-class students because expenses were low. The school was entirely for commuters, so the largest “amenity” on campus was a lunch cafeteria. Classes took place from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. (14 hours per day). Teacher salaries were low. I started life as an assistant, teaching 150 students for $11,000 a year. A year later, when they made me a “full-time” faculty member, I had 202 students starting at $19,000 a year…At New York.
The decision to close St. John’s was made because enrollment has now fallen to approximately 800+ students. This is partly due to declining enrollment that never recovered post-COVID. This is partly due to the decline of Staten Island’s Catholic high schools, which traditionally feed into St. John’s. But the most important factor is what is known as the “enrollment cliff” or “demographic gap.” And it’s something we don’t talk about enough, because I predict its impact on what’s left of “Catholic higher education” will be devastating.
Simply put: university enrollment will explode from 2025.
The most immediate cause was the great birth shortage of 2007-2008. The children who should have been born in those years would now be high school students, accompanying their parents through anxiety and excitement. to choose a college.
Except these children aren’t there.
The 2007-2009 recession prevented people from getting married and, if they did, from having children. This demographic crisis did not worsen when the economic situation improved. It has remained below average: the American fertility rate is now below replacement level and would be even worse than it is without fertility and the increase in immigrants.
So if you’re a university administrator, you have years of desks in front of you with no one to sit behind.
This is the “proximate cause”. There are, of course, deeper causes.
One of the reasons I was initially drawn to St. John’s was that, at least at the time, the institution consciously strove to be an orthodox Catholic institution. I remember my interview with the dean of the Vincentian college. He asked me, “How would you explain Human life to an undergraduate student? I was ready. I had just written a thesis defending the pre-papal sexual ethics of Karol Wojtyła, so I presented my version of Lublin Thomism. He looked at me over his bifocals, convinced that I was not a dissident theologian, but added, “I see you’re getting into this new thing from John Paul.” Afterwards, no one ever called John Paul and I a “new genre.”
But while St. John’s at least tried to adhere to Catholic teaching on sexual ethics, other “Catholic” universities did not. Catholic sexual ethics as taught in most theology or religious studies departments of “Catholic” colleges is rarely supportive or even particularly sympathetic. If you want a Catholic sexual ethic, you’ll probably have to go to a seminary — and even that might be risky. (The bifurcation between “university” and “seminary” theology is the subject of another essay).
Thus, “Catholic” schools which, in the name of their “academic freedom” and their “institutional autonomy” have defended contraception since 1968, can now wonder how they intend to keep the lights on. Because these renewed octogenarian nuns in pantsuits are not a large and promising demographic.
“But, you say, the greatest Catholic schools at the moment are those which have “progressive” theological orientations! Georgetown is number 1, DePaul number 2, Fordham 5, Boston 7, Notre Dame 8!
Well, let’s look at the writing – or at least the numbers – on the wall.
Georgetown enrolls just under 21,000 students. In contrast, two years ago (the latest numbers I have for this cohort), Texas A&M had nearly 73,000 students. Rutgers has just under 69,000 students. My son graduated from George Mason University last May. The total number of GMU graduates in May – a Virginia record – was 11,000.
In other words, GMUs graduates represented a little more than 50% of the total enrollment of the largest Catholic university.
Let’s take another metric. West Virginia University enrolls just under 25,000 students, or about 17% more students than Georgetown. This figure is significant, but not surprising. And remember, we’re comparing apples and oranges. Georgetown is a private institution, West Virginia a public school. When WVU can’t pay its bills, it has the option of running for what’s called the West Virginia Legislature (even if it doesn’t receive a handout). This is not the case with Georgetown.
This was very evident when I was associate dean at Seton Hall. I used to attend the weekly deans meeting with the provost. The provost was not concerned about my problems at the seminary. The lion’s share of every meeting, especially from recruiting in September to college decisions in May, was devoted to undergraduate enrollment numbers. At a tuition-driven Catholic university, those numbers meant the difference between paying or not paying your bills.
I mention WVU because, having not been reined in by the state legislature, its board of trustees is making significant program cuts, cuts that fall heavily on the liberal arts side, which is generally the sole aspect of higher education Catholic. If a public school makes these kinds of budget cuts before enrollment drops, what should that mean for smaller Catholic schools whose financial resources are often more precarious?
I was an undergraduate from 1977 to 1981. In my time, the Grim Reaper was already coming for smaller Catholic colleges. Places that literally enrolled a handful of students — places like Albertus Magnus in Connecticut, Don Bosco in New Jersey, Duns Scotus in Michigan — are gone. My son’s promotion was 11,000; mine was 22 years old. Needless to say, St. Mary’s College in Orchard Lake, Michigan is now also extinct.
But even then, I learned that Michigan’s private sector was a shadow of its public counterparts: Even the largest school, the Jesuit-run University of Detroit, was only ‘a pale reflection of the size of the University of Michigan or Michigan State. I emphasize this because the private Catholic sector in higher education has always been fragile vis-à-vis the public.
I also predict another wave of Catholic university closures.
When I was in college, a Catholic university with even 800 students would have felt good about itself. The fact that St. John’s has “only” 800 students says a lot about the overall macroeconomics of higher education. My quickest survey of current college statistics suggests anecdotally that 2,000 to 2,200 is about the highest number. minimum the “floor” of full-time equivalent student enrollment that a school currently needs to remain viable.
However, children have always been “precious”. But, in this extremely competitive academic environment, they are even more valuable…especially to admissions directors, budget directors, and college presidents. But even if we started talking seriously about the virtues of fertility and multiplication, it wouldn’t solve the problem of college until the class of 2044 at the earliest.
And Catholic colleges simply don’t have the money – tuition, reserves, endowments – to continue paying expensive professors and even more expensive administrators for the next 21 years of starvation.
We can talk about all kinds of strategies, including “lifelong learning”, “distance learning”, government subsidies, career guidance, etc. But, in a certain sense, they are all palliatives, a bandage on a hemorrhage, because they do not replace the lack of people.
An academic analyst warns: “By 2030, our country will have far fewer universities than today, and many private establishments – and perhaps some public ones – will disappear after decades, even centuries of existence. » Catholics in the United States can be proud of having built a strong network of Church-affiliated higher education, even despite its flaws, that, at least numerically, is unmatched in any other country. Just like our parish network, the next decade could see serious contractions among these.
The challenge is: How can we make it labor pains, and not a fatal cardiac arrhythmia? This is why we need a discussion now.
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