I Watched an Evangelical College Die From the Inside

The autopsies blame leadership. The autopsies are wrong and conducting more of them won't save the next one.

I Watched It Happen

I have watched an evangelical college close up close. Not from a distance, not through press releases, but from inside the institution. I have seen the faculty meetings where optimism slowly curdled into anxiety. I have seen the administrators who genuinely loved their students continue planning programs for a future that had already expired. I have seen the students who had no idea they were studying on borrowed time.

When The King’s College in Manhattan shut its doors in 2023, the explanations came quickly: compromised leadership, financial mismanagement, and poor decisions. These explanations were not entirely wrong. But they were convenient, because they located the problem in people rather than in the system. They allowed everyone else to feel safe. If this just was a leadership failure alone, then competent leadership could prevent it from happening again.

Here’s the hard truth folks: it can’t. And until the evangelical world is willing to say that plainly, people will be blind to what is happening nationally.

The Thesis Most Leaders Are Not Ready to Hear

Here it is plainly: the evangelical college system that emerged after World War II is structurally finished. Not declining. Not under pressure. It’s a wrap y’all and we’re going to see many Christian colleges close over the next few years. What we are watching across the country is systemic unraveling. The conditions that made these institutions possible have changed, and most of them are not coming back.

This is a structural argument, more so than an anecdotal one. Every declining system produces visible outliers. Late-stage contraction often concentrates enrollment in a shrinking number of institutions as weaker ones disappear. The presence of thriving schools does not refute this analysis some would argue that actually confirms it. Growth inside a collapsing pipeline is not evidence of health. It is evidence of consolidation, mergers, and shifts in brands.

The question before Christian higher education is not how to reverse something that cannot be reversed. The question is what faithfulness to God and neighbor requires inside a reality we did not choose.

The Demographic Cliff

Begin with the numbers, because they are unambiguous. As Nadya Williams documented in Christianity Today, U.S. birthrates collapsed during the Great Recession and never recovered. This means that every entering freshman class nationwide will be smaller than the one before it, not for a season, but for the foreseeable future. America’s fertility rate is currently 1.6 births per woman. We have a college education environment built on a prior 2.3 birth rate.

This is not merely a marketing problem. You cannot recruit your way out of a demographic decline. Institutions that have been built on the assumption of a steady pipeline of eighteen-year-olds are now facing a structural ceiling. It’s the demographic cliff. It’s a huge cliff. The pipeline is narrowing, and no amount of enrollment strategy changes that fact. Consultants are making a ton of money telling schools nothing that’s actually going to work.

Trust me, I’ve heard it all.

What makes this more acute for Christian colleges is that they are not competing against each other in isolation. They are competing against public universities, online alternatives, trade programs, and a growing cultural skepticism about whether a four-year degree is worth its cost at all. The question is whether institutions will face it honestly or keep pretending that better tactics will produce different results.

The Demand Problem Nobody Wants to Name

Demographics alone do not explain the crisis. The deeper problem is that the demand for what Christian colleges have historically offered is vanishing. Seth Odell, writing in The Christian College Crisis, argues that these schools are being hit from multiple directions simultaneously: declining demand, rising price pressure, and a cultural shift away from liberal arts toward programs with clearer economic returns.

It’s really, really hard to sell a Christian liberal arts education these days. Parents just aren’t having it. They want to know, “Will this major lead to a concrete (guaranteed) job?”

Students are making rational decisions. They, and their parents, are looking at the cost of tuition, the realistic earning potential of available programs, and the experience they will actually have on campus, and they are making decisions accordingly. They are debt conscious. When Christian colleges charge significant tuition but offer an experience that’s not currently trending (“Christian formation”) and cheaper secular alternatives are giving families want they want, it creates a sobering reality. However, as John Stonestreet put it at BreakPoint, if a school offers nothing uniquely Christian, there is no compelling reason for it to exist.

Mission Drift Is A Just A Theological Problem and A Strategic Failure

There is a particular kind of self-deception that afflicts institutions in decline. They tell themselves that broadening their appeal will arrest the slide. They believe that need to offer more amenities and “experiences” (like sports). In practice, however, that pursuit can accelerate decline. When Christian colleges soften their theological commitments, reduce their chapel requirements, or evacuate their curricula of serious biblical content, they become less attractive and distinct.

Hannah Hutchins, writing in Minding the Campus, compared schools with robust chapel attendance requirements and substantive Bible coursework against those with only nominal religious identity. Her conclusion was clear: schools that maintained genuine Christian distinctiveness were better positioned for survival than those that diluted it.

James Samels, in Christian Scholar’s Review, interviewed 150 leaders from tuition-driven institutions and found that market competition had fundamentally distorted the values of mission-driven schools. The tension between money and mission, when consistently resolved in favor of money, produces institutions that no longer know what they are for.

Kimberly Thornbury, reviewing David McKenna’s work in Christian Scholar’s Review, put the challenge precisely: Christian higher education still faces “issues of religious liberty, which can threaten accreditation and access to federal dollars,” while most schools remain “enrollment-driven, tuition-supported, and aid dependent.” That is real volitility. Institutions dependent on government funding while holding convictions the government may eventually penalize are not building on solid ground. Yikes!

The Financial Model That Is Eating These Institutions Alive

The standard response to enrollment decline has been tuition discounting. It’s a discounting arms race at the moment. This may well be one of the best financial aid eras for families in recent decades. Schools offer larger and larger aid packages to attract students, which produces the appearance of enrollment stability while systematically destroying the financial foundation beneath it. Elizabeth Black, writing in WORLD Magazine, found that many schools delay the hard decisions by expanding discounts rather than cutting costs. This allows them to avoid immediate pain while compounding long-term risk.

Here’s the problem: they need to cut costs!

The math is not complicated, but institutions keep refusing to do it honestly. Declining net revenue, increasing aid obligations, massive debts, and deferred maintenance do not produce a turnaround. They produce a crisis, usually arriving faster than anyone in the building expected. And when it comes, it’s like a tidal wave.

The more sustainable path, as Great Lakes Christian College argued in Christian Standard, is building endowments that support genuine scholarships rather than discounting tuition to create the illusion of affordability. Their institution grew enrollment by 44 percent over three years, not by lowering standards, but by building clarity about their mission and communicating that value honestly.

Honestly, in my view, if Christian colleges were not endowment-averse set in the 1950s, many of them would be in much better shape. Many conservatives fear endowments because, in the past, Christian colleges with massive endowments tend drift toward nominalism and/or liberalism. In theory, it was a reasonable caution but it wasn’t prepared for the demographic cliff.

The Broken Pipeline Nobody Is Talking About: Non-Denoms

Evangelical colleges were never designed to operate as standalone businesses. They were embedded in a dense ecosystem of denominations, local churches, and families that functioned as a coordinated pipeline. Parents sent their children to these schools because the church had shaped them to value this kind of education. Pastors recommended these institutions because they saw them as extensions of the broader Christian formation project.

That ecosystem has evaporated. Non-denominational churches, now the dominant expression of American Protestantism, are locally oriented and institutionally unconnected. They do not have the structural investment in higher education that denominational systems once maintained. Add to this the decline of students wanting to be pastors, the collapse of ministry as a culturally honored career path, and the reality that pastoral compensation has not kept pace with the cost of an advanced degree, and you have a broken pipeline at every stage.

John Stonestreet and Timothy Padgett observed at the Colson Center that this crisis is also an opportunity for the Church to reclaim its historic role as an educational force. But that requires honest acknowledgment that the church-college relationship that once existed cleanly is not the same as was 20-plus years ago and it cannot be revived without intentional, costly effort from both sides.

The Governance Failure That Keeps Making Things Worse

There is a another pattern in Christian college closures that deserves direct naming. Institutions that are struggling typically have boards that do not understand how severely the institution is struggling. Boards are often protected from on-campus reality. Folks, this is really, really bad. David Hoag, president of the CCCU, described the problem in CCCU Advance this way: in conversations with boards across dozens of campuses, he found that they often did not have an accurate picture of their own institutional health. The CCCU developed a “Sustainability Index'“ precisely because boards need honest data, not reassuring reports from administrators who are also managing down fear.

Nadya Williams documented what this looks like when it finally breaks. When Eastern Nazarene College announced its closure in June 2024, the announcement came after faculty had already begun planning their fall syllabi. Six months’ notice in an academic calendar is not a plan. It is a failure of governance, and it treated faculty and students as afterthoughts rather than as people whose flourishing the institution was supposed to serve.

Wheaton College offered a different model. When it needed to reduce faculty, it gave affected staff a year and a half of notice. That is what it looks like to lead an institution with theological integrity even in difficulty and shows real care for people that will be impacted by any restructuring.

At King’s we were given just a few months notice near the end of the second semester, which is months after the job cycle for next academic year concluded. I was extremely close to working at Walmart (I’m not kidding).

What Faithfulness Requires Now

Christian higher education was never supposed to be sustained by memories of the good-ol’ days. It exists to form human beings who can live truthfully and faithfully in God’s world as image-bearers called to love their neighbors. They exist to form the Christian mind. That mission does not disappear because the financial model is broken. But it does require institutions to act with the kind of clarity and courage that sentimentality makes impossible.

The institutions that survive will be the ones that face their actual situation honestly, make decisions that correspond to reality, and remain genuinely committed to the theological mission that is the only real reason for their existence.

What Christian Colleges Must Do: Ten Recommendations

1. Recommit to genuine theological distinctiveness. Resist mission drift. Maintain robust chapel requirements, serious Bible coursework, and curricula genuinely shaped by Christian conviction. Schools with nominal religious identity are not offering parents and students a reason to choose them. The mushy middle will close!

2. Stop discounting tuition as a survival strategy. Tuition discounting creates the appearance of enrollment stability while eroding long-term financial health. Schools must align costs with actual revenue rather than purchasing enrollment they cannot afford. You simply can’t discount your way into sustainability.

3. Build endowments, not discount rates. The long-term solution is generating genuine scholarship funding through endowment growth, not reducing sticker prices and calling it generosity. Schools are going to have to get over the anti-endowment history and, instead, figure out a way to do endowments better so that they don’t subsidize mission-drift but protects the mission.

4. Cut underperforming programs before a crisis forces it. Institutions that make difficult decisions early, with transparency and adequate notice, preserve their integrity. Institutions that delay until the last moment damage their faculty, students, and Christian witness. This is tough folks because cutting programs means also cutting faculty.

5. Give boards honest data. The CCCU’s Sustainability Index exists for a reason. Boards need accurate information about institutional health, not optimistic narratives from administrators managing their anxiety. Tell the board truth: the good, the bad, and ugly (especially the ugly).

6. Treat faculty and students as people, not liabilities. When difficult decisions must be made, they must be made with adequate notice and genuine care. Wheaton’s model of giving faculty eighteen months’ notice is what institutional integrity looks like under pressure. At King’s we were given just a few months notice at the end of the second semester, which is months after the job cycle for next academic year concluded.

7. Rebuild relationships with local churches and denominations. These institutions cannot survive as standalone businesses. They must reconnect with the ecclesial ecosystems that once sustained them, and that requires costly, intentional effort on both sides. Christian college need to persuade non-denom audiences about the value of Christian higher education.

8. Clarify the value proposition and communicate it precisely. Families are making rational and financial decisions. Institutions must be able to explain, concretely, what a student will receive that they cannot receive elsewhere, and why that is worth the cost.

9. Pursue collaboration, shared services, and mergers rather than isolated survival. As the CCCU has argued, survival of the fittest is not a strategy that serves the common good of Christian higher education. Christian institutions must work together.

10. Protect religious liberty proactively. As Kimberly Thornbury noted, threats to accreditation and federal funding are real institutional risks. Schools must build relationships with legal partners and plan for a regulatory environment that may become more hostile. That is, they should expect hostility or prepare financially to withdraw from federal financial aid.

This Is A Total Restructuring

Again, before anyone reaches for the obvious reply, it is worth stating plainly: pointing to a single growing institution is not a rebuttal. It is a misunderstanding of the trends and shifts in American Christian culture in general.

This analysis is about systems. Systems decline even as individual actors within them appear to succeed. In fact, late-stage decline typically concentrates growth in a smaller number of institutions as weaker ones disappear.

That is exactly what we are seeing. Some schools are growing but others are dying.

So if your instinct is to name a school that is currently thriving, you are simply identifying an exception to the pattern.