Glass doors lead into the light-filled lobby of a red brick and limestone chapel at one end of a grassy quad, where lectures and receptions were held and students testified about their faith.
Original artwork hangs on the walls on the way to the chaplain’s office and recital hall, along with brass “leaves” listing the names of past financial boosters formed into the shape of a tree.
This visit to Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights isn’t real. It’s virtual.
It was captured just before the college closed in May. Now, students and alumni can remember the campus, which is being sold to repay more than $26 million of debt and other liabilities.
“Instead of being wiped off the map, this is a way to honor the legacy,” said Shalom Nwaokolo, who with his wife Ashley is creating the permanent digital preservation of it.
The Trinity memorial is among the more sentimental responses to the accelerating pace at which colleges are closing and being projected to close. Elsewhere, steps are being taken to address the intensifying threat of plummeting enrollments, rising debt and other problems.
Some states are ramping up protections for consumers when campuses close, and there is a proposal to do the same thing at the federal level. The federal government is promising to streamline the process through which struggling colleges are taken over by healthier competitors.
Twenty-two states, including Illinois, now make private higher education institutions pay into “tuition recovery” funds, which typically require that a percentage of tuition collected be put aside in state accounts from which students could be compensated if their colleges end up closing. Many of these funds were started to protect students at for-profit schools, but nearly half of them have been extended to not-for-profit, degree-granting colleges.
In Illinois, colleges have to post surety bonds big enough to fully repay their students if they close.
The U.S. Department of Education has pledged to speed the process that can lead to mergers of healthier institutions with those that are financially troubled, which officials say takes so long that one or the other party often gives up.
Meanwhile, lawsuits have been filed on behalf of students, faculty and other staff members of some colleges that have closed, generally accusing them of fraud and breach of contract. Three federal lawsuits have been filed against just one of the schools, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, which abruptly closed in 2024.
More than 440 of the nation’s 1,700 private, not-for-profit, four-year colleges and universities — about a quarter of the total — are at risk of closing or needing to merge in the next 10 years, according to an estimate by the Huron Consulting Group. More than 120 of them were deemed to be at the highest risk, based on enrollment, assets, debt, cash on hand and other characteristics.
So much attention has begun to be focused on college closings that the Department of Education has produced instructions for students about what to do if it happens to them. “Try not to panic,” the federal advice suggests.
That might be hard, considering that fewer than half of students at colleges that close continue their education, according to a study by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Many of those who do continue end up losing credits they’d earned and paid for. And fewer than half ultimately earn degrees. The 442 colleges that Huron projects to be endangered have a collective enrollment of 670,000 students.
Students whose colleges close can apply to get their federal loans forgiven through the Borrower Defense to Repayment and the Closed School Discharge programs. But that loan forgiveness shifts the debt onto taxpayers, who have had to cover billions of dollars in loans that will never be repaid.
There have been calls for institutions to set aside money for these costs.
“We do need to think about how students are protected, so, when they have invested time and money in their degrees, they can get refunds and discharges of their college loans, and so those costs can be paid for by colleges rather than taxpayers,” Cooper said.
In his proposed federal version of state tuition recovery funds, schools’ contributions would be based on how much federal student loan money they get. Institutions at higher risk would pay a larger fee. Cooper calculates that this would raise $9.5 billion over 12 years to cover the cost of loans that might be forgiven if the colleges close. Critics counter that such a fee would further squeeze cash-strapped colleges.
Despite pressure to prepare for the worst, many vulnerable colleges have been slow to act, said Brian Weinblatt, founder and principal of Higher Ed Consolidation Solutions, one of a growing number of firms that help imperiled schools fix their financial problems, merge or close.
“Almost every institution waits until it’s too late to engage in this process,” according to Weinblatt, who said working with colleges that have decided to shut down is the fastest-growing part of his business.
The federal Department of Education is working to fix that, Nicholas Kent, the undersecretary for higher education, told a conference at George Mason University.
“Depending on how you count them, we have 6,000 institutions of higher education in this country, and not all of them are going to make it out of the next decade,” Kent said. “And, quite honestly, not all of them need to make it out of the next decade or should. And the ones that do are going to be the ones that adapt in a variety of ways.”
Some are taking steps, at least small ones, to balance the books, finding new sources of needed revenue.
In June, Agnes Scott College in Georgia started renting out three historic homes it owns. Sweet Briar College in Virginia sells hydroponic lettuce grown in its greenhouses. The University of California, Davis, has launched a line of products from the olives it cultivates for research. The University of Alaska sells permits to harvest firewood from forests it owns. New Mexico State University has licensed its brand for coffee, whiskey and tequila; Mississippi State University has done the same for cigars; and the University of Nevada, Reno, for beef jerky.
The Nwaokolos, who are producing the virtual reality tours of Trinity Christian, see potential for a business doing that more widely as colleges continue to close.
They’ve built a platform for it they call Perduras — Spanish for “you endure.”
“There’s so much life that happens at college,” Ashley Nwaokolo said. “It’s a crossroads of maturity. You have a community around you going through similar experiences. That creates, most of the time, good memories and attachments to that college.”
With digital re-creations, Ashley Nwaokolo said, “People can have some history to go back to.”
After all, she said, “What do you do for a homecoming when there’s no place to come home to?”
The Hechinger Report is a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.