Trinity Christian College, located in Palos Heights, Illinois, announced that it will close after the 2025–2026 academic year. It has existed for more than 65 years.
Campus Reform reports that
The college plans to continue normal academic and residential operations through spring 2026 before ceasing all academic activity.
The Board of Trustees said the decision was made after an extended financial review, with acting president Jeanine Mozie revealing in a video message that college leaders found that “there is no sustainable path forward.”
Persistent operating deficits, declining student enrollment, and reduced donor giving have left the institution unable to sustain its mission or meet long-term financial obligations.
Trinity says its challenges mirror those of small private colleges across the country that have struggled with the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, rising operational costs, and increased competition for a shrinking pool of students.
After exploring a variety of options, including restructuring programs, forming strategic partnerships, and implementing cost-cutting measures, the college determined that closure was the only feasible outcome.
Trinity has begun coordinating with “teach-out” partner institutions to ensure that students who have not completed their degrees can transfer their credits and finish their programs at comparable costs.
About 150 colleges have closed or merged since 2016. The University of Saint Katherine near San Diego closed last year, citing “financial pressure due to unprecedented inflation and rising state-mandated labor costs.” Other California colleges have complained about high state minimum wages that have to be paid to even unskilled staff, and California wage-and-hour laws that require overtime pay even when employees don’t work more than 40 hours per week, if they have to work more than 8 hours on even one day.
Other colleges that closed last year include the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York. Its communications director, Denise Dagnino, lamented that a “demographic cliff” is shrinking enrollments. “There are fewer traditional-age, college-bound students in the U.S., so the existing pool of new students has diminished overall,” Dagnino said. The pool of college-age students has fallen further due to rising skepticism about the value of a college degree, she notes. The COVID pandemic also contributed to the closure of many colleges in the northeast, she says. Saint Rose closed last June, as did Cabrini University in Radnor, Pennsylvania.
In surveys, small businesses say they find many college graduates useless.
Yet, for years, the federal government has effectively encouraged people with few academic skills to go to college, rather than working in manufacturing or skilled trades, by heavily subsidizing college, rather than training for blue-collar jobs. The result is that there is a surplus of people who go to college despite not being college material, and then study useless, easy majors in college, and then never pay off their student loans.
Meanwhile, there is a big shortage of skilled manufacturing workers. And application rates to technical jobs that require vocational training dropped by 49% in 2022 compared to 2020, according to data from Handshake obtained by NPR. The US Chamber of Commerce in their 2023 economic projections predicts a “massive shortage of skilled workers.”
The Biden administration’s financial aid policies subsidized useless majors through income-based repayment plans, which write off a person’s student loans after 10 or 20 years of payments based on a percentage of income, no matter how low that income is. Its “Pay as You Earn” program allowed eligible student-loan borrowers to cap monthly payments at 5 percent of their income over $33,000 a year), and have their remaining federal student loans forgiven after 20 years — or just 10 years, if they go to work for the government. So the less a student earns (because their major was in a useless subject), the less they pay on their student loans before the loans are forgiven.
The government has encouraged people who once would have become skilled and valuable factory workers to instead go to college and work in white-collar jobs, contributing to a severe shortage of the skilled workers needed by manufacturers. The Washington Post reported in 2012 on this problem:
the country … needs more manufacturing work. But … many manufacturers say that, in fact, the jobs are already here. What’s missing are the skilled workers needed to fill them. A metal-parts factory here has been searching since the fall for a machinist, an assembly team leader and a die-setter. Another plant is offering referral bonuses for a welder. And a company that makes molds for automakers has been trying for seven months to fill four spots on the second shift. “Our guys have been working 60 to 70 hours a week, and they’re dead. They’re gone,” said Corey Carolla, vice president of operations at Mach Mold, a 40-man shop in Benton Harbor, Mich. “We need more people. The trouble is finding them.”
In recent years, government officials have depicted white-collar jobs for college graduates as the way to go. President Obama advocated sending every high-school graduate to college or some form of higher education, while denigrating training for blue-collar industrial jobs. He has sought to increase spending on colleges, while slashing spending on more useful vocational education that could lead to work in manufacturing. As The Washington Post notes, as senior skilled factory workers are retiring, no one took their place, since “many of the younger workers who might have taken their place have avoided the manufacturing sector because of the . . . stigma of factory work.” .
Meanwhile, college students learn less and less with each passing year. 15 years ago, “thirty-six percent” of college students learned little during their four years of college, and students spent “50% less time studying compared with students a few decades” earlier. Today, students study even less than they did 15 years ago, at places like Harvard, where the vast majority of students receive A’s even when they do fairly little work.
