Updated at 6:30 p.m. March 11 with more information from Fontbonne University and additional reaction from students
Citing dwindling enrollment numbers and a shrinking endowment, officials of Clayton-based Fontbonne University announced Monday that the Catholic institution will close in 2025.
The board of trustees voted Sunday to shut down the century-old college, said Nancy Blattner, the school’s president. The private school will not welcome another freshman class but will continue classes to graduate as many of its current students as possible, she said.
The school will provide students with assistance and information about completing their degrees elsewhere if they can’t or don’t want to finish at Fontbonne, Blattner said.
“Many who are hearing this message will experience shock, hurt and anger,” Blattner said in a video message on the school’s website. “Please know that members of the university community and the leadership team have worked tirelessly through the past few years to forge a viable path forward.”
At an afternoon press conference, Blattner said that in the past 15 years, the university has seen a more than 70% drop in enrollment. She said there just weren’t enough students paying tuition to keep the school open.
The university also has not been able to bounce back from budget problems, she said.
Smaller private schools are having a hard time staying above water, Blattner said. There aren’t as many college-age people as there were 20 years ago.
“I think there's definitely a demographic cliff, and the Midwest and the Northeast are hitting that sooner than other parts of the country,” she said. “I think that for the first time in my life, people are questioning the value of higher education, which I never, ever anticipated.”
Families and students are also less willing than in the past to take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to go to university, Blattner said.
The campus is old and needed work, but the school didn’t want to raise tuition much, she said. Tuition for a Fontbonne student without financial aid costs around $28,000.
“Our revenue really only comes from student tuition, or from the endowment,” Blattner said. “I think that sometimes you just can't continue to increase tuition for students that are financially strapped, it's not ethically right to do that.”
In 2022, there were fewer than 700 undergraduate students enrolled at Fontbonne, according to the university’s website. The overall enrollment was approximately 944.
Fontbonne canceled many classes on Monday and asked students to come to an 11:30 a.m. meeting in the school’s gymnasium.
“It was very sad; a lot of people were crying,” said Ogechi Okpara of St. Louis, who graduated in December with a degree in elementary education. “I feel really bad. I’m obviously happy I got a chance to graduate before it closed.
"But the freshmen and everyone that has all these friends and people that they met — they were basically advised not to stay here because you can’t graduate here," she said. "It will be gone before they have a chance to graduate.”
What comes next?
Blattner told students the school will provide assistance and information about completing their degrees at other schools if they can’t or don’t want to finish at Fontbonne.
The school will use its remaining $9 million endowment to allow undergraduates to take an expanded summer schedule for free and help some finish their degrees. Graduate students will be able to take summer classes at a discounted rate.
“What I tried to say to them was: This may be that your dream of graduating from Fontbonne can't be realized,” she said. “But your dream of getting a college education, a college degree, can.”
Fontbonne also is working to complete negotiations with other schools that could take students who could not finish their degrees before the end of summer 2025.
Such agreements allow students to be automatically accepted into another program. They also would allow students’ credits to be transferred and would keep costs similar to what they would have paid at the closed university.
Of the approximately 600 students who will be left after this spring’s graduation, Blattner estimates that half likely will be able to finish their degrees at Fontbonne before the school closes.
Washington University, which abuts the northern end of the smaller Fontbonne campus, has agreed to purchase the land, Wash U officials confirmed Monday. The larger university will lease the 16 acres back to Fontbonne as the school winds down operations.
Wash U does not have further plans for the property, school officials said.
“We are saddened that Fontbonne University’s Board has made the difficult decision to cease operations," Washington University officials said in a statement. “Our institutions have enjoyed a long history of mutual support and friendship as neighbors and community partners."
Suspicions confirmed
Dylan Scruggs, a sophomore nursing major from St. Louis, said the school’s announcement confirmed what many students had suspected was coming.
“This campus has been here for one hundred years,” he said. “That legacy — and that’s really what it is — just done.”
Scruggs said he plans to continue studying nursing but is heartbroken that he won’t be able to finish his studies at Fontbonne.
“This school has given me so much and given me the opportunity to do what I wanted to do for a while,” he said. “So it’s really sad to see it all coming down to an end.”
Morgan Laughlin, a graduate student in the fine arts department, said she knew the school was in peril when officials announced cuts to the department last year.
“We always kind of were holding out hope and really advocating for ourselves as much as we could,” she said. “It is just disappointing to see five months of work that is working hard to stay part of a university that's now not going to be around.”
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated when Fontbonne University's board voted to shut down the college. The vote occurred Sunday.
