School's Out Forever

From time to time, far too often really, you'll hear about a school that closes down due to lack of funds. The students are dispersed to other nearby schools, jobs are lost, the building is repurposed or torn down. But the thing about these closings is that they are usually K-12 schools. Colleges are never thought to be at any particular risk of closure; in fact, with spiraling tuition fees and crippling pressure on high school graduates to both go to and graduate from college, one might think your average college as quite profitable.

So what happens when that isn't the case? What happens when a college closes down? The Chronicle of Higher Education has endeavored to find out, as they happen to have a shuttering college to profile, or at least, one that's desperately fighting to avoid it. That college, which began as an elementary school in 1888, is Saint Paul's College in Lawrenceville, Virginia, which in what makes a depressing kind of sense happens to be a historically black college.