Editor’s Note: Today’s piece is by Michael Rodriguez. Michael serves as Senior Strategist for Content and Scholarly Communication Initiatives at Lyrasis, where he advances consortial licensing and open access programs at a national scale.

In the first half of 2024, institutions of higher education in the United States closed permanently at the rate of one per week, according to one estimate, with little sign of slowing down. Where the author lives in Pennsylvania, eight colleges have closed, consolidated, or announced plans to do so since January 2024 alone. These closures directly impact small private colleges and the communities built around them, but closures also ripple throughout the academy, disbanding libraries and archives and endangering access to and preservation of the scholarly record.

Overview of College Closures

In August 2024, the U.S. Department of Education reported that the total number of U.S. higher education institutions had decreased by 2 percent since the previous academic year. According to The Wall Street Journal, more than 500 private, nonprofit colleges have closed in the last ten years, “three times what it was in the decade prior.” Higher Ed Dive lists scores of these colleges that have closed or merged since 2016. Many of these institutions have been concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest, where student enrollment is declining because of population shifts and lower birth rates. However, colleges are shuttering as far apart as Florida and California, in regions that have witnessed sustained population growth in recent decades. Institutions that survived the COVID-19 pandemic have been hit hard by the end of federal relief money. Public confidence in higher education has waned. Institutions have struggled with rising operating costs, overbuilt campuses, and costly deferred maintenance. The federal government has been cracking down on deceptive for-profit colleges, putting many of them out of business.

Private nonprofit institutions at greatest risk of closure tend to fit a profile: small, dependent on tuition revenue, high applicant acceptance rates, already low and declining student enrollment, deeply in debt, located in a region of demographic decline, and often religiously affiliated. Loss of accreditation is of course the death knell for such institutions, but colleges usually risk losing accreditation only when they are already in deep financial trouble or when their leadership is malfeasant. State schools close too, but often in uniquely disastrous circumstances, and they are more likely to shutter campuses or merge into a system than to shut down altogether. (Of course, survival can still mean decline when it comes to college budgets and workforces.)

Impacts of College Closures

When a college closes, the ripple effects are significant. Faculty and staff lose their jobs. Only 17% of students displaced by a college closure go on to earn their degree. As a result, most will earn less money over their lifetimes. Students who transfer to other schools often lose credits, forcing them to invest more time and money to complete their education. Some students have transferred from closing schools only for their new schools to close too. When a college closes, the community simultaneously loses a major employer,  a major property owner, a major source of residents and taxes, and a major source of cultural and economic uplift. Campuses may sit empty and decaying for years while owners struggle to sell or repurpose land and buildings. Closures can disrupt the arts and culture of whole cities or leave entire city blocks vacant.

When colleges close, libraries close. Faculty, staff, and students are no longer able to access the library’s resources and expert staff, cutting off a key avenue not only for academic research and education but also for lifelong learning and entrepreneurship in the community. Closures also impact neighboring institutions, whose faculty and students can no longer borrow the library’s materials via interlibrary loan. Community members can no longer benefit from arrangements in which libraries provide onsite-only guest access to paywalled electronic resources.

Implications for Archives and Special Collections

College closures endanger archives and special collections, which contain college records as well as unique materials that document local communities, literary traditions, historical events, and influential people. Intellectual outputs such as some theses and dissertations may be lost to posterity. Both print and digital materials are endangered, as colleges generally pay to maintain repositories that host digital materials, and colleges that close may stop paying those invoices.

Many special collections hold materials of national or international importance. When Finlandia University in Michigan closed in 2023, fear spread that vital sources of Finnish American history and culture would vanish forever into private collections. Fortunately, a Finnish nonprofit raised $3 million to acquire and maintain the collections in a public venue. Unique materials risk being lost to the scholarly record, whether pulped, left to deteriorate in empty buildings, or swept up by private collectors. Institutions might not want their neighbors’ archives, which might be out of scope for their collections or challenging to process and make accessible. Sometimes colleges close too abruptly to make an orderly wind-down possible, especially as libraries and archives are low priorities for administrators or consultants tasked with winding down operations. When the University of the Arts announced its closure with only a week’s notice, staff scrambled to rescue a typewriter exhibit and give away the library collection to other Philadelphia-area libraries. “Otherwise, it will probably be sold off as poundage,” curator Sid Sachs noted.

Implications for Print and Circulating Collections

Libraries’ circulating collections face particularly uncertain futures amid closures. Most libraries hold little in the way of truly unique and/or valuable books or other materials. This is especially true of libraries at small and non-research-intensive institutions, which face the most precarity. Few buyers are interested in print journals, theses, DVDs, or obsolescent formats like microfilm. Print books are likelier to sell, but usually only in bulk and for a pittance. It can be easier just to wait for receivers to dispose of the collection, often by discarding or recycling everything. A few institutions have embraced more innovative solutions. In 2020, leaders at Marygrove College in Detroit donated more than 70,000 books and journals to the Internet Archive, which preserved and digitized the entire collection. Such large donations are uncommon, and colleges that enter receivership may be legally required to keep their assets to pay off their debts — even though Marygrove’s best-case fallback scenario was to sell 32,000 books at the rate of $1 per book. As a preservation strategy, precarious institutions’ library leaders may wish to consider strategic asset dispersals prior to their institutions’ announcing closure or entering bankruptcy.

Loss of circulating collections jeopardizes the purpose of shared print programs. While the types of colleges most liable to close typically do not have large and robust print collections, some are members of shared print programs. The Shared Print Partnership documents Best Practices for Exiting a Shared Print Program, recommending, among other steps, the transfer of ownership of physical materials to other shared print program member libraries, but little concrete guidance or published precedents exist for navigating this process of physically transferring thousands of books and associated metadata. When Holy Names University in Oakland, California, shut down in 2022–23, it had 6,860 shared print retention commitments as part of the SCELC Shared Print Program, 1,791 of which were unique titles held by no other SCELC participating library. Only 94 of these titles ended up at other libraries; the rest went to the Internet Archive. “Nobody was prepared to deal with such a situation,” SCELC Shared Print Committee chair Leanna Goodwater told me. No other shared print program had a system in place to deal with a member’s closure.

Implications for Licensed Resources, Library Consortia, and Vendors

Libraries cancel the last of their licensed electronic resources when their parent institutions close. Thus, closures mean the loss of some subscription dollars for publishers and vendors, but these losses are unlikely to thrust publishers into financial precarity. Closures mostly happen at struggling small schools that have already slashed their libraries’ collection budgets, spreading out the blow to vendors’ bottom lines. Closures may most directly impact revenue at database vendors such as Gale, ProQuest, and EBSCO, as database subscriptions may be among the last resources left standing when small institutions gut their libraries’ collection budgets. (Journal packages and specialized or advanced research resources are often the first to be canceled.)

Digital repository vendors may be left with what are essentially orphaned collections after the holding institutions have closed. Vendors have little contractual duty to preserve content when customers are not paying for this service and when no successors are available to receive the customers’ assets. In general, however, vendors are not contractually obligated to take down or delete content after holding institutions close, unless the rightsholders ask the vendor to do so.

Closures also endanger perpetual access rights to electronic resources. Libraries pay large sums of money to acquire perpetual rights to access and use ebooks, ejournals, and primary source collections. Those rights generally cease when the purchasing college ceases operations. This is because most e-resources are licensed and not owned, so the first-sale doctrine — the copyright law that undergirds physical library lending — does not apply. Most licenses bar institutions from reselling, donating, or otherwise transferring their rights to another institution. Publishers can typically agree to a transfer, but they can charge whatever fees they deem appropriate for their consent. In cases when the rights are transferred to a larger institution with more students, the fees can be equivalent to purchasing the rights a second time, which makes the transfer moot.

Both libraries and publishers are working out how to handle these situations, as the pace and scale of college closures is new to everyone. It behooves libraries to negotiate flexible transfer language in license agreements when acquiring electronic resources in perpetuity. For example, a license agreement recently negotiated by Lyrasis and a publisher affirms, “Rights to Perpetual Access Licensed Works purchased by the Institution undergoing merger or acquisition shall be assigned to the Institution conducting the merger or acquisition. Licensor reserves the right to charge a reasonable one-time fee for expanded access if the merger or acquisition results in a significantly larger number of Authorized Users permitted to access the Perpetual Access Licensed Works than had been previously contemplated under this Agreement.” While it may not satisfy everyone, this clause facilitates reassignment of rights on a basis sustainable for all.

Finally, library consortia are weakened when their members close. The impact goes beyond the loss of membership dues or committee volunteers, which can be significant. Consortia rely on economies of scale to bring value to their members through activities such as resource sharing, shared infrastructure, group licensing, and more. If members close, or if they diminish so much that they can no longer participate in the consortium, the consortial value proposition softens. The New York-based WALDO consortium, which started winding down operations in 2023, had lost three of its thirteen charter members to closure, with a fourth charter member announcing its merger in May 2024. Other consortia, while suffering little direct financial impact, are facing a rash of closures. At the CARLI consortium in Illinois, eight members have closed or merged and two drastically restructured since 2017. At Lyrasis, whose members are across the United States, over 20 members have announced closures (or mergers in lieu of closure) since 2022. This is a small proportion of more than 1,100 Lyrasis members and 120 CARLI members, but the trend is stark. Two-thirds of U.S. consortium directors who answered a 2023 survey conducted by SCELC acknowledged that at least one of their members is likely to close in the next decade.

Closures create additional risks for consortia that make financial or contractual commitments on behalf of their members. If a consortium member agrees to a vendor product renewal but then suddenly goes out of business, the consortium may be obligated to pay the vendor regardless, depending on the terms of the contract. Long before such a scenario takes place, consortia and vendors should work together to make clear who is responsible for payment and (if applicable) debt collection from any institutions that have ceased operations or stopped returning calls.

Conclusion

College closures are increasing in rate and scale across the U.S. higher education sector, and the impacts of closures on libraries and archives, publishers and vendors, and library consortia are intensifying. Libraries, vendors, and the organizations that support them must urgently develop contingency plans, best practices, and technical infrastructure for dealing with a wide range of closure scenarios, lest college closures inflict irreparable harm to the scholarly record.