What Small College Closures Can Teach Independent Schools

A quieter stretch of the calendar gave me a chance to work through my "Read Later" folder, which, if you're anything like me, is a graveyard of good intentions.

One article had a star next to it: Robert Kelchen's piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Can Small, Struggling Colleges Survive? There are paths forward, but they all require acting early. It's a thoughtful, data-informed look at the financial pressures facing small private colleges, and it deserved more than a quick skim.

I spent some time with it, processed it, and started thinking about what independent school leaders can actually take from it.

What's Happening in Higher Ed

The picture Kelchen paints is sobering. Small private colleges are facing a compounding set of pressures: declining enrollment, tuition-dependent revenue models, and a financial aid environment that got significantly more complicated after the FAFSA problems of recent years. Institutions like Wells College, Fontbonne University, and Birmingham-Southern College have found themselves on the edge of closure, and they're not isolated cases.

The responses have been varied. Some schools are exploring mergers and acquisitions, though these are complex and require assets, real estate value, or state support that many institutions simply don't have. Others are adding programs in STEM, health, and business to attract new student populations, with the understanding that program expansion is expensive and carries real financial risk if enrollment projections don't materialize. A number of schools have also expanded athletic programs as an enrollment driver, which again requires substantial investment in facilities and staffing before it generates any return.

None of these are easy answers. And the article's central argument, captured right in the title, is that all viable paths forward require acting early.

The Independent School Parallel

As I read through the piece, I kept finding echoes of conversations I've had with heads of school over the past few years.

The structural similarities are real. Many independent schools, like small private colleges, run tuition-dependent revenue models with limited financial reserves. Enrollment is the engine. When enrollment softens, the pressure compounds quickly. Strategic decisions that could have been made from a position of strength get pushed back until they have to be made from a position of urgency, which is always a harder place to operate from.

The specific pressures are different. Independent schools don't deal with FAFSA the way colleges do, and the closure dynamics aren't identical. But the underlying lesson is the same: the schools that will navigate the coming decade well are the ones doing the hard work on their business models now, not the ones waiting until the pressure forces the conversation.

Three Places to Start

I'm not inclined to read a situation like this and stop at identifying the problem. Here are three areas worth examining proactively.

Start with a Hard Look at Your Business Model

Before any strategic initiative can be evaluated honestly, you need a clear picture of where your school actually stands. That means understanding your enrollment trends, net tuition revenue, cost structure, and competitive positioning without flinching at what the data shows.

The Business Model Retreat is designed specifically for this. In a single, focused day, your leadership team and board gain a clear picture of where your business model is strong, where pressure is building, and which opportunities are worth pursuing. From there, you can build strong business cases to validate the initiatives that deserve investment.

The worst time to examine your business model is when you're already in crisis. The article makes this explicit for colleges. The same principle applies here.

Explore Strategic Partnerships Before You Need Them

The merger and acquisition conversations happening in higher ed are more reactive than proactive. Schools facing closure are exploring these options because they've run out of better ones.

Independent schools don't have to wait for that. Some have already demonstrated what proactive strategic partnerships can accomplish. The Village School of Naples acquired a college-planning program that contributed to a 54% increase in enrollment. Providence Country Day School acquired a lower school as part of a strategy that helped the school nearly double enrollment over four years. These weren't desperation moves. They were deliberate strategic choices made with intention.

The question worth asking now is whether there are partnerships, collaborations, or adjacencies your school hasn't fully explored.

Expand Programs Thoughtfully, Not Reactively

The college playbook of adding high-demand programs to attract new students carries real risk when it's done reactively or without financial discipline. The same is true in independent schools.

Program expansion can be a genuine breakthrough revenue strategy when it's done well. Breakwater School's approach to auxiliary program expansion is a good example of what careful, mission-aligned program development can do for a school's financial position. The keyword is careful. Adding programs that don't align with the school's mission or that outpace the school's operational capacity creates new problems rather than solving existing ones.

The Strategy + School Operating System is built around exactly this kind of disciplined thinking, helping leadership teams distinguish between opportunities worth pursuing and initiatives that sound compelling but carry more risk than reward.

The Broader Point

Higher education gets covered extensively, and its challenges tend to generate a lot of commentary. It's easy for independent school leaders to read about college closures and feel some distance from the situation.

I'd encourage resisting that instinct. The pressures aren't identical, but the patterns are instructive. Schools that are examining their business models, building strategic optionality, and making deliberate choices about where to invest and where to hold back are in a meaningfully different position than schools that are deferring those conversations.

Acting early is the advantage. The article's title says it plainly, and I think it applies across both sectors.

If you want to start with a baseline read on where you stand across the competencies that support this kind of strategic thinking, the Business Competency Self-Assessment is a practical ten-minute starting point.

As always, I'd welcome your thoughts on this. What parallels are you seeing? What's your school doing to stay ahead of the pressure?