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Perhaps no single city has seen a greater proportion of its colleges struggle financially than Portland, Ore. Marylhurst University shut its doors in 2018, followed by Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2019 and Concordia University in 2020. Another of Portland’s independent colleges—Multnomah University—will live on, but not as an independent institution. The private Christian institution announced Tuesday that it will become a satellite campus of Jessup University, a Christian institution located 600 miles away in Rocklin, Calif.

About an hour into the call with her college’s bondholders, the president tried one last plea. Jennifer N. Schuller and several of the college’s trustees had been trying to explain all that they were doing to keep Lake Erie College open in hopes their creditors would cut them a break on payments. Still, a representative from the holder of its major debt kept pushing back. Forget the coming years, would the college even remain viable in the coming weeks?

The president of Linfield University (OR), Miles Davis, is resigning, citing family health concerns. Davis notified the university’s board of trustees of his decision in a special afternoon meeting Thursday. Davis is not leaving immediately, but said he plans to remain as Linfield’s leader until early 2024, after a transition period for an interim president has been completed. Davis had been serving as the 20th president of Linfield University since 2018. He was the school’s first Black president.

The U.S. Department of Education put colleges on notice Tuesday that their obligations to investigate sexual-harassment complaints don’t end when the accused professor resigns or moves on to another institution.
That warning came in the form of an agreement between the department’s Office for Civil Rights and Arcadia University, in Glenside, Pa. The office found that the private institution had violated the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX when it failed to investigate years of complaints from students and the faculty that a professor, who isn’t named in the document, had been sexually harassing female students.
 

But numbers are not wholly incidental at Concordia or at the other small private colleges in Michigan facing declining enrollment and a shrinking pool of potential students. Like Concordia, many have responded by focusing on a value proposition beyond small class sizes and professors who know your name: sports, the chance for high school players to compete for a few more years or for weekend athletes to play sports they couldn’t play in high school. Colleges have added football and basketball, bass fishing and lacrosse, hockey and cornhole, figure skating and ultimate Frisbee. And many students and their families have shown themselves willing to pay thousands of extra dollars a year to attend a private college if it means four more years of competition.