According to a report on trends in higher education, since the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdowns colleges across the country have closed their doors, including 18 Christian colleges that either shut down completely or merged with another school to stay open.
The attendance trend for Christian colleges began to decline in 2016 but, like many other declining industries, the Covid response ended up being a MAJOR unforeseen acceleration force.
According to the story from The Christian Post, the decline among religious universities is just about on par with secular universities which began seeing a decline about 6 years earlier than Christian schools.
Amanda Staggenborg, chief communications officer at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, a Christian higher education advocacy association with more than 185 member institutions, has noticed that the trend is impacting colleges across the board.
Staggenborg told The Christian Post that both secular and religious institutions have experienced an enrollment decline. She cited multiple reasons for the decline, including a drop in birth rates leading to a decreasing number of students graduating high school and fewer high school graduates seeking higher education.
If you're in the business of higher education, that last line has to frighten you.
Not only are there fewer potential students than in recent decades, but fewer and fewer are seeing any need to attend a college at all.
And who can blame them? If you want to work you can make $15-30/hour at Wendy's, why would you want to get a bachelor's degree and make little more than that sitting behind a desk?
The story goes on to talk about how Christian colleges need to extoll their benefits over secular institutions, but I'm honestly not sure how many Christian Universities there are that actually follow Christian teaching anymore.
"There is no better time to communicate the value of Christian higher education," Staggenborg said. "Faith is rooted in Christian higher education, where a student is called to use God-given talents and gifts combined with the learned skills in that university setting to live out that calling or that vocation."
If your school can boast that, great. But many can't appeal to their faith as a selling point.
Why go to a "Christian" school if you're going to learn the same woke crud as a secular school?
Hopefully, this will give faithful Christian schools an opportunity to fill in the gaps left by the dwindling university system.
