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Virginia Intermont College in Bristol had one of the best sports nicknames in the state, or maybe anywhere: the Cobras.
If you look online, you can still find multiple sites that sell Cobras gear — shirts, hats, hoodies. If you really look, you’ll notice the fine print on one of them: “Prep Sportswear is not affiliated with the Virginia Intermont College Bookstore or the VI Bookstore.”
There’s a good reason for that, of course.
Virginia Intermont College closed in 2014.
A Chinese company bought the property and vowed to reopen it as a college but never did. Two weeks ago, a fire of undetermined origin gutted four of the oldest buildings on the property.
The story of Virginia Intermont College offers a cautionary tale that extends far beyond Bristol and far beyond Virginia, for that matter.
The school was founded as a women’s college in 1884 in Glade Spring and grew so fast that within 10 years it needed larger quarters, which turned out to be in Bristol. For most of its history, Virginia Intermont was a two-year school, but a quite popular one. Enrollment grew so much during the 1960s that five new buildings were added; in the early 1970s it expanded to a four-year institution and began admitting men. As recently as 2004, the school had a peak enrollment of 1,123, according to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. Nine years later, it had shrunk to 378. Ten years later, it was no more.
When enrollment plummeted, it plummeted fast.
At its height, Virginia Intermont was about as big as Hollins University and Virginia Military Institute and bigger than 11 other four-year schools in the state: Bluefield University, Bridgewater College, Christendom College, Eastern Mennonite University, Emory & Henry College, Ferrum College, Hampden-Sydney College, Randolph College, Randolph-Macon College, Southern Virginia University and Sweet Briar College.
Now it’s a smoldering ruin. (Firefighters were still putting out hot spots earlier this week.)
Virginia Intermont is not alone. Over the past decade, more than 500 nonprofit private colleges across the country have shut down, according to The Wall Street Journal. That’s triple what it was in the decade prior. Those numbers are increasing. At least 20 colleges have closed in 2024, with nine more announcing they will this year, according to Implan, an economic analysis company. A December report by the Federal Reserve of Philadelphia warns that as many as 99 more could close.
The schools that closed this year probably aren’t ones you’ve heard of, which is a nice way of saying their sports teams weren’t playing in bowl games. But many of them had a long history: Goddard College in Vermont dated back to 1863. Pierce College in Philadelphia was founded in 1865. Each of these schools had its own origin story, but they all ultimately shared the same story about their demise: declining enrollment.
And, lately, that traces back to the same source: demographics. More specifically, the intersection of birth rates and immigration.
Demographics boosted Virginia Intermont: It was founded at a time when the nation’s population had grown 30% in the previous decade, the population of surrounding Washington County had grown at a staggering 49.9% rate — and the idea of educating young women beyond household duties was slowly catching on. Virginia Intermont grew again in the 1960s when the children of the post-war baby boom were entering their college years. Now those boomers are retiring, or dying, and the nation’s population growth in the past decade was in single digits — even with rising levels of immigration.
Demographers and universities alike have been warning for some time about “the enrollment cliff.” That enrollment cliff is here, a direct consequence of declining birth rates that have reduced the traditional college-age population.
Three years ago, Vox reported:
“In four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, due to a rolling demographic aftershock of the Great Recession. Traumatized by uncertainty and unemployment, people decided to stop having kids during that period. But even as we climbed out of the recession, the birth rate kept dropping, and we are now starting to see the consequences on campuses everywhere. Classes will shrink, year after year, for most of the next two decades.”
Whether that decline really will be “sudden and precipitous” depends on how you define “sudden and precipitous,” but, mathematically speaking, the number of births in the U.S. peaked at a record high of 4,316,233 in 2007 and hit a low of 3,605,201 in the pandemic year of 2020. They’ve come up since then, to 3,667,758 in 2022, but fell again in 2023 to 3,591,328.
Those 2007 babies will turn 18 this year and will constitute a big graduating class — which then will grow smaller and smaller for at least 16 years. And longer, unless there’s some sudden change in birth rates.
Demography is destiny, as the saying goes, and these numbers will play out in lots of ways. For our purposes here today, it’s universities counting potential students — and seeing that pool shrink. For businesses looking further out, these numbers mean a smaller labor pool. For those doing the math on Social Security and other government programs, these numbers mean fewer people paying into those — which starts to raise very uncomfortable questions about how we’re going to pay for them. This is why, mathematically speaking, we need more immigration, not less — unless we’re OK with a future where retirees don’t get all the benefits they thought they had been promised. All that’s for another day, though.
Today, the matter at hand is how in 2041 there will be 724,905 fewer potential college students (unless immigration makes up some or all of that difference).
Colleges face other pressures, too. Not only is the number of 18-year-olds set to decline, the percentage of high school graduates choosing to attend college is also declining — from 70% to 62% over the past decade, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. There are multiple reasons for this — the rising cost of college is one, the growing recognition that there’s good money to be made in the trades is another.
All this adds up several ways.
1. More colleges will close.
There will be more Virginia Intermonts; we just don’t know which ones or whether any will be in Virginia. Colleges are not necessarily permanent. If you look across Virginia, you’ll see other former colleges. Saint Paul’s College, a historically Black college in Lawrenceville, closed in 2013. Sullins College, a two-year college for women in Bristol, shut its doors in 1976. Frederick College, a short-lived four-year college in Portsmouth, shuttered in 1968. Marion College, another two-year college for women in Smyth County, went out of business in 1967. I could go on. The older ones may be more historical curiosities, but Saint Paul’s and Virginia Intermont are close enough to us in time to be more relevant. Sweet Briar College almost joined them in 2015 and was saved only by a determined band of alumnae — and the fact that the school had been founded through a will, which created a legal foundation upon which Amherst County could challenge the board’s attempt to close the school.
In the fall, the General Assembly’s watchdog arm — the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission — issued a report in which it identified seven state-supported schools that it said should be monitored more closely because of enrollment declines, with three of them deemed having “some viability risk.” None were rated in danger of closing, but this was still an unusual warning.
The seven: Christopher Newport University, Longwood University, Norfolk State University, Radford University, the University of Mary Washington, the University of Virginia’s College at Wise and Virginia State University.
The three of those singled out most: Radford, Mary Washington and Virginia State.
As for private schools, who knows? Those are outside JLARC’s purview.
2. Colleges will do more things to attract students.
Roanoke College has brought back football. Randolph College has added other sports. Ferrum College is moving up a division in sports. These moves really don’t have much to do with athletics and everything to do with admissions. More teams mean more students. This is all about these schools positioning themselves to keep, and boost, enrollment.
3. The community college is revamping itself to serve “adult learners.”
The community college system has always served multiple constituencies — traditional college-age students as well as adult students coming back to school. Every time I’ve heard the chancellor of Virginia’s community college system talk, David Doré has emphasized the importance of reaching out to those adult students, partly for the demographic reasons laid out above.
4. Colleges will seek out more international students, although Trump’s immigration policies could complicate things.
The number of international students at American colleges hit an all-time high of 1.1 million for the 2023-2024 school year, according to a report published by the State Department and the Institute of International Education. Schools like foreign students because they pay “full freight” — no in-state discounts there. If the number of American students is going to decline, an increase in international students can help make up the difference.
That may be complicated by the immigration policies of the incoming Trump administration. International enrollment started to decline under Trump’s first term, before the pandemic cut overseas enrollment further. Wary of travel restrictions or outright bans on visitors from certain countries, some colleges have advised their international students to be back before Trump is sworn in. “It’s a scary time for international students,” one recent graduate from India told CNN.
On the other hand, Trump has also said he would “automatically” give green cards to international students who graduate from U.S. colleges, which would encourage more foreign students.
Here’s why some schools are worried:
Some schools are a lot more dependent on international students. At New York University, 26% of the student body is international, according to U.S. News & World-Report. At Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Rochester, 23% are. The Virginia school with the highest percentage of international students is Marymount University in Arlington — 12%, which puts it in line with Princeton and Stanford. The University of Lynchburg is in second place among Virginia schools, at 7%, according to the U.S. News database, with George Mason University and the University of Virginia tied for third at 5%.
All these trends and fears existed before the buildings at Virginia Intermont went up in flames, but that fire does call new attention to the former school — and the situation of lots of other schools would like to avoid the adjective “former” being affixed to their names.
At least nine women from Southwest and Southside served in historic Army battalion featured in Netflix movie
One of the hottest movies on Netflix right now is “The Six Triple Eight,” a Tyler Perry-produced film based on the true story of the 6888th, a nearly all-Black women’s battalion during World War II that was put in charge of dealing with a backlog of undelivered mail to and from soldiers in Europe. In this week’s West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter, I have a list of the members who were from Southwest and Southside, and ask readers help in finding their descendents.
Also in West of the Capital this week:
- Old Dominion University report has a cautionary warning for state legislators.
- Rep. Ben Cline, R-Botetourt County, takes on a new role in Congress.
- What we’ve learned from our Voter Guide for the Jan. 7 special elections.
- More!
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