Editor’s observe: The School Closure Recordsdata is an occasional column chronicling why establishments shuttered and what classes increased training leaders can glean from these shutdowns.
Limestone College graduated its remaining class this previous spring after a last-ditch effort to boost sufficient cash to remain open fell brief. Based within the mid-Nineteenth century, the South Carolina establishment skilled monetary tumult a number of instances all through its life, together with when it closed briefly through the Civil Conflict-era.
Right here’s a take a look at Limestone’s historical past and what went fallacious ultimately.
The early years
Limestone started its life as a Southern girls’s faculty. Actually, it was possible South Carolina’s oldest girls’s faculty and one of many oldest within the South.
Established by Baptist clergy on property as soon as house to a resort on the bucolic Limestone Springs, the establishment provided each spiritual and liberal arts instruction.
Over the second half of the Nineteenth century, the school briefly closed and the property modified arms.
Limestone College at a look:
Based: 1845
Closed: 2025
Location: Gaffney, South Carolina
Establishment kind: 4-year personal nonprofit
Scholar physique: 1,782 (fall 2023)
Mission assertion: “Limestone College is dedicated to the liberal arts and sciences and to educating the people who will turn out to be tomorrow’s leaders, who will render significant service, and who will get pleasure from skilled success as lifelong learners.”
It fell on troubled monetary instances through the Civil Conflict because the establishment’s chief on the time, William Curtis — son of Limestone’s co-founder — lent cash to the Accomplice authorities, in line with an official faculty historical past. Curtis had no hope of being repaid after the South was defeated. In the meantime, the rich planters who despatched their daughters to the school additionally got here into onerous instances following the struggle.
Earlier, when Limestone was shuttered for an prolonged interval within the early 1860s, “splendid laboratory gear” was carried off and destroyed whereas the property was unoccupied, although particulars of what precisely occurred didn’t make it into the information, in line with a historical past of the school revealed in 1937.
“You could say that Limestone is immortal. If something may kill it, it might have been lifeless way back.”
Harrison Patillo Griffith
Submit-Civil Conflict period chief of Limestone
Curtis was deeply in debt within the early 1870s — after his personal loans to the Accomplice authorities went unpaid — and offered the property. The new homeowners, Thomas Bomar and Charles Petty, reopened Limestone.
Within the early Eighties, the establishment was renamed the Cooper-Limestone Institute. By then, it was instructing programs in zoology, astronomy, political economics and lots of different areas. Collegiate tuition price $25 per time period in these days, lower than what college students on the time would possibly pay for his or her artwork provides and music lessons. Board was one other $62.50.
Limestone rose out of debt below new management in that interval, and the establishment attracted sufficient college students to turn out to be self-sustaining.
“You could say that Limestone is immortal,” a university chief of the period mentioned, a remark possible knowledgeable by the establishment’s turbulent monetary historical past as much as then. “If something may kill it, it might have been lifeless way back.”
By the tip of the century, the establishment was renamed Limestone School. As its increased training ambitions grew, it leaned into its Southern identification. It constructed an architecturally bold historical past heart named after Winnie Davis, a daughter of the Confederacy’s president and a logo of “Misplaced Trigger” historic narratives that mythologize the Confederacy and downplay slavery’s function in Southern secession and the Civil Conflict.
Limestone’s Winnie Davis Corridor was named after the daughter of the Confederacy’s chief and have become a middle for Southern historic research with a “Misplaced Trigger” bent.
The establishment, in a course catalog from the early twentieth century, referred to as the historic heart “a fantastic division of a fantastic faculty donated to the training of Southern Girls.”
In 1930, the school started admitting males as commuter college students. By the late Sixties, the establishment was absolutely coed, with dormitories for males in addition to girls.
The faculty barred Black college students from attending till the desegregation period. M.L. Annette Reynolds turned Limestone’s first Black pupil and, in 1970, its first Black graduate. Half a century later, Limestone awarded Reynolds an honorary doctorate and named an endowment fund after her.
Later within the century, Limestone turned a pioneer in serving nontraditional college students and dealing adults.
Within the Nineteen Seventies, it created a program that allowed college students to finish bachelor’s levels fully by way of night lessons. Twenty years later, it created a “Digital Campus” for instruction. In 2005, the school mixed the Digital Campus with its night program as the premise of an internet program.
“Offering increased training entry to these needing it probably the most has been a proud theme all through the historical past of Limestone,” the establishment says on its web site.
Over the twentieth and twenty first centuries, Limestone skilled alternating durations of relative stability in management and funds blended with instances of turbulence.
The establishment had three presidents over the primary roughly 65 years of the twentieth century, after which eight presidents within the subsequent 26 years — three of them on an interim foundation. When Walt Griffin took over as president 1992, Limestone confronted “dwindling enrollment, main monetary deficits, and deteriorating buildings,” within the establishment’s phrases.
However, in line with Limestone’s web site, the school “not solely recovered from the onerous instances of the Nineteen Eighties, but in addition flourished throughout his [Griffin’s] presidency till he retired in 2017.”
The establishment modified its identify to Limestone College in 2020 after including grasp’s applications in enterprise and social work.
Path to closure
In 2023, Limestone’s auditor raised doubts in regards to the establishment’s potential to proceed working, citing “a decline in enrollment and uncontrolled spending” through the earlier two fiscal years. Limestone’s bills had spiked 20% between fiscal years 2020 and 2022 to $46.2 million.
The college employed consultants to assist stem its monetary troubles. They really helpful decreasing its workforce, reducing underperforming applications, canceling satellite tv for pc location leases, increasing on-line applications and launching a capital marketing campaign to boost unrestricted funds.
Together with rising prices, the establishment confronted a shrinking pupil physique. Between 2018 and 2023, Limestone’s fall enrollment cratered, declining 27% to 1,782 college students. In that respect, the college confronted struggles just like many different small personal liberal arts faculties.
The difficulty ran even deeper, nonetheless. Gary Stocker, founding father of School Viability, a knowledge platform taking a look at faculty monetary well being and failure threat, factors to the college’s dismal commencement charges. By fall 2023, Limestone’s commencement price hadn’t cracked 40% for a decade, in line with federal knowledge.
“The very first thing I all the time like to have a look at is commencement charges,” Stocker mentioned. “These sorts of schools are extra tuition assortment companies — they’re gathering tuition, they usually’re not graduating anyone.”
Then, Limestone’s monetary struggles deepened much more. In 2023, the college secured approval from the state legal professional common to take away restrictions on its endowment and commenced drawing hundreds of thousands from that fund to keep up its operations. Between fiscal years 2023 and 2024, Limestone’s web belongings fell by greater than $12 million, to $61 million.
“They’d been robbing the endowment piggy financial institution to maintain the lights on and meet payroll,” Stocker mentioned. “You simply can’t do this.”
School Viability knowledge reveals Limestone’s web tuition income declining since fiscal 2016 whereas its web earnings margin tanked after 2021. Bills rose on the identical time — rising over 10% in fiscal 2022 and 2023.
Unrestricted web belongings — which Stocker describes because the important monetary worth of the school — additionally collapsed after fiscal 2021. They fell from nearly $25 million that 12 months to roughly $1 million in 2023 earlier than leaping to almost $5 million the next 12 months.
“The Limestones of the world will proceed to shut, as a result of they chronically imagine they’ll do it themselves. Don’t wait to have that merger dialog.”
Gary Stocker
Founder, School Viability
“Extra faculties than not haven’t had a good post-pandemic restoration, and clearly Limestone suits that invoice,” he mentioned.
This previous April, Limestone’s board of trustees introduced that the 179-year-old establishment wanted an instantaneous infusion of $6 million in emergency funding or it must transfer solely on-line or shutter fully. On Fb, the establishment mentioned, “Please be part of us in praying for God’s steerage and power within the days forward.”
Days later, it introduced a attainable “monetary lifeline” that would permit it to remain open. Officers provided scant particulars aside from saying a “attainable funding supply” had emerged. Even with that newfound hope, Limestone President Nathan Copeland mentioned the college would function on the belief that it might transition to online-only after the spring 2025 semester.
However earlier than the month ended, Limestone officers referred to as it: They introduced the college would shut completely after the semester, regardless of having raised $2.1 million in a Hail Mary fundraising dash.
“Within the remaining evaluation, we couldn’t proceed operations on-campus or on-line with out a higher quantity of funding,” board Chair Randall Richardson mentioned.
What can we study?
Within the wake of Limestone’s demise, school issued a blistering evaluation of its management throughout its remaining years and days.
In a written assertion, school alleged that in his interview for the presidency, Copeland promised to show the college’s funds round and talk extra with school on its monetary situation.
“Nonetheless, since his set up in the summertime of 2024, the college have heard from him thrice, and in every of these, he offered nothing however platitudes and imprecise allusions to ‘attempting,’” they mentioned. “We had been nonetheless not knowledgeable of the dire state of our establishment or its probability to be abruptly shuttered at a second’s discover.”
College described a lack of expertise in regards to the college’s monetary situation from its leaders, whom they accused of mismanaging Limestone.
“The dearth of efficient governance and oversight from the Board demonstrates their whole and utter incompetence and their drive to do nothing greater than pad their very own resumes,” the college mentioned.
Their assertion accompanied a no-confidence vote within the board and Copeland. College additionally disinvited the trustees, Copeland and the college’s vice chairman from Limestone’s last-ever commencement ceremony.
“As soon as you must take your financial savings and pay on your month-to-month bills, you’re transferring rapidly to some extent the place your mannequin will not be going to be viable.”
Chuck Ambrose
Senior training marketing consultant, Husch Blackwell
College anger is frequent amid sudden faculty closures. So are questions on what college leaders knew and when — and if closure may have sooner or later been prevented, or at the least managed with extra planning.
Stocker’s recommendation to varsity presidents taking a look at Limestone’s expertise: “Don’t wait this lengthy.”
He pointed to the college’s falling belongings after 2021, its use of endowment funds throughout that point and different purple flags that emerged properly forward of its closure. A tough take a look at adverse monetary indicators may have led Limestone to hunt a merger accomplice earlier than it was too distressed for anybody to wish to be part of with or purchase it.
“The Limestones of the world will proceed to shut, as a result of they chronically imagine they’ll do it themselves,” he added. “Do not wait to have that merger dialog. You could or might not transfer ahead, however you wish to have it as we speak, with the intention to least assume that by way of.”
Limestone’s $6 million fundraising blitz got here up in need of saving the establishment from closing.
Dwindling endowment serves as a stark warning. When faculties begin drawing from their endowment to pay the payments, they’re possible already in deep monetary hassle.
Establishments can scale down their bills in some circumstances to fulfill new enrollment and income realities, however the market is sending indicators by way of faculty closures that some will not even be capable to do this, in line with Chuck Ambrose, a senior training marketing consultant with legislation agency Husch Blackwell who has served as chief government at a number of faculties.
A very powerful motion for faculties to take, Ambrose mentioned, is to align their bills with income. However some establishments have waited too lengthy to do this, he mentioned.
“As soon as you must use your belongings — as soon as you must take your financial savings and pay on your month-to-month bills, you are transferring rapidly to some extent the place your mannequin will not be going to be viable,” Ambrose mentioned.
