I recently penned an essay on the threats imperiling the existence of Catholic colleges. I identified four: demographics, costs, people’s perceptions of the need for college degrees, and AI. Not all of them carry the same weight. For example, how AI may affect college graduates (especially in terms of entry-level work) is a wild card. But some of them involve confrontation with hard quantitative realities and, like the old saying goes, “numbers don’t lie.”

The most immediate grinding number is demographics: students who aren’t there. American fertility began falling below replacement level in 2008 and has not recovered. Why does that matter now? Because kids that would have been born in 2008 would be starting college as freshmen now — and those seats are empty. That year is not an anomaly; those desks look empty for the foreseeable future.

Costs also enter the picture. Catholic colleges are usually more expensive than state schools for the simple reason that they are tuition-dependent, i.e., they don’t have a state legislature to subsidize them. To be perfectly honest, it’s not that state schools are doing things more efficiently and Catholic schools jack up prices (though that might sometimes also be true). The truth is that state schools look cheaper because the gap between what students pay in tuition versus what operating the school actually costs is a hidden subsidy paid by taxpayers. In that sense, they’re like public grade and high schools: they’re “free” until you look at your tax bills. They also pose the same social justice problem: While a Catholic parent is paying unsubsidized tuition for his child in a Catholic college, he’s also contributing to the subsidized tuition of other students in state schools. But let’s win the educational choice fight at compulsory schooling levels first.

I emphasize these two quantitative factors because hard numbers tend to have a galvanizing force softer factors (like how much people think a college degree is worth) don’t. If my tuition receipts are X but my costs are X+20%, “Vatican, we have a problem!” If that goes on long enough, we don’t have a school.

My aforementioned essay (linked below) lists 50 Catholic colleges (out of the roughly 200 that exist) whose financials and other factors could suggest the next decade might be rocky, if not fatal. I certainly wish them well. But, after writing that essay, I also tried to look at what Catholic colleges existed a decade ago that are now just memories. ChatGPT spit out 20. Two were subsumed into bigger nearby Catholic universities. But several were in places Catholic colleges are not that common (Kentucky, South Dakota) and most had small-to-medium enrollments. For them, the absence of students made their tumbling over the demographic cliff painfully obvious.

I stress that “numbers don’t lie” because there perdures a kind of mushy ecclesiastical thinking about the holy virtues of “a poor Church for the poor.” As I’ve said before (here), there is nothing worse the Church could do to the poor than be poor. The Church needs resources, including money, to maintain the comprehensive infrastructure of parishes, schools, colleges, hospitals, orphanages, and other care facilities it once was capable of building (on far less affluent Catholics’ shoulders) and which people need. That Catholic students are losing opportunities for Catholic higher education — both by institutions disappearing and by being priced out of those remaining — is a social justice issue that is not met by lauding actors playing the ecclesiastical version of Dr. Welby: “I’m not a poor person, I just play one in Catholic media.”

(The link to my original article is here.)