Dive Brief:
- Aurora University, a nonprofit institution to the west of Chicago, plans to stop offering classes at a campus it owns over the Wisconsin border, some 70 miles away.
- The campus, called the George Williams College campus, has been a conference center and camp on Geneva Lake as well. Aurora operated academic programs there for local students, including a large master of social work program, according to the university's president, Rebecca Sherrick. But the number of students dwindled as enrollment patterns changed, Sherrick said.
- Aurora plans to end academic programming at the campus in December 2023. Leaders plan to keep the campus as a conference center and continue hosting a popular summer music festival there, according to Sherrick.
Dive Insight:
Colleges across the country have been rethinking their footprints after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted operations and finances starting in 2020 — and as available student populations change in size and shift in location. Some institutions have closed branch campuses where enrollment was dwindling. Other colleges have turned to mergers, acquisitions and, in more dire cases, shut down entirely.
In Aurora's case, leaders started evaluating the George Williams campus about 18 months ago ago, Sherrick said. The institution depends on enrollment to drive its revenue, and it wanted to protect its core operations in Illinois.
"We're watching this very competitive environment," Sherrick said. "We combine a thoughtful price point with a very conservative management style."
The campus enrolled as many as 421 students at its peak in 2009, when it had both undergraduate and graduate programming.
But that graduate programming has since moved to Illinois and shifted online, Sherrick said.
Today, the campus has about 175 enrolled undergraduates — a small number in comparison to the larger university, which enrolled 4,114 undergraduates and 2,051 graduate students in fall 2021, according to federal data.
"We were just left with a small undergraduate curriculum, and we did our best to revitalize that," Sherrick said. "But we finally decided that we were simply not able to reach a critical mass."
Ten full-time faculty members work at the campus. Those with tenure will be able to teach online or move to the university's main campus, Sherrick said.
Aurora plans to teach out remaining students at the campus so they can graduate. Any who haven't completed their degrees by the end of next year will be able to continue to study in Illinois, the Lake Geneva Regional News reported.
The university has another branch campus in Woodstock, Illinois. It's holding discussions about growing programming there for transfer students from a local community college, Sherrick said.
