Over the last decade, college enrollment has been declining. A study from the National Center for Education Statistics says undergrad enrollment dropped by 15%, from 18.1 million to 15.4 million students, between fall 2010 and fall 2021.

With fewer students enrolled in classes, its gotten more difficult for many institutions to keep their doors open.

Karin Fischer is a Senior Writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. She wrote about what happens to a town when its college closes. She joined “Marketplace” host Amy Scott to discuss her reporting. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Amy Scott: An average of one college closed every week last year. I was kind of stunned by that number. What is causing this situation?

Karin Fischer: It was kind of a perfect storm of things. It’s the combo of the declining demographics and, you know, there was COVID relief funding that was keeping a lot of colleges going through the pandemic, and that’s all dried up and disappeared, and we just have a lot of colleges. So the competition for students is pretty great. And so a lot of colleges have been kind of in precarious financial states for a while, and this is just a sort of a tipping point for a number of them, unfortunately.

Scott: So you spent some time reporting in a town called Aurora, New York, where it’s small college, Wells College, closed. Can you talk about what happened to Wells and what it’s meant for the community?

Fischer: Wells, like many of these other colleges, had been having some financial troubles for a long time, and it actually it’s a liberal arts college, or was a liberal arts college and it was a women’s college, and it had gone co-ed in part to try to sustain itself. But then this spring, or last spring, in April, it just announced that it was closing, and it took everybody by surprise. The students started registered for classes, the faculty members, you know, had signed their contracts, and it took the community by real surprise as well. I mean, the college had just as recently as a few months earlier, assured them that their financial health was fine, and they just had never really contemplated, I think the community members, what it would be like not to have this college in the center of their town.

Scott: Yeah, and you talk about not only the economic impact, this is the town’s largest employer, but also the effect on just basic services in the community.

Fischer: Sure. I mean, you know, colleges and medical centers, they anchor communities. I mean, they do have this great economic impact. They create jobs, they buy things in the communities, but, you know, many of these towns have grown up around the college, and so they’re very interconnected. In Wells’ case, the college actually ran the water treatment facility, and so all of a sudden, the town just didn’t even know how it was going to continue to go on, you know, and have safe drinking water for its residents. But there’s also other ways. I mean, I think the people think of these places very much as cultural magnets. They are points of pride. They can be community gathering places, and all of a sudden that was lost to this town.

Scott: And the health center is hanging in the balance as well.

Fischer: Yeah. So, Wells is a very small college, and so it, years ago, in fact, had sort of merged its college Infirmary with the Community Health Center in town, and so they used the college’s infirmary space. And it was sort of a win, win. It, you know, gave the college onsite medical providers. But it also served as the only community health center for about 15 miles, which upstate New York in the winter, is not insignificant. And because the college housed the Community Health Center, now with the college campus’s future uncertain, so is the future of the Community Health Center.

Scott: And you write that this is not just limited to this town of Aurora. This is happening in small towns around the country. What kinds of solutions do you see to this problem of towns losing their economic lifeblood, really, in some cases?

Fischer: I mean, I think there are questions about what can you do ahead of time? Are there ways that communities and colleges can work together more effectively, ways that maybe, perhaps it could stave off some of these closures? Were there things that towns can do, for example, the zoning, that could help the colleges sell property or use it in more mixed ways. I think there’s also the feeling, and it came out very clearly, both in Aurora and Wells and some other communities that I talked with that also had pretty abrupt college closures that communication would be really helpful. You know, a lot of people said it’s one thing for the college to shut down, but for it to shut down so abruptly and take us by surprise that didn’t enable us to do any kind of planning for what was next. But I don’t think, unfortunately, there is any sort of magic bullet, some solution that’s going to make colleges finances whole, and, you know, avert other Auroras and other Wells from going through the same thing.