Lourdes University, with 72.3 percent athletes, will close at the end of the year
Last March, Eric Kelderman penned an important article for The Chronicle of Higher Education about Lourdes University in Ohio titled, "We Have More Athletes Than We Have Fans." The story correctly points out the risks to small, private colleges when they invest heavily in athletics as a way to attract students. It is something on which I have regularly offered research here on Glory Days.
Today, less than a year after Eric's article, Lourdes announced it will close at the end of the academic semester. According to the school’s most recent EADA report for the 2023-24 academic year, 72.3 percent (n = 428) of the institution’s 592 total undergraduate enrollment were athletes.
Lourdes has struggled for more than a decade, as Kelderman emphasized in his article, “Despite more than tripling the number of students who participate in athletics, Lourdes saw its full-time undergraduate enrollment tumble from 1,285 in the fall of 2012 to just 691 in fall of 2022.”
As an enrollment strategy, however, college athletics programs have a mixed record; in some cases, they’ve been little more than a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. Adding sports might slow a decline, the data suggest, but at a cost — because athletic teams are expensive to stand up and support. - Eric Kelderman in The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 19, 2025
Indeed, that is the case. Using data Lourdes provided to the Office of Postsecondary Education as part of the school’s annual EADA report, we can easily see two parallel stories. One is the steady decline in overall undergraduate enrollment. The other story is the consistent rise in percentage of athletes as students at Lourdes.
While recruitment of athletes at small schools can help increase enrollment, athletes cost more than non-athletes because of athletic personnel, travel, etc. Lourdes reported overall athletic expenses of nearly $4 million in 2017-18 compared to more than $6 million in 2023-24. So unless the school realized $2 million more in tuition revenue as the result of increasing the number of athletes, simply adding athletes might not have been the correct enrollment strategy.
Lourdes’ 72.3 percent athletes as students exceeds Finlandia University’s 62.3 percent, the previous high percentage for a school that announced closure.
As I have done with other articles I have written in this space, I want to emphasize that correlation does not equal causation. This isn’t a told-you-so moment. Rather, it is another data point that campuses which aggressively grow enrollment through the addition of sports or increased roster sizes are, it appears, at a much greater risk of closure. Schools engaged in these practices need to be certain their enrollment strategies, particularly around athletics, make sense for long-term sustainability.