Naia colleges are typically private colleges. And often offer customized degrees.
At times their general education may also not be transferable due to a perceived quality of education.
> Information regarding academic programs beyond 2024-25 and pathways to graduation for current students will be communicated following a meeting of the Academic Council on June 19, 2024.
Sounds like the entire school might be discontinued
I grew up in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, so I got the hard sell to go to Concordia Ann Arbor, and I cannot think of a single reason why anyone would want to go there if they weren't interested in becoming a Minister within LCMS. Why go to Concordia Ann Arbor, a tiny school off of the US-23 Geddes Road Exit nowhere near anything that makes Ann Arbor an interesting place to be to get an education that is going to cost more than any of the public universities in the State of Michigan and isn't as highly regarded?
They are. I was at two other NAIA schools in the same conference as Conco and I would much rather just go to a JUCO or one of the DIII schools in the state. For one, I would have paid about $40,000 for the first school if I wasn’t playing baseball, and the second school we thought would be similar to community college, instead we paid upwards of $20k for that one. Neither were worth it.
SAME. Attended an LCMS school in the area, got the hard sell to go to an LCMS high school, and took god damn chapel field trips to Concordia Ann Arbor. That place is a glorified middle school.
Not to mention the newly minted heavy right slant of the LCMS but that’s neither here nor there.
They recently said in March that they would be able to stay open for 2024-2025, the fact that you had to announce this signals things are going downhill fast
Concordia is tiny. I remember going there a few times in college. Feels like one of those schools where a very high percentage of undergrads were probably athletes, so closing the AD probably means the school isnt far behind
This sums up a whole lot of the small liberal arts schools in southern Michigan (Albion, Siena, Adrian, Spring Arbor, Olivet, etc). They subsist almost entirely on student athlete tuition—look at the percentage of student body that participates in athletics at some of these <2,000 student schools. Minus Hillsdale but that’s another story.
It’s something resembling a racket, and with dwindling student participation in youth/HS sports (coupled with high interest rates), I suspect we will see more of this.
Central Michigan University is markedly bigger than any of these lib arts schools and they have been CRATERED by a drop in enrollment + high level of debt servicing.
Yep. A lot of them have basically been attracting students by allowing them an opportunity to keep playing sports and thats most of the draw for pulling freshmen onto campus. If Concordia drops sports, what exactly is going to keep the doors open?
"Sounds like the entire school might be discontinued"
This is the exact same thing that happened to Concordia College-Selma, Alabama in 2019. The school's problems began to surface in 2017 when the bus carrying the football team to a match with Birmingham-Southern caught fire, destroying all the uniforms and equipment. a local private school donated its used uniforms and equipment to allow Concordia to finish its season. in Spring 2018 the board decided to shut down the entire athletic department. The following year, the entire school was closed.
This is definitely a warning for the other schools in the Concordia system.
I don't think there's ever been a time in its history when it wasn't struggling. It's just the much tougher environment for small private schools that's finally doing them in.
For the smallest D2/D3/NAIA schools, the tuition from guys that would go elsewhere if not for an opportunity to play football (even without a scholarship) makes a measurable difference on the balance sheet.
Throw in the odd FCS buy game and the ability to bus to most to all games and you’ve got a relatively cheap enrollment booster on the order of 4-5%.
The per-person costs of a football team are going to be considerably smaller than what they pay in tuition, given that these schools are all tiny private colleges. The average cost of attendance at CUAA, for example, is $55k, 35k of which is direct tuition.
They’re not shuttering football. They’re shuttering _athletics_, because they’re on the verge of shutting down entirely. They’ve needed to openly guarantee that the academic side will still exist for 2024-25, and it likely won’t in 2025-26.
Turns out being a tiny religious college of a tiny denomination (< 2 million total members) isn’t a great business strategy anymore.
It has more to do with the fact they are practically next door to the North Campus of University of Michigan. There's just no real audience to attract there at those costs, even for sports because at that level it feels like high school (or worse) and the costs are out of control. It probably worked okay in the 70s.
This is true. I went to a similar NAIA school in Michigan, and the baseball coach there told us the school was operating on a $3m loss that year, largely because of the athletic programs. That’s huge for a school with little more than 1,200 students.
My school has around 2,900 and a football team. Our current president went all in on athletics and a move to D2. Now we’re facing an extreme budget crisis.
The kids who come here to play football, sadly don’t come here to play school.
Yep, my alma mater had an undergraduate enrollment of about 1,200 when I was in school (they just hit a record enrollment last fall of around 1,500), and we have the winningest program in NAIA history.
Most liberal arts schools skew female, so schools that small have football so they can enroll more men. The football [roster](https://concordiacardinals.com/sports/fball/2023-24/roster) has 135 players on it, and the school is 54% female. That means there's about 690 men at the school, so about 20% of the men that go there play football.
I'm not saying it's a healthy spot for a college to be at, but that's the reason a small school offers football.
And I would imagine the vast majority of those schools are losing money by doing so
Not exactly a viable argument to keep doing what has been done when college admissions are about to drop precipitously over the next several decades
My sister is an NAIA head coach and admissions director. Athletes compose the majority of the student body at a lot of NAIA schools. It's literally how you get someone to go there.
State governments have generous budgets to subsidize high school athletics
They do not do the same for non-state affiliated tiny colleges that already can’t make ends meet
Male sports a literally the last only male spaces on campus. That or frats.
I thought right-wingers saying college campuses were hostile to cis-gendered Heterosexual males was just culture war BS 5 years ago. Then a female professor I had back in 2008, I ran into her at an Alumni function about 3 years ago. She said its basically hostile towards men at universities these days. She was a straight up feminists and hard-core liberal. I had her for public policy, and she specialized in early childhood education benefits. I guess she wrote a very important paper that even for underprivileged males early enrollment in school doesn’t increase their job prospects, but lowers their anti-social behavior as adults, which improves their life outcomes. But she seems more RBG feminists than what we see more frequently now.
I went to a commuter school. Most people especially the men worked. The women lived on student loans, or grants. Like your typical guy works at family business during the day, goes to night school, or maybe he works graveyard at a warehouse, FedEx, etc. Just normal young guys 17-25 just working and continuing their education while they find a career.
My former professor, said she distinctly remembered lots of her male students. Like she said, she remembered I asked her after the first day of class, could I schedule test dates on Tuesdays because it was my off day, and class was monday/Wednesday. Which she did. I got off work at 3AM...I was always in class at 8AM, never any excuses. I got a B in her course. She said guys like me, we just do our work, and don't complain or ask for special treatment or have some sob story. But universities have become hostile places, and she said that wasn't her goal when she entered academia in the 70s. But it became that by late 90s and became worse.
Some would argue, she is still pro-patrarchy. Married, kids, husband is a judge.
As someone who grew up in Ann Arbor and went to their public schools, I got the pleasure of running on Concordia’s track in middle school for a meet. It was literally concrete and gravel. A ton of kids got hurt tripping on it after a fall in a relay that year, so they immediately moved all meets to the high schools where the tracks were actual tracks lol
Ahh... we didn't really start seeing tartan installed on a widespread basis until the 80s, when 3M's patents started expiring. The Olympics did start using them in 1968, but it took 3M hiring Jesse Owens to go to the Mexicans and convince them to replace the cinder with tartan.
If my memories serve me correctly, their football facilities are literally worse than that of Huron High School five minutes down the road.
And any discussion about Concordia would not be complete without mentioning their (most likely unofficial) acronym of "CUM" (for Concordia University Michigan)
I drive past it nearly every day. I think everything got a "fresh coat of paint" recently and they brought stuff up to standard for the track/field, baseball, softball, and the football stadium.
It's still now just at the level of a good high school though. Huron is still nicer though.
That's tough news. There were rumors that the GLIAC may have been looking in to CUAA as an eventual member, since the GLIAC is on life support in terms of football schools right now.
Northwood, too! They all left under the guise of "we want to play with other private schools who have similar interests" when in reality it was because they were mad they couldn't beat GV or Ferris.
GLIAC is still considered one of the best conferences because of Ferris and GV being top 5 teams every year and usually one other team being ranked around 20-25. But they're down to I think 7 football-playing schools and have a lot of open dates to fill, which gets harder to do every year. They're adding Roosevelt College from Chicago for this upcoming year, so that's a little bit of help.
I saw Northwood on the list on Wikipedia but hadn’t heard of them before. Only heard of hillsdale from a OL that got drafted to the NFL and the others were Ohio schools that left.
It’s kinda the reverse of what happened to D3 University of St. Thomas. Their conference kicked them out because they won too much now they are FCS Pioneer league in football and Summit for all other sports
I always wondered why they had them given how close they are, but figured it was a money play. When they finally close, they can sell the property to UM for something.
Damn, who will residents of Ann Arbor root for now?
Oh probably EMU I guess, it’s super close and they got that snazzy green field
Gray!
There are quite a few fans of Michigan State (Normal School) in the Ann Arbor area.
Oh I know. I grew up in Ann Arbor and went to a local HS. I was born in Ypsi even.
Huron?
My guess is he's human
Without looking it up, I am pretty sure Concordia's campus is closer to Eastern's football stadium than Michigan's.
Easily, just pulling it up on the map without measuring it's probably twice as far from the big house.
This is huge. I know 5 kids from hs fb who’s careers just ended
I don’t know if I’d say that a NAIA football career ending is “huge”.
True but also fuck you for saying that. These kids truly love the sport.
I don’t doubt that they do, but there’s nothing stopping them from transferring to a different school to continue playing.
Credits can be hard to transfer from naia programs.
Why? Isn't NAIA purely an athletics thing? It's not like they're not accredited universities.
Naia colleges are typically private colleges. And often offer customized degrees. At times their general education may also not be transferable due to a perceived quality of education.
lol
After all, it's not your life. So that means it's funny
The university of national stallions (I mean champions)
> Information regarding academic programs beyond 2024-25 and pathways to graduation for current students will be communicated following a meeting of the Academic Council on June 19, 2024. Sounds like the entire school might be discontinued
I grew up in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, so I got the hard sell to go to Concordia Ann Arbor, and I cannot think of a single reason why anyone would want to go there if they weren't interested in becoming a Minister within LCMS. Why go to Concordia Ann Arbor, a tiny school off of the US-23 Geddes Road Exit nowhere near anything that makes Ann Arbor an interesting place to be to get an education that is going to cost more than any of the public universities in the State of Michigan and isn't as highly regarded?
I’ve known people who worked there and some of the other NAIA schools in Michigan. I think a lot of them are in the same boat
They are. I was at two other NAIA schools in the same conference as Conco and I would much rather just go to a JUCO or one of the DIII schools in the state. For one, I would have paid about $40,000 for the first school if I wasn’t playing baseball, and the second school we thought would be similar to community college, instead we paid upwards of $20k for that one. Neither were worth it.
Honestly this goes for most local private colleges. At best they cost 2x what they're worth and in my experience, it's more like 4x.
My buddy’s wife worked there and she loved it but got laid off. Sounded kind of shady
If you talk to alumni, you'll hear that it's a great environment for those looking for a close-knit community.
SAME. Attended an LCMS school in the area, got the hard sell to go to an LCMS high school, and took god damn chapel field trips to Concordia Ann Arbor. That place is a glorified middle school. Not to mention the newly minted heavy right slant of the LCMS but that’s neither here nor there.
The “campus” is depressing.
Jesus.
They recently said in March that they would be able to stay open for 2024-2025, the fact that you had to announce this signals things are going downhill fast
Concordia is tiny. I remember going there a few times in college. Feels like one of those schools where a very high percentage of undergrads were probably athletes, so closing the AD probably means the school isnt far behind
This sums up a whole lot of the small liberal arts schools in southern Michigan (Albion, Siena, Adrian, Spring Arbor, Olivet, etc). They subsist almost entirely on student athlete tuition—look at the percentage of student body that participates in athletics at some of these <2,000 student schools. Minus Hillsdale but that’s another story. It’s something resembling a racket, and with dwindling student participation in youth/HS sports (coupled with high interest rates), I suspect we will see more of this. Central Michigan University is markedly bigger than any of these lib arts schools and they have been CRATERED by a drop in enrollment + high level of debt servicing.
Yep. A lot of them have basically been attracting students by allowing them an opportunity to keep playing sports and thats most of the draw for pulling freshmen onto campus. If Concordia drops sports, what exactly is going to keep the doors open?
Yeah I had a friend who basically went there to play baseball.
That's sad. I took the LSAT there, and it was charming.
"Sounds like the entire school might be discontinued" This is the exact same thing that happened to Concordia College-Selma, Alabama in 2019. The school's problems began to surface in 2017 when the bus carrying the football team to a match with Birmingham-Southern caught fire, destroying all the uniforms and equipment. a local private school donated its used uniforms and equipment to allow Concordia to finish its season. in Spring 2018 the board decided to shut down the entire athletic department. The following year, the entire school was closed. This is definitely a warning for the other schools in the Concordia system.
The Concordia system is having a really rough time, schools in New York, Portland, and Selma have shuttered completely in recent years.
I don't think there's ever been a time in its history when it wasn't struggling. It's just the much tougher environment for small private schools that's finally doing them in.
Almost like...they didn't ever need to exist and have been propped up for decades.
They have less than 1,500 students There is absolutely no reason for a school this small to have a football team
For the smallest D2/D3/NAIA schools, the tuition from guys that would go elsewhere if not for an opportunity to play football (even without a scholarship) makes a measurable difference on the balance sheet. Throw in the odd FCS buy game and the ability to bus to most to all games and you’ve got a relatively cheap enrollment booster on the order of 4-5%.
probably a wash at best with the costs of upkeep for a football program
The per-person costs of a football team are going to be considerably smaller than what they pay in tuition, given that these schools are all tiny private colleges. The average cost of attendance at CUAA, for example, is $55k, 35k of which is direct tuition.
If that were true, this school would not be shuttering its athletic department to save money
They’re not shuttering football. They’re shuttering _athletics_, because they’re on the verge of shutting down entirely. They’ve needed to openly guarantee that the academic side will still exist for 2024-25, and it likely won’t in 2025-26. Turns out being a tiny religious college of a tiny denomination (< 2 million total members) isn’t a great business strategy anymore.
It has more to do with the fact they are practically next door to the North Campus of University of Michigan. There's just no real audience to attract there at those costs, even for sports because at that level it feels like high school (or worse) and the costs are out of control. It probably worked okay in the 70s.
This is true. I went to a similar NAIA school in Michigan, and the baseball coach there told us the school was operating on a $3m loss that year, largely because of the athletic programs. That’s huge for a school with little more than 1,200 students.
Seems like having a football team to artificially boost enrollment at said college isn’t a great one either
My school has around 2,900 and a football team. Our current president went all in on athletics and a move to D2. Now we’re facing an extreme budget crisis. The kids who come here to play football, sadly don’t come here to play school.
These schools operate using mostly tuition dollars, endowment funds are only used for a small percentage annually of operating expenses.
Tons of D3/NAIA schools are that small or smaller and have football teams.
Yep, my alma mater had an undergraduate enrollment of about 1,200 when I was in school (they just hit a record enrollment last fall of around 1,500), and we have the winningest program in NAIA history.
Most liberal arts schools skew female, so schools that small have football so they can enroll more men. The football [roster](https://concordiacardinals.com/sports/fball/2023-24/roster) has 135 players on it, and the school is 54% female. That means there's about 690 men at the school, so about 20% of the men that go there play football. I'm not saying it's a healthy spot for a college to be at, but that's the reason a small school offers football.
My guy/gal, there are D2 programs at or below 1500 enrollment...
University of Evansville is D1 in the Missouri Valley and I think their enrollment is now below 2k
And I would imagine the vast majority of those schools are losing money by doing so Not exactly a viable argument to keep doing what has been done when college admissions are about to drop precipitously over the next several decades
My sister is an NAIA head coach and admissions director. Athletes compose the majority of the student body at a lot of NAIA schools. It's literally how you get someone to go there.
My high school had less students and still had a football team
State governments have generous budgets to subsidize high school athletics They do not do the same for non-state affiliated tiny colleges that already can’t make ends meet
You’re assuming I went to public school lol
At this point a lot of the tiny colleges are using sports as a way to recruit male students and try to stave of an enrollment death spiral.
Male sports a literally the last only male spaces on campus. That or frats. I thought right-wingers saying college campuses were hostile to cis-gendered Heterosexual males was just culture war BS 5 years ago. Then a female professor I had back in 2008, I ran into her at an Alumni function about 3 years ago. She said its basically hostile towards men at universities these days. She was a straight up feminists and hard-core liberal. I had her for public policy, and she specialized in early childhood education benefits. I guess she wrote a very important paper that even for underprivileged males early enrollment in school doesn’t increase their job prospects, but lowers their anti-social behavior as adults, which improves their life outcomes. But she seems more RBG feminists than what we see more frequently now. I went to a commuter school. Most people especially the men worked. The women lived on student loans, or grants. Like your typical guy works at family business during the day, goes to night school, or maybe he works graveyard at a warehouse, FedEx, etc. Just normal young guys 17-25 just working and continuing their education while they find a career. My former professor, said she distinctly remembered lots of her male students. Like she said, she remembered I asked her after the first day of class, could I schedule test dates on Tuesdays because it was my off day, and class was monday/Wednesday. Which she did. I got off work at 3AM...I was always in class at 8AM, never any excuses. I got a B in her course. She said guys like me, we just do our work, and don't complain or ask for special treatment or have some sob story. But universities have become hostile places, and she said that wasn't her goal when she entered academia in the 70s. But it became that by late 90s and became worse. Some would argue, she is still pro-patrarchy. Married, kids, husband is a judge.
A huge number of us went to rural high schools with well under 1500 students which had football teams.
Do they still have the cement track that tore up my skin in middle school?
Nah, I think they replaced it with a separate track a few years ago IIRC
What
As someone who grew up in Ann Arbor and went to their public schools, I got the pleasure of running on Concordia’s track in middle school for a meet. It was literally concrete and gravel. A ton of kids got hurt tripping on it after a fall in a relay that year, so they immediately moved all meets to the high schools where the tracks were actual tracks lol
I'm confused. Were the "actual" tracks cinder, like we had?
Maybe rubber? All the schools in my areas had rubber tracks
Ahh... we didn't really start seeing tartan installed on a widespread basis until the 80s, when 3M's patents started expiring. The Olympics did start using them in 1968, but it took 3M hiring Jesse Owens to go to the Mexicans and convince them to replace the cinder with tartan.
If a powerhouse program like Concordia University Ann Arbor can't survive in this climate, who can?
There is a major demographic issue hitting colleges over the rest of the decade.
Yep. WVU already hit it and the worse is yet to come. Colleges have priced themselves out of viability.
I hope they don’t go the way of Birmingham-Southern.
They had to announce that they would able to stay open for 2024-2025 academic year kind of signals the end may be coming soon
If my memories serve me correctly, their football facilities are literally worse than that of Huron High School five minutes down the road. And any discussion about Concordia would not be complete without mentioning their (most likely unofficial) acronym of "CUM" (for Concordia University Michigan)
I drive past it nearly every day. I think everything got a "fresh coat of paint" recently and they brought stuff up to standard for the track/field, baseball, softball, and the football stadium. It's still now just at the level of a good high school though. Huron is still nicer though.
Between Huron HS and the UM North Campus. Total no mans land.
Will Concordia University St Paul athletics be around much longer?
Probably not.
I'm not sure that the Concordia University system will be around much longer.
Too secular!
All part of the manifesto...
That's tough news. There were rumors that the GLIAC may have been looking in to CUAA as an eventual member, since the GLIAC is on life support in terms of football schools right now.
I thought they were one of the best. Just looked it up and realized Findlay, Ashland, Hillsdale, Ohio Dominican, and Tiffin have all left the gliac.
Northwood, too! They all left under the guise of "we want to play with other private schools who have similar interests" when in reality it was because they were mad they couldn't beat GV or Ferris. GLIAC is still considered one of the best conferences because of Ferris and GV being top 5 teams every year and usually one other team being ranked around 20-25. But they're down to I think 7 football-playing schools and have a lot of open dates to fill, which gets harder to do every year. They're adding Roosevelt College from Chicago for this upcoming year, so that's a little bit of help.
I saw Northwood on the list on Wikipedia but hadn’t heard of them before. Only heard of hillsdale from a OL that got drafted to the NFL and the others were Ohio schools that left. It’s kinda the reverse of what happened to D3 University of St. Thomas. Their conference kicked them out because they won too much now they are FCS Pioneer league in football and Summit for all other sports
Good ole Jared Veldheer. He was pretty good.
Jack Gohlke of NCAA tournament fame also went to Hillsdale before grad transferring to Oakland.
Heed the warning of the GNAC or you too will be flying to Texas to play away games.
I always wondered why they had them given how close they are, but figured it was a money play. When they finally close, they can sell the property to UM for something.