Enrollment has fallen from roughly 2,000 to about 1,200. The endowment—around $140 million—looks respectable on paper but cannot offset collapsing tuition revenue. Wittenberg is hardly unique. Hundreds of similar institutions are stuck in the same death spiral:
• The cost structure doesn’t work. Small colleges carry the expense of a full residential campus, faculty, and administrative apparatus without the enrollment to support it. Tuition rises to fill the gap, making the pitch to families less believable every year.
• The competition has changed. Online programs are cheaper and more flexible. State universities offer scale and name recognition. Elite schools offer prestige. Small liberal arts colleges are stranded in the middle—too expensive to be practical, not prestigious enough to justify the investment.
• Technology has eaten their distinctives. These colleges once sold intimacy: close faculty contact, small seminars, community. But AI tutors and remote platforms now replicate much of that experience at a fraction of the cost.
• Their founding mission has evaporated. Wittenberg was created by German Lutheran immigrants to educate clergy and cultivate leaders shaped by the classical Christian tradition. That mission had coherence. But most of these schools have since secularized and repositioned themselves as generic liberal arts institutions—without a clear reason to exist in a market that values credentials and career pathways over formation.
So the hard question hangs over them: have they outlived their purpose? Increasingly, yes.
The one practical strategy that preserves something of the mission is merger with a larger, stable university. Miami University absorbed Western College for Women in the 1970s—a model that saved the campus, the programs, and even parts of the founding mission while giving students degrees from a viable institution.
Wittenberg could do the same. Ohio State, Wright State, or the University of Dayton could absorb its campus, faculty, and endowment. The Wittenberg name could survive as a residential college within a larger university. Students would keep continuity. The campus would stay alive. The endowment would stop bleeding out.
But that requires Wittenberg’s board to accept what institutions almost never admit until it’s too late: independent survival is no longer realistic. Merger means surrendering autonomy, legacy, and the comfortable fiction that a turnaround is just one fundraising campaign away.
Wittenberg is a proxy for dozens of schools in the same condition. Maybe it can still become an example of how to exit with honesty and preserve what matters.
Dennis Doyle lives in Cincinnati.
