Second Acts for Closed Campuses

When Birmingham-Southern College closed in 2024, local residents raised concerns about the loss of a long-standing institution with a significant footprint in one of Alabama’s largest cities.

Beyond the loss of the college, locals were concerned about what would become of the property. Both Alabama A&M University and Miles College expressed interest in buying the site, but those talks fell apart, leaving the fate of the 192-acre campus in limbo for two years.

While the college sold off a number of assets shortly after closure—including statues, yearbooks, office furniture and other assorted items—the property remained on the market until last month, when the U.S. Coast Guard finalized its $126 million purchase of the BSC campus.

Now the Coast Guard plans to open a training center on the campus later this year.

“We all know that this investment represents not only a new mission for this historic campus, but it’s transformational as it relates to the opportunity for economic growth as well as so many other things around workforce development in this city,” Birmingham mayor Randall L. Woodfin said at a press conference when the deal was first announced. “We’re talking about 1,000-plus jobs.”

After two years of uncertainty, the leafy campus will live on as an educational site. But other campuses that have closed in recent years have faced sharply different outcomes. While many have been bought by private K–12 schools, developers and religious institutions, others have remained on the market, in some cases falling into disrepair as maintenance issues compound on largely untended campuses. And as pressures mount on colleges amid dwindling enrollments and economic headwinds, experts are predicting additional closures in the future, meaning more communities could soon find themselves figuring out how to deal with their own vacant campuses.

Finding New Purpose

In the past few years, dozens of colleges have closed. Some sites were acquired by other institutions, such as Concordia University’s Portland campus, which closed in 2020 and was bought by the University of Oregon in 2022. The site reopened in 2025 as Oregon’s Portland branch campus.

Across the border in California, Soka University announced Monday that it plans to purchase the Middlebury Institute of International Studies campus in Monterey, a graduate school operated by Middlebury College in Vermont, which announced last year that it would shutter its MIIS programs in 2027. Soka officials plan to take over some graduate programs and operate the Monterey site as a second campus.

But oftentimes closed campuses are converted for other uses. Many have been reborn as K–12 schools, which experts note is a good fit because the facilities don’t need to be overhauled and campus owners don’t run into the challenge of rezoning an educational site. Others have been turned into housing, breweries and rehabilitation centers.

Converting colleges for other uses can be fraught with challenges, said Jeffrey Woolf, senior vice president and national practice leader of the realtor CBRE, which has sold multiple campuses. Woolf noted that colleges are not laid out like contemporary business parks, which poses difficulties for developers. Another issue is that many of the buildings don’t meet modern standards for utilities or safety and may include asbestos and other toxins that require removal. Accessibility standards are another common challenge.

Deferred maintenance—which is a growing issue on many campuses across the nation—can be especially problematic at colleges where leaders staved off repairs for decades amid financial struggles, said Emilio Amendola, co-president of A&G Real Estate Partners, which has been involved with the sale of various campuses—including Cazenovia College earlier this year.

“Every one that we’ve worked on had deferred maintenance of some kind, whether it was roof or air-conditioning systems or heating systems, or potentially environmental things that were not taken care of. We’ve had gymnasiums where the pool was sinking, roofs leaking, everything,” Amendola said.

Sometimes potential buyers are put off by a campus’s location.

“These campuses can have a lot of value, residually, based on wherever they are. Some of them can be a real struggle [to sell], because they’re located basically in the middle of nowhere, which is probably one of the reasons that they are going out of business,” Woolf said. “It’s like the old real estate adage—location, location, location. That holds true in college real estate, too.”

Zoning can also be a headache, experts noted. Colleges are typically zoned as educational sites with limitations for other uses, meaning developers need to work with localities to change that.

But conversion challenges are not necessarily a death knell for developing closed campuses.

Amendola pointed to an example of the former Briarcliffe College campus in Patchogue, N.Y.—which now houses Blue Point Brewing Company. He noted that the brewery owners faced numerous obstacles, including negotiating with tenants to vacate the property and renovating the space to fit the necessary equipment, which required removing much of the building’s second floor. But in the end, the site was revitalized and is now a centerpiece of downtown Patchogue.

J. Conrad Williams Jr./Newsday RM/Getty Images

Importantly, Amendola said, the local community was on board with the plan. He noted that given zoning and other challenges, buy-in from the local community and politicians is vital.

“If you get the political environment behind you, it makes it an easier process,” Amendola said.

Crumbling Campuses

Not all closed campuses have happy second lives.

Some crumble into disrepair, attracting vandals and creating headaches for communities. Some sites have been deteriorating for years, neglected or barely maintained by far-flung owners.

In late 2016, a Chinese company known as U.S. Magis International Education Center purchased Virginia Intermont College for $3.3 million after the site in Bristol, Va., sat vacant for two years following its closure. Representatives for the new owners told local media that they intended to open a college, but almost a decade later, that effort hasn’t materialized. Meanwhile, the property has fallen into severe disrepair and multiple buildings burned down in a 2024 blaze.

(A lawyer representing the owner did not respond to a request for comment.)

The city of Bristol began an effort to seize the vacant Virginia Intermont site for unpaid back taxes in 2025; the distant owner then suddenly paid its $605,000 bill, staving off an effort by the municipality to take over the property.

Mack Smith, economic development manager for Bristol, told Inside Higher Ed by email that multiple issues still plague the campus. Though the buildings that burned were demolished, debris remains and the property is overgrown, despite the owners’ promises to address it.

“We have been told a lot of things, but at some point we need to start seeing progress,” Smith wrote.

Officials in Nashua, N.H., are dealing with a similar challenge.

In 2017, Xinhua Education Consulting Services Corporation, a Chinese company, purchased the closed Daniel Webster College campus in Nashua for $11.6 million. The new owners later told local officials that they thought they were buying an operational college.

While the new owners have been more timely with their tax payments than their counterparts at the Virginia Intermont campus, city officials note at least part of the site is becoming blighted.

Liz Hannum, Nashua’s economic development director, told Inside Higher Ed that some buildings “are in disrepair and unable to be used” and the city has heard complaints from neighbors. But other parts of the facility are functional and are being rented out by a company that makes unmanned aerial vehicles and a hockey academy that houses students in the dormitories. (She credited those companies for maintaining their leased portions of campus.)

Even as the property’s future remains unknown, Nashua officials have been proactive.

Last year—after lawmakers passed a bill barring Chinese nationals from buying property in New Hampshire—the city pushed for funding from the state to purchase the site. Officials argued that buying the campus would ease concerns about foreign ownership and allow the city to use the site productively. But legislators voted along party lines and the Republican majority on the state’s Senate Finance Committee rejected $20 million in funding for Nashua to buy the former Daniel Webster College site, casting the proposal as a bailout.

The campus remains a priority; a redevelopment proposal is in the city’s master plan. Nashua officials plan to keep trying to improve the site despite the legislative setback.

“We’re either going to try to support development privately or potentially look at the next legislative session for more funds,” Hannum said. “We wouldn’t go as far as bonding for it to purchase it ourselves, because then we would be responsible for it while we try to find a developer. But if we were to purchase it using state funds, I think that would make sense.”

Remembering Closed Colleges

Ryan Allen, a professor of comparative and international education and leadership and author of the College Towns newsletter, has crisscrossed the country in recent years to visit closed campuses, traveling thousands of miles for a book he’s writing on the subject.

Over those miles, Allen has seen both hope and decay in his visits to more than 50 sites.

He pointed to Oregon’s revitalization of the former Concordia campus in Portland as an example of a campus that is thriving in its second life. But many other campuses he visited sit empty, he said, with local flora and fauna slowly reclaiming vacant sites that verge on abandonment.

“Some of them have remained isolated, and going to those places is just very eerie and almost supernatural,” Allen said. “It’s like I’m walking through the ruins of a lost civilization where, in some cases, I’m the only person on campus or there are very, very few other people there.”

He noted that many locals in small college towns have lamented the loss of their higher ed institutions. Beyond the economic and cultural impact, Allen pointed to the role that colleges play in shaping the identity of the town, bringing new faces in and serving as a third space, akin to a park where residents walk their dogs and revel in the beauty of a manicured campus.

While colleges may continue to close, Allen hopes they aren’t forgotten.

“It’s an important part of American culture. And I think because we’re losing colleges, we’re losing some of that—losing this small college that maybe no one’s heard of, that has a really important [idea] for the town,” he said. “It makes me sad that suddenly it’s gone. And who is even going to know that a college was there?”