WHEELING, W.Va. — For seven decades, West Virginia’s only Catholic university has educated young adults in this corner of Appalachia, but despite that proud tradition, it entered the summer with an unlikely task.

It had to find a new name.

The words Wheeling Jesuit University no longer fit the struggling institution in this city after cutting every liberal arts major, 21 of its 53 full-time faculty and most Jesuit positions.

A campus that once touted ambitious growth plans lost more than a quarter of its 1,600 students in six years, even as it wooed them with steep price discounts.

So last week, it became just Wheeling University, in a bid to rebrand itself without a Jesuit affiliation.

“We truly feel deep sorrow that this institution is no longer a member,” said Deanna Howes Spiro, a spokeswoman for the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities headquartered in Washington, D.C.

There are an estimated 1,700 private, nonprofit colleges, and it’s no secret that many smaller ones are stressed. Experts warn that more of them will merge if not close, for reasons ranging from population loss to growing skepticism about the price and value of a four-year college degree.

Concern runs particularly high in the Midwest and Northeast, regions dotted by decades of plant closings. Seen as most vulnerable are schools of about 1,000 students or less that have modest endowments and draw students mostly from their region.

To compete, many give back a growing share of tuition and fees as financial aid. Nationally, the “tuition discount” rate among private colleges is almost 50%, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

It’s well above that at Wheeling Jesuit, founded in 1954 as the youngest of 28 Jesuit campuses, a part of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus.

The school with 1,171 students and tuition and fees of $29,290 returns 74 cents on the dollar to upper-class students and up to 67 cents to freshmen, a burden for a campus with a $13.9 million endowment.

In other states, the toll is evident.

This spring, Vermont’s Green Mountain College closed after 185 years. Its president, Robert Allen, lamented that while the school championed social and environmental sustainability, “We have not been able to assure the economic stability of the college.”

Southern Vermont University in Bennington also closed, and Detroit’s Marygrove College will shutter in December. It cut undergraduate studies in 2017, hoping to survive as a graduate campus. Enrollment of 1,850 students six years ago is now 305.

So worried are Massachusetts higher education officials, they may start monitoring private schools for financial stability using publicly available records, a financial “stress test” of sorts eyed in response to the abrupt demise of Mount Ida College.

Fueling the worry is that families often don’t know if that venerable college with an idyllic campus is what it appears or is on a secret and dangerous financial treadmill.

“The grass will be cut and the dorms will be filled on the day they are merged, closed or acquired,” said Brian Mitchell, a Boston consultant who writes about colleges and himself led institutions including Washington & Jefferson College and Bucknell University.

Between 2004 and 2014, five of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit colleges closed each year, according to Moody’s Investors Service. It predicts the annual rate by this year could nearly triple to 14.

And global consultant EY-Parthenon Education says it’s no temporary blip.

“A decades-long expansion of higher education institutions — a golden era when many of today’s campus leaders came of age — is over,” it wrote in 2016.

More than 700 institutions are at risk for reasons including size, it said.