opinion

Marygrove College finds new life as graduate-only institution

From the outside, Marygrove College's decline seemed sudden.

There was no way for most people to know how close the school came to closing outright, its campus gone dark, a neighborhood's stability imperiled.

It's a story Detroiters know all too well, even if most people didn't know what was happening at Marygrove. Decline, crash, a shuttered building, a hole in a neighborhood.

It's bad enough when the corner store closes; the shuttering of a college campus posed a mortal threat to the northwest Detroit communities Marygrove anchors, and to the investment attracted by the college.

To experience decline is nothing new for Detroiters; to arrest decline is something different.

At 53 acres, Marygrove's campus exceeds the footprint of the Packard Plant, just 40 acres, or the Michigan Central Depot, 18 stories on 11 acres.

Both have become symbols of Detroit's long fall. Marygrove and its neighbors were determined not to join that gloomy procession.

Last September, Marygrove President Elizabeth Burns announced that the college, founded in 1927 by the education-oriented nuns of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, would close its undergraduate program. The college's undergraduate enrollment had hit a record low: just 491 students. Marygrove couldn't afford to service its $25 million debt and meet its $20-million annual operating budget without the sort of significant enrollment growth that was not in the cards.

The college had weathered ups and downs before, but this was an unprecedented confluence of debt and enrollment decline. So Burns went looking for new sources of support and found the Kresge Foundation, the deep-pocketed philanthropy that's investing heavily in the northwest Detroit neighborhoods around her college.

A stripped-down mission

In the space of a few months, everything at Marygrove has changed. Now a graduate-only institution, its faculty teaches most classes online. The college's physical campus has been deeded to a new conservancy — one influenced by IHM values, but funded, at least in the short-term, by Kresge.

It is, the parties agree, the best plan possible -- the only plan, really, that can keep Marygrove alive.

And yet survival is far from certain. Marygrove has to prove that it should keep its accreditation as a graduate-only institution. The campus' future relies on more funding partners financing not just the costs of maintenance, but whatever comes next: a center for education or the arts or community involvement. Even if the college clears its accreditation hurdle, graduate enrollment will need to double or triple to make that program self-sustaining.

But ask any of the people who devised this plan, and they'll tell you why it's going to work: Because it has to.

A proven recipe

Large universities boast billion-dollar endowments. Driven by the ministry of the IHM sisters, Marygrove's pride is the women and men it has educated: generations of Detroit teachers, social workers, artists, musicians.

The college bookends the University District, a stable community on the city's northwest side, and anchors the Fitzgerald neighborhood, where private, municipal and foundation dollars are funding broad investment in a concerted effort to extend Detroit's revitalization beyond Midtown and downtown.

In northwest Detroit -- dubbed the "LiveSix" area, for Livernois and Six Mile roads -- funders like Kresge see some of those same conditions that made Midtown and downtown fertile for redevelopment: Educational institutions like Marygrove and the University of Detroit-Mercy, stable, if struggling, neighborhoods, and viable, or at least reparable commerical corridors.

"So this is something Detroiters know how to do," said Wendy Lewis Jackson, Kresge's Detroit program manager.

For Kresge, which has spent heavily in the last decades to counteract disinvestment and decline, this was a rare opportunity to get ahead of the curve -- to stop the next Packard Plant or Michigan Central Depot from happening. The challenge was to stabilize the neighborhood before it reached the point of no return.

Not to act, says Rip Rapson, the foundation's president and CEO, would have been philanthropic malpractice.

But for Kresge to commit, the college's plan had to work.

Digging a deeper hole

Marygrove's mission, like that of its founding order, is rooted in social justice, community building, and educating the professionals needed to sustain both. Its graduates serve primarily as teachers, artists and social workers, folks who do essential, if not lucrative, work. Marygrove doesn't have a billion-dollar endowment, or a stable of wealthy alumni ready to write big checks for new projects.

But the first and worst problem was declining enrollment. The recession had not been kind to the small school, nor had Detroit's population loss. Like independent Catholic colleges across the country, it struggled with the loss of Catholic K-12 schools that had historically served as feeder system. And liberal education was out of vogue as many employers clamored for job-specific degree programs.

The college's first impulse was to borrow. Invest in the campus and new programs, its leaders reasoned, and new students would come.

"An arrangement was made between the sisters and college," said Aaron Seybert, Kresge's social investment officer. "The sisters would deed the land to college, which could use that land, pledge it to the bank, boost enrollment and use the revenue to pay off the loan . Except that didn’t happen. Enrollment didn’t pick up, and expenses didn’t decline."

By 2013, a new administration was desperate enough to relax the school's admissions standards, yielding the highest enrollment figures in the school's history. But Marygrove didn't have the support structures to bring those students up to the mark, and many of them didn't return. The school's retention rate, previously 67%, dropped to 40%. Enrollment kept falling, from 883 undergraduates in 2014, to 667 a year later, a 23% decline.

That's the year Beth Burns, a 1972 Marygrove alum who'd served on the college's board, returned to take the position of provost. After earning a medical degree from the University of Michigan, she had spent years in family practice before joining the Stryker School of Medicine at Western Michigan University. She was named interim president in fall 2015 and confirmed as president early the following year.

Because she'd been on the college's board, Burns knew the school was in dire straits.

The school was regularly overspending its roughly $20 million annual budget, she recalls, facing a $5 million shortfall. A $7.3-million loan was due by at the end of 2016. The school had already defaulted on a $500,000 loan from Wayne County, for the purchase of the former Immaculata High School.

"At times, it felt like every week there was a new major problem we were going to have to deal with," Burns said. "I likened it sometimes to a patient in the ICU. It's hard to focus on what was the most important problem that was facing you at the time."

In 2017, the federal government dealt the college another devastating blow: Because of its declining enrollment, the U.S. Department of Education required the school to post a $7.2-million letter of credit to receive $15 million in federal financial aid.

Encouraged by the increasing investment in the community around Marygrove, Burns reached out to Kresge, hopeful that foundations interested in the LiveSix area would offer help.

To Rip Rapson, the foundation's president and CEO, the idea that Marygrove's campus might go dark, was "devastating."

"I think in many ways that’s what motivated us to become involved at first ... largely because we felt it was such an important physical presence in that community. The possibility of it being boarded up was just unthinkable."

But the the college's financial situation, Rapson said, was even more dire than he'd expected. A foundation-financed audit suggested the school's prospects for rebuilding its undergraduate enrollment were dim.

"There were a lot of tears. There’s been a lot of tears," Burns said. "In some ways I feel like my medical career has been preparing me for this job."

"I think in some ways, I think that it takes somebody who cared about Marygrove and loved the institution to do it," Burns said.

"I know people really don’t like me," she added. "... But it could not continue the way it was. It just could not. And you have to face that. You can’t do the irrational exuberance of, we’ll find the right donor, we’ll find the right grantor. Why would anyone give us funding to do business as usual?"

Once the difficult decision to jettison the undergraduate program had been taken, Kresge's Seybert helped Marygrove restructure its debt. With Kresge's backing, the Department of Education agreed to accept a $1.5 million letter of credit.

Preserving what matters

It's haunting to walk the halls of Marygrove College now, and recall how bustling it once was. But Angela May is thankful that, despite what's happened, her alma mater has a chance at new life.

May is one of four Marygrove graduates in her immediate family — mother Mary Walton-May, brother Leon Dale May and sister Michelle May are all Marygrove alums.

Marygrove was the school that felt like home for all the Mays. Michelle May majored in English, bringing home books by black authors like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison that opened new vistas for the sisters. Majority African-American by the 1970s, classes were led by esteemed black professors, Angela May recalls, people who'd used their lives and careers to make a difference. Students both black and white valued that diversity, that perspective.

"It was so small it was like being in a family," Michelle May said. "It never felt like it was wasting time.

For Burns, Herb, Rapson and Jackson, it's essential that the college continue in that role.

Whatever its future holds, education has to be part of it. The plan currently on the Kresge-backed table includes a P-20 education center — early childhood education through community college.

But these aren't decisions that will be made lightly, or free of input from the community Marygrove has always intended to serve.

What pains Herb — more than the $10 million the IHM sisters have willingly foregone, if it makes the school's plans more viable, more than the changing nature of the school's educational role — is the idea that Marygrove might stop serving its community.

"Just like our founders who faced an unknown future, so do we, but you have to take risks to make something new happen," she said. "You can’t just be content with the tried and true. It’s elements of faith, it’s elements of the women that have gone before us. That’s what I believe."