Tomorrow, in Gaffney, S.C., the board of trustees at Limestone University, a 179-year-old college which began life as Limestone Springs Female High School, could be making consequential decisions as to the future of the institution.
Last week, university president Nathan Copeland spoke with students about the potential move of the university to become an online-only college, meaning the closure of dorms, physical class space, and athletic teams, including Division II teams in field hockey and women’s lacrosse.
These teams have been doing very well in recent years; the field hockey team qualified for the NCAA Division II tournament last fall, losing by a goal to Shippensburg in the first round. The women’s lacrosse team had a 17-1 record last year and won its conference championship, but was bafflingly not selected for the bracket for last fall’s NCAA Division II tournament.
Limestone University, according to a statement from the board of trustees, needs at least $6 million in donations in order to give the school time and room in order to pursue next steps when it comes to finances and fundraising.
That’s fine, but there are a number of underlying factors that won’t be papered over with angel levels of donations.
One is the four-year graduation rate at the school, which is at 23 percent. While one can explain that away with the current post-COVID extension of academic/athletic careers to five or six years, the retention rate after Year 1 is just 65 percent. This means that a third of students entering the school drop out after one year.
Another factor is that the school has been operating under significant financial deficits over the last few years, growing from about $2 million per year to a reported $12.6 million per year in the 2022-23 academic year, according to figures uncovered by the ProPublica investigative journalism organization.
But what is a deeper problem is the fact that nearly half of the 1700 students at Limestone are athletes. The closure of the school — and its athletic programs — would mean that the athletics half of the student body are not likely to want to continue at the online university for their degrees.
This kind of reminds me of what has happened to Bryn Athyn College, a school which also has about 50 percent of the student body as athletes. This Division III school outside of Philadelphia recently announced that it would be shutting down its 11 varsity sports at the end of this school year.
I find the situations at Bryn Athyn and Limestone interesting. The schools in question have allowed their student-athlete populations to approach half of the student body. This, as many big-time athletic universities like Penn State and Auburn, have only one to two percent of its undergraduate population as student-athletes.
But when Bryn Athyn and Limestone run into financial difficulties, the first course of action is to pull the rug out from the athletics programs and, well, half of their respective student bodies.
Something (literally) does not add up here.