With stats stacked against them, students get help from soon-to-close Cabrini University to enroll elsewhere

Cabrini University student Zackery Donlen strolled into what once was the admissions office, but is now, in the school’s waning days, focused on helping underclassmen find new universities to attend.

“I know where I’m going,” he declared.

The junior accounting major from Lancaster told two Cabrini administrators he had settled on Gwynedd Mercy University in Montgomery County, one of four universities the cash-strapped Cabrini had designated as ideal partnership schools for its students after it closes for good in June, and its campus becomes the official property of Villanova University.

» READ MORE: Cabrini begins its final year, remaining students note a smaller campus. Where did the others go?

“The partnership schools take all your credits and help you stay on track,” Donlen said, adding that he also will be able to continue his sport there, cross-country.

Donlen’s outcome is what officials at the Catholic college in Radnor are hoping for all of its remaining 316 freshmen, sophomores and juniors who will need to find another college to finish their education.

Cabrini, like other colleges that close, is up against some daunting statistics: More than half of students at 467 colleges that closed between July 1, 2004, and June 30, 2020, did not reenroll elsewhere, according to a 2022 report by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Of those who did, only 36.8% earned a degree; and 10% more were still enrolled when the study ended.

The majority of those colleges were for-profit institutions and many of the closures were abrupt, and only about 18% of the schools in the sample were private, nonprofit four-year universities, like Cabrini. But the study showed that when closures were handled in an orderly way with support for students, about 70% of students reenrolled, findings that have served to inspire Cabrini officials.

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“These stats have driven my work this year,” said Michelle Filling-Brown, dean of academic affairs, who is in her 16th year at Cabrini and plans to stay through the very last day. “We are doing this in a way that we think will be best for our students.”

Cabrini announced its closure a year in advance and established partnerships with local colleges that had similar academic programs and athletics and were willing to match students’ tuition and financial aid packages. Cabrini staff invited all undergraduates last semester to one-on-one meetings where they explored transfer options and made students aware of the partnership schools.

Ninety-three percent of students came for the meetings, with virtually all indicating they planned to continue their studies, Filling-Brown said.

» READ MORE: As the Cabrini community reels from its closure announcement, other Catholic colleges woo its students

This spring, Cabrini staff plan to follow up with another round of meetings to make sure students are on track to do just that. Once they are accepted, the university transfers their records for free to partner schools.

“That’s absolutely the best practice,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor in educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. “Students have time to prepare. They don’t lose time toward their degree, and they are not financially worse off. They are doing all the right things to take care of students.”

College closure can upend a student’s academic journey. Just ask Cabrini senior Kaitlyn Delaney, 23, a psychology major from Bel Air, Md. She was a junior at Wesley College in Delaware when it closed in 2021 and was acquired by Delaware State University.

As an education major, she found that schools weren’t willing to transfer a lot of her credits and accept her as a senior. So she took a semester off, then went to community college, where she decided to change her major. Then she came to Cabrini last year where she had to repeat her junior year.

“I could have been graduating two years ago,” she said, and that extra time cost money.

When she heard last June that Cabrini was closing, she thought she again wouldn’t be able to finish her senior year.

“At that point, I was like, ‘I have to go find a trade,’” she said.

» READ MORE: With a mounting deficit, Cabrini University eliminates academic leadership positions, including the provost

But she was relieved to learn that she would be among Cabrini’s last group of seniors.

For her friend and softball teammate Ariana Mirenda, 21, of Reading, it’s also the second college closure. She, too, had attended Wesley.

“I was like, again?” Mirenda said. “But I kind of knew what to do already and what to expect.”

Students at Wesley had less time than those at Cabrini to figure out their next step, Mirenda said. Luckily, her softball coach helped pave the way for her to transfer to Cabrini.

She is getting her bachelor’s in biology/premed from Cabrini and continuing on to Goldey-Beacom College in Delaware to finish a bachelor’s in psychology. Her former Wesley coach works there and helped her with the transfer, she said.

Some Cabrini students, though, didn’t have a year to plan.

The nursing program, which was relatively new and in the process of getting accredited, was not permitted to continue this year. Cabrini paved the way for nursing majors to transfer, the majority of them heading to Eastern University, another partnership school.

» READ MORE: Villanova finalizes agreement to acquire Cabrini University campus

And Cabrini’s athletic director was able to work out an arrangement with the National Collegiate Athletic Association that allows the Eastern students to continue to play sports at Cabrini this year if they took at least one course there.

Also, international students face a requirement that they be associated with their home schools for a period of time if they want to remain in the country after graduation, said Kimberly Boyd, dean for retention and student success.

“So our seniors [who are international], really needed to leave before the start of the school year,” she said.

They were among several hundred students who left before the start of the fall semester. Cabrini started this year with 708 undergraduates.

Some students knew where they wanted to go immediately, Boyd said. Others had no idea.

Cabrini brought representatives from the partner schools onto campus and provided a one-page summary of each. Boyd arranged transportation for those who wanted to visit the schools.

“We pushed them to explore, and we invited our partner schools to pull them in,” Boyd said.

Filling-Brown said Cabrini did its best to find partnership schools that were healthy so that students wouldn’t find themselves at another struggling institution. They are guaranteed admission if they are in good standing in academics and behavior.

“They are taking our curriculum and teaching it out so that students are staying on track for graduation,” Boyd said. “They are not going to lose any credits, and the credits that are coming in are counting for requirements.”

Eastern, a Christian college across the street, has proven to be the most popular of the four choices, Filling-Brown said. The university enrolled 40 Cabrini students in the fall, 31 of them undergraduate, and 135 more students are in various stages of exploring Eastern, said Ronald A. Matthews, Eastern president. That would give Eastern, which enrolls about 7,000 students — about 1,700 traditional undergraduates — a significant increase.

“We’ve had a good relationship with cross-registration opportunities for years,” Matthews said, adding that the school added a special visitation day, held a welcoming day for Cabrini students in the fall, and is planning a special religious service in honor of the school’s legacy in April. “We’ve known each other, been good neighbors, and competed in sports. I think it’s a fairly known quantity.”

Gwynedd Mercy and Holy Family in Philadelphia, both Catholic schools, and Ursinus, a nonsectarian liberal arts school in Collegeville, rounded out the list. (Cabrini also established a few relationships for special programs: Thomas Jefferson University for graphic design, Albright College for music industry, and St. Joseph’s University for master’s in criminology and criminal justice.)

By the start of the spring semester, Cabrini was down to 516 undergraduates — 168 having transferred and some having graduated. Ninety-one of those students completed exit interviews, and 95% said they were transferring to another college immediately, Filling-Brown said. Many indicated they were looking at St. Joseph’s, Boyd said. St. Joseph’s in September said it had already admitted about 120 Cabrini students for the current academic year.

Rosie Ortiz-Pablo, 20, a junior criminology major from King of Prussia, is finishing her junior year at Cabrini but has applied to St. Joseph’s. Her tuition at Cabrini is covered through scholarships and aid. She hopes to get the same arrangement at St. Joseph’s.

“I went to go visit them and they were so kind,” she said.

But Filling-Brown, Boyd, and their team still have some work to do.

In a class last month, none of five underclassmen said they knew where they were going next year. But four had some ideas of places, and a couple had applied. One junior said he hadn’t even started to think about it.

“We will continue to work with students until they figure it out,” Filling-Brown said.