Rosemont merger gives students and faculty three years before closing. But will they stay?

Students attending Rosemont College will have a little more than three years to complete their degrees before it fully merges into Villanova University — as the plan stands.

That’s an unusually long runway for students, staff, and faculty to have when a college closes. Cabrini University, which shuttered in June after its campus was purchased by Villanova, gave its students and staff a year’s notice. At University of the Arts, which closed abruptly last June, they had only a week.

“I can’t think of another college that had that long of a runway,” Robert Kelchen, a professor in educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who has followed college closures and mergers, said of the Rosemont plan. “It’s certainly the most ethical way to treat students and employees, and it gives everyone a chance to finish and it gives employees a chance to find a new job.”

» READ MORE: Financially strapped Rosemont College will merge with Villanova University

But it’s uncertain how many students will choose to stay and at what enrollment point, if any, it would be too costly and difficult to keep the college open. Nearly two-thirds of Rosemont’s undergraduates are athletes, and the college will stop Division III intercollegiate athletics after the spring 2026 season. The school has 14 men’s and women’s teams.

“A lot of guys here are probably going to leave,” said Nick Tanella, a senior from Brick, N.J., who is a captain on the baseball team. About 20 of the 48 players are seniors, and others are already looking around for other schools, he said.

There are also questions about whether students who planned to enroll at Rosemont in the fall will actually come. Rosemont, which enrolls 774 undergraduate and graduate students, has marketed its modest size with the slogan “The power of small,” but how small is too small?

“There will be a point where operations become unsustainable,“ said Ricardo Azziz, principal at SPH Consulting Group: Strategic Partnerships in Higher Education, based in Alabama. ”That point is variable for institutions.”

» READ MORE: At Cabrini University, there will be no next year: A chronicling of its final semester

Villanova has agreed to provide financial support to Rosemont over the next three years, but neither school has released the financial details of that arrangement.

“There are no plans to cease operations pre-2028,” Rosemont board chair Maria Feeley said when asked if the college could continue to operate if enrollment fell below a certain level.

“We are really in unchartered waters with this situation,” Kelchen said.

But Rosemont does seem to have financial support that many other closing colleges do not.

“This seems like a pretty strategic acquisition by Villanova,” he said. “They value the Rosemont campus enough to do this and they think it is in their mission to help out a struggling institution.”

In any case, Azziz said, it is prudent for merging colleges to allow for a longer runway, given the changes in the federal government under President Donald Trump and the impact that could have on approvals from agencies, including the U.S. Department of Education.

The merger between the two Catholic institutions, announced Monday, stunned the Rosemont community, even though many were aware of the school’s financial struggles. Rosemont was one of 13 colleges The Inquirer examined last fall and found it was in poor financial health, using an index developed by a finance executive at a small college in Illinois.

The transition will begin in 2027 and be completed in 2028, when the campus will become known as Villanova University, Rosemont Campus.

The development follows years of operating losses for the more than century-old Catholic college, less than a mile away from Villanova on the Main Line.

“We met as a team. It was pretty emotional,” said Tanella, the baseball player, who is a business major with a sports management focus. “No one knew this was happening. It was very shocking.”

Rosemont started the baseball team when Tanella entered the school as a freshman almost four years ago. He was a part of the program as it grew and was hoping to stay next year and coach after he graduates. He doubts that will happen now, or whether the school will be able to field a team next year, he said.

Athletes likely will want to look for other schools where they can play, said Tanella, an outfielder.

At Cabrini, between a quarter and a third of students participated in athletics, nowhere near as high of a percentage as at Rosemont. After Cabrini announced in June 2023 that it would close a year later, the number of athletes shrunk by nearly half, said Kate Corcoran, the former Cabrini athletic director who now works in that role at Millersville University. There were 370 athletes on the 2022-23 roster, compared with 190 in 2023-24, Cabrini’s final year.

Cabrini, however, was able to run all but two of its existing sports — women’s basketball and women’s volleyball — during that final year, said Corcoran, who worked at Rosemont before moving to Cabrini.

» READ MORE: With only 10 players left, Cabrini’s softball team wants to win the conference for its last season

The size of the Cabrini softball team went from 20 players to nine in the final year. Men’s lacrosse shrank from 61 players in spring 2023 to 27 the following year, Corcoran said.

Christopher Taylor, 18, a freshman media communications major from Yeadon, said he plans to stay at Rosemont next year for its final basketball season, as long as there is one. Many athletes are looking to leave, he said.

“I’m going to give Rosemont its last chance,” said Taylor, who plays point guard. “For this last year, I would say, ‘Let’s go out in a bang in our last go-around and try to get a championship and leave our mark on this school.’ We don’t want this school to be forgotten. We love this school.”

Taylor, like other students, is upset over the merger announcement and the loss of his final two basketball seasons at Rosemont.

“Having that opportunity taken away from us was very disappointing and very hard to fathom,” he said. “We all have a plethora of unanswered questions and concerns.”

But he also said he has faith that his coach and mentors will help him to find a new school for his junior and senior years.

For nonathletes, the transition might not be quite as jarring. Mark Laywhyee, a sophomore political science and communications major from Philadelphia, said he is leaning toward staying because of the time and logistics involved in a transfer — some friends lost a lot of credits when they transferred to larger schools last year — and the possibility of having to pay more at another college.

“Rosemont was very generous with financial aid and scholarships,” he said.

His professors, he said, have told him they want to help make sure he has everything he needs to graduate on time.

“If they are willing to fight, then why abandon ship,” he said. “I would hope to be able to stay and make something meaningful out of this.”

Laywhyee said he also feels an obligation as editor of Rosemont’s recently revived student newspaper, the Rambler. And, he added, he is grateful for the long runway given for students to be able to stay and graduate.

“It’s a better deal than most schools closing are getting,” he said, “a more dignified ending than most. But an ending is still an ending, so it doesn’t feel great.”