DETROIT (WWJ) -- Marygrove College, a small school located on Detroit's west side for more than 90 years, is closing.
School officials informed the staff and faculty on Wednesday the school will shut its doors at the end of the upcoming Fall 2019 semester due to dwindling enrollment numbers.
The school closed its undergraduate program in 2017 due to financial struggles and low enrollment. The school was reportedly about $25 million in debt, with a $20 million operating budget and fewer than 500 students, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Marygrove continued to struggle financially after becoming a graduate-only school and numbers grew even thinner. There were only about 100 students enrolled for the upcoming semester and only two of them were new students.
Marygrove was founded as a Catholic women's school in the early 1900s as St. Mary's College before moving to its current location near 6 Mile and Wyoming on Detroit's west side and changing its name to Marygrove in 1927. The school began admitting male students in 1970.
School president Elizabeth Burns told WWJ the enrollment trajectory was bleak, leading to the closure.
"We calculated the number of students we would need and we weren’t anywhere close," Burns said. "Our trajectory for applications for the fall was not such that it gave us any confidence that we would come near and that we were on a trajectory to complete a turnaround"
Burns says this decision was the hardest the school's board has ever had to make.
"It was something that they prayed over, that they thought about, that has been discussed," Burns said. "It was one of the options that was discussed in 2017 when we just closed undergrad, the entire campus was closing down."
The closure of the school will not impact the P-20 educational campus that is set to open this fall in partnership with the Detroit Public Schools Community District, the University of Michigan, the Kresge Foundation and others.
Marygrove officials are working with Oakland University, and potentially other schools, to accommodate students who are a year away from completing their degrees. The Rochester school says it has embarked on a plan that will allow those students to complete their degrees at OU and they say they're committed to making sure Marygrove students have a solid understanding of the academic course transfer process and a clear path to continuing their education.
Oakland will work closely with deans and faculty in the days ahead to collaborate on crafting appropriate teach-out plans.
Burns says Marygrove is doing all it can to try and help some students finish out their degrees where they started.
"All our students are being asked to contact their advisors to get academic counseling because we need to know, can we finish them? Can they take enough courses in the fall so they can graduate?"