The College That Closed and the Degree I’m Still Paying For

Cardinal Stritch University charged Ivy League prices, targeted adults who felt they had no options, and closed abruptly in May 2023. I was one of those adults. Here’s what I actually got for my money.

Cardinal Stritch University closed in May of 2023.

Not a planned closure. Not a dignified wind-down with adequate notice and transfer pathways and the institutional grace of an organization that understood its obligations to the people inside it. An abrupt closure. The kind that leaves people mid-degree, mid-semester, mid-whatever-they-were-building-when-the-building-disappeared underneath them.

I was not mid-degree when it closed.

I had finished years before.

But I felt the news in a specific way, not grief, not satisfaction, something more complicated and more honest than either of those. The particular feeling of a suspicion confirmed. The validation of something you knew without being able to fully prove.

They’re gone.

The degree is still on my wall.

Cardinal Stritch was a private university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

It presented itself with the pricing of an institution that carries weight. The kind of number on the tuition page that implies rigor. That implies selectivity. That implies the return on investment is commensurate with the cost because institutions that charge that much must be providing something worth that much.

It targeted working adults.

This is the part I want to linger on because it is the part that matters most and the part that gets talked about least.

They were not recruiting traditional students, eighteen-year-olds fresh from high school, with time and bandwidth and family support and the luxury of being a student as a primary identity. They were recruiting people like me. People with jobs and families and obligations and gaps in their schedules and the particular kind of desperation that comes from feeling like you are behind and running out of time, and this might be the door that’s still open.

They found those people.

They enrolled those people.

They took those people’s money.

I was desperate.

I would not have used that word at the time. At the time I would have said: I am being strategic. I am investing in my future. I am doing what needs to be done.

The word underneath all of that was desperate.

I needed the credential. I needed it in a format that fit around the life I was already trying to manage, the job, the health issues, the mental health history I did not yet have adequate language for, and the general condition of being a person whose margin was thin and whose options felt limited and who had learned to make decisions from scarcity rather than abundance.

Stritch was there.

Stritch was willing.

Stritch was structured in a way that said: we see you, we can work with your life, we will give you what you need.

What they gave me was not what they implied they were giving me.

Here is an honest accounting of what I learned at Cardinal Stritch.

I learned how to write a long paper.

I want to be precise about this because precision is what the institution did not teach me and I am trying to practice it anyway. I learned the structure of academic arguments. Introduction, body, conclusion, citations formatted correctly. I learned to produce documents of significant length that demonstrated familiarity with the assigned readings. I learned the form of academic writing without the substance that should fill the form.

I did not learn quantitative methods.

I did not learn qualitative research design.

I did not learn how to read a study critically, how to evaluate the methodology, assess the sample, understand what the findings actually prove versus what the authors claim they prove. I did not learn statistics. I did not learn program evaluation. I did not learn the intellectual tools that would have made the credential mean something in the rooms where credentials are supposed to mean something.

I learned how to write a long paper.

They gave me a degree for that.

They charged Ivy League prices for that.

The model was not accidental.

This is what I understand now that I did not understand when I enrolled. The working adult education model, at Stritch and at the many institutions like it that proliferated in the 1990s and 2000s, was not designed around what working adults needed. It was designed around what working adults would complete.

Those are different things.

What working adults needed was rigorous, well-resourced education that took their life circumstances seriously without using those circumstances as a reason to lower the standard of what was being offered.

What working adults would complete, given their limited time, their competing demands, their need to stay employed while enrolled, their relative inability to simply stop everything and be a student, was something more forgiving. More flexible. More oriented toward getting through than toward going deep.

The institution optimized for completion.

Because completion generated the tuition payment.

Because completion generated the graduation photo.

Because completion generated the alumni status and the reported outcome and the accreditation metric.

Learning generated nothing you could put in a spreadsheet.

So learning was optional.

Not officially. Not in the mission statement. In the operational reality of a model that needed bodies to finish programs and could not afford — financially, institutionally — to have too many people fail or drop out.

They needed me to pass.

They did not need me to actually know things.

I went to Cardinal Stritch because I felt I had no other options.

That is the sentence I most want the people who designed that model to sit with.

Not because I want them to feel guilty, guilt is unproductive and I have spent enough of my life energy on emotions that don’t move things forward. But because that sentence is the thing they were counting on. The feeling of no other options. The desperation that makes a person look at a price tag that should raise questions and not raise them because the door is open and you are tired of doors being closed and you just need to get through this one.

They found people in that feeling.

They built a business model around that feeling.

They charged accordingly.

And then they closed in May of 2023 and the people who were mid-degree had to scramble and the people who had already finished were left holding credentials from an institution that no longer exists and the people who were still paying off the loans kept paying.

I am fifty-three years old and I am rebuilding my education.

This is the part that arrives with complicated feelings.

Not just the time it is taking, though the time is real. Not just the money it is costing, though the money is also real. But the particular feeling of sitting down with a Coursera course from MIT or Johns Hopkins and recognizing, in the first week, what rigorous instruction actually feels like — and understanding for the first time what was missing.

Not missing from me.

Missing from what they gave me.

The difference matters.

For years I assumed the gap between my credentials and my capability was mine. That I had failed to extract what was there. That a smarter or more disciplined or more focused version of me would have gotten more out of what I paid for.

That is not what happened.

What happened is that what I paid for was not what was promised.

I did not fail to extract the rigor.

The rigor was not there to extract.

I am taking courses now that cost a fraction of what Stritch charged.

MIT program evaluation through edX. Qualitative methods from the University of Amsterdam. Statistics from Johns Hopkins. Cornell Systems Thinking. The University of Minnesota graduate courses that will put me in a room with the faculty who will eventually evaluate my doctoral application.

These courses are teaching me things.

Not the form of academic work.

The substance.

The actual tools — the methodological frameworks, the analytical skills, the research design competencies — that the credential I earned at Stritch implied I had and did not give me.

I am building the floor that should have been built thirty years ago.

At fifty-three.

With my own money.

On top of a full life that does not pause for the construction.

I am not telling this story to be bitter.

I am telling it because it is not only my story.

Cardinal Stritch enrolled thousands of people. Institutions like it enrolled millions. Working adults who felt they had no other options, who paid prices that implied rigor, who received credentials that implied competence, who went out into the world with degrees that said one thing and foundations that delivered another.

Some of them figured out the gap.

Many of them didn’t.

Many of them looked at the distance between their credentials and their outcomes and concluded that the gap was theirs. That they should have done more with what they were given. That something was wrong with them specifically.

That is what happens when a system fails you in a way that looks like your own failure.

That is the Accommodation Trap inside an educational institution.

That is what thirty years of working adult education models produced at scale.

And most of it is still running.

Stritch closed.

The model didn’t.

The degree is still on my wall.

I am still building the education it was supposed to represent.

I will finish building it.

Not for them.

Despite them.