Money is tight and students are scarce. Can this Baltimore college beat the odds?

Notre Dame of Maryland University has managed to innovate its way out of a lot.

When enrollment was shrinking, the women’s college began accepting men and then acquired an integrative health university to double its graduate student population. When money was tight, Notre Dame leaders inked a partnership with a senior living center and began renting out facilities.

But as it turns out, innovation can only do so much for the small Catholic college perched on a hill in North Baltimore. From 2014 to 2024, enrollment fell by 35%, according to federally reported data. Last year, the university recorded about $90,000 in losses. Now, its beloved president of 12 years, who led the school through drastic changes to stay afloat, is about to retire.

Notre Dame is one of many small, regional private colleges across the country that are treading water as fewer students enroll and operating costs climb. Its next leader, Abagail Van Vlerah, hinted at more change ahead in a statement announcing her presidency last week: Higher education must be “sufficiently nimble to meet a rapidly changing world,” she said. The university declined to make Van Vlerah available for an interview.

Some things, though, can be hard to work around, including the Catholic college’s fundamental mission. It was founded 131 years ago by a group of nuns who emigrated from Germany with a goal of educating poor girls and women. That ethos continues today.

“Our mission is our greatest strength, and it’s also our vulnerability,” said Donna Carroll, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. “We educate the poor, and that can be a stressful financial model.”

According to the university, 49% of Notre Dame undergraduates are eligible for a Pell Grant, a form of federal financial aid awarded to students who demonstrate exceptional need. Undergraduate tuition plus room and board at the university has a sticker price of over $60,000, but according to federal data, most students pay about $20,000 each year to attend.

“Many Catholic institutions have tighter margins financially, so with demographic changes and that volatility, are challenged,” Carroll said.

Alicia Crosby, who earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Notre Dame, was drawn to the university partially because of its affordability. She went on to teach as an adjunct professor there for 18 years.

“I noticed that my classes were just getting smaller and smaller,” Crosby recalled.

She taught a class on event planning management that had a long waiting list when it began in 2007. By the time she stopped teaching in 2022, the class had only four students.

“It was clear the university was struggling,” Crosby said.

Strength in small numbers?

To biology professor Jennifer Kerr, Notre Dame’s small size is a strength.

“We’re able to have students do real, authentic research in the classroom even starting in their first year,” said Kerr, who has taught at the university since 2013. “Going to class is one thing, but being able to interact with everybody outside of that space is what I think makes it special.”

Though smaller class sizes are attractive to some students, they can also complicate a college’s finances: With fewer students comes less tuition revenue.

Faced with declining enrollment, Notre Dame in 2023 shed its identity as a women’s college and opened its traditional undergraduate programs to men. That “felt like a loss for a lot of people,” said Damita McDonald, the school’s senior director for university communications and public relations.

Women’s colleges have by and large seen enrollment declines and smaller pools of interested students. In 1960, there were 230 women’s colleges in the country, but by the time Notre Dame went coed, only 30 remained, according to the Women’s College Coalition.

But McDonald said admitting men helped boost the school’s small undergraduate population, which has increased year over year since the decision. In 2025, 678 full-time undergraduates were enrolled, compared to 497 in 2022, the year before men began enrolling.

Its part-time student population has also skyrocketed, largely thanks to dual-enrollment partnerships with local private high schools. Notre Dame had 1,203 part-time students in 2025, up from just 112 the year before. University officials don’t expect most of the part-timers to become full-time students; they see it as a public service.

“We saw that as an opportunity to give the high school students a head start,” said Marylou Yam, the school’s president.

The university declined to share how much money it is earning from dual enrollment.

Notre Dame is also working on recruiting more graduate students. The university is one of three campuses in the state that have more graduate students than undergraduates, but by 2024, it had enrolled about one-third fewer graduate students than it did in 2014.

Leaders at the university said the 10-year enrollment declines reflect COVID-19’s seismic disruption to higher ed.

“Once we hit the pandemic, it’s almost like a full reset” in the data, said Greg FitzGerald, chief of staff and vice president for planning and external affairs.

Still, the university struggles to turn acceptance letters into enrollment. In 2024, Notre Dame admitted about 82% of those who applied, but just 8% of those accepted enrolled, the lowest yield among colleges it considers to be its peers.

Last year, Notre Dame acquired the former Maryland University of Integrative Health, adding about 500 graduate students for a nearly 50% increase. It also made Notre Dame the nation’s first comprehensive university with a school solely dedicated to integrative health.

Yam said the merger made sense because Notre Dame is “already so strong in the healthcare professions.” The university’s most popular graduate-level programs are in nursing and education.

The university has also begun offering more online options for students, said Ryan Schaaf, an associate professor of educational technology who has taught at Notre Dame since 2010.

“A lot of our students are online,” said Schaaf, who mainly teaches graduate students. “We’re trying to pivot more into not just giving students traditional routes or degrees.”

‘The exciting part’

But as Notre Dame adds new students, it must retain and graduate the ones it already has.

The university’s six-year graduation rate for undergraduates is 60%, eight percentage points lower than the national average for private nonprofit universities, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Trouble with aging facilities hasn’t helped. In recent months, students have complained about decrepit dorm buildings that have repeatedly lost hot water and heat.

“It was hard for me to focus on school,” junior Jahbreco Dacosta said, “because it was so cold in my room.”

When Dacosta wanted to take a shower during parts of March and April, he had to trek to a different building because of a water main break on campus. He also took videos this year of brown water coming out of faucets, mold on ceilings and holes in walls.

Dacosta and sophomore Janice Agyepong planned a protest, and the university held town halls about the issue. Leaders ended up reimbursing the students between $50 and $500 for their troubles. Yam said the university solved the dorms’ problems but did not share details.

Other parts of the campus have seen more investment in recent years, even turning into moneymakers.

Leaders built a new artificial turf field for student-athletes that the university rents out. They also acquired the former Knights of Columbus building, demolished it and leased the site to Brightview Senior Living to develop a community on campus.

The community will have 170 units for independent living, memory care and assisted living. Seniors living there will be able to take classes at Notre Dame of Maryland.

The university declined to share how much revenue it is earning from the land lease. Neighboring Goucher College announced a similar move in 2024.

“We’ve had to be innovative with our partnerships,” Yam said. “The Brightview collaboration is a win-win.”

The outgoing president has seen the university through a number of drastic changes, but she said that was one of her favorite parts of the job.

“Innovation needs to be done at every institution in order to be successful,” Yam said. “No one can ever sit back and not innovate. It’s the exciting part of the work.”

About the Education Hub

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