A Road Trip to Dead and Dying Colleges

Higher education has seen a wave of university closures in recent years. While data has been valuable in understanding the scale of these difficulties, there are real people and places behind the numbers. I decided to do a classic American road trip to dead and dying colleges this past summer, chronicling what the sector was losing through ethnographic research. 

The road trip was more than 3,000 miles long and brought me to 12 campuses, taking me through the Rust Belt region—to Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Syracuse and Cincinnati—to Plains cities like St. Louis, Oklahoma City and Tulsa and finally back home to the West Coast, with stops in Santa Fe and Albuquerque along the way.