What happens next for small Catholic college sports?

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

One of the most rewarding things about running Extra Points is that no two days are ever the same, in large part because the off-the-field forces that shape college athletics is such a massive beat. Nearly everything, on some level, is a college sports story. Labor issues, legal issues, political news, demographic shifts, economics news…all of this impacts college sports.

This week? I’m thinking about religion. Specifically, Catholicism. Stick with me here for a second, I promise this isn’t a shameless ploy to try to grab some of that Pope-related SEO, or an elaborate bit.

Once upon a time, many students attended Catholic K12 schools. In fact, according to the Journal of Catholic Education, enrollment across K12 schools reached over five million students in the 1960s. Roughly 13% of all American students attended a Catholic primary school. And then those students graduated, many of them decided to enroll in Catholic colleges.

Not just Notre Dame, Boston College or Georgetown, mind you. But also at dozens and dozens of the small, Catholic liberal arts colleges all over the country. Those types of schools would later become the bedrock of D-III, along with multiple conferences at the D-II and even D-I level.

But that isn’t what today looks like.

Enrollment in American parochial education is in decline, and has been for several years. According to the previously linked study from the Journal of Catholic Education, enrollment in Catholic K12 schools has dropped to roughly 1.8 million in 2021. A recent Cardinal Newman Society report also noted that over 200 Catholic schools closed or merged in 2020-2021. Less than 4 percent of US students now attend Catholic primary schools.

As best as I can tell, there are multiple reasons for this change.

Perhaps the single biggest? Catholic education is a lot more expensive than it used to be. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, many Catholic K12 schools were heavily staffed by nuns and priests. But the number of folks becoming priests in the US has been in decline for decades, which has forced Catholic schools to increasingly rely on laypeople to serve as teachers and administrators…and those laypeople command higher salaries and require different benefits. As labor and healthcare costs have jumped, many Catholic schools have had to raise tuition, making them a less attractive option to many of the lower and middle class families that relied on them decades ago.

I don’t live in a particularly expensive or fancy part of Chicago, but the tuition to send my two daughters to our neighborhood Catholic elementary school would be more than I paid to go to Ohio State. Tuition for just one kid would be more than my wife paid to go to BYU. It’s a lot of money!

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