EDUCATION
the CollegiuM: higher eduCAtion to sAve souls A new CAtholiC College in MArylAnd eMbrACes trAdition while thinking innovAtively to MAke eduCAtion More AffordAble n BY COLLEGIUM PRESIDENT EDWARD SCHAEFER
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e opened the doors of Collegium Sanctorum Angelorum (The Collegium of the Holy Angels, called The Collegium for short) in the fall of 2021 in historic Hagerstown, Maryland, on the eastern coast of the United States. We are a classical liberal arts undergraduate college, founded to meet some of the major issues facing higher education today.
THE CHALLENGES The challenges facing higher education today are numerous. I will focus on three. • First, there is a declining pool of students. Birthrates in the United States have been falling for years, and this decline is now offering colleges, which are largely built on a financial model of perpetual growth, fewer students to feed that growth. • Second, there is the spiraling cost of college. The average tuition today at a four-year, private college is almost $33,000/year. This does not include housing, meals, and additional costs such as books and travel. The full cost is over $45,000/year. • Third, with regard to Catholic institutions, the data show that a high percentage of young Catholic adults stop practicing their faith either during their college years or shortly thereafter. (Pew foundation studies put this percentage at about 80%. Some studies put it as high as 93%.) Whatever is happening in Catholic colleges, it does not appear to be helping young Catholic men and women strengthen their 36
INSIDE THE VATICAN NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2022
Left, Collegium President Edward Schaefer at an orientation day for students and parents. Below, students in class and a moment of common prayer
faith or preparing them to live lives of virtue that will get them to heaven. What is worse, families are paying exorbitant costs for this.
THE COLLEGIUM The Collegium was founded to address these issues: directly, relating to cost and the kind of faith formation that young people receive in college; and indirectly, relating to declining birth rates by preparing young Catholic adults to live truly Catholic lives, in which they come to see that the primary purpose of marriage is to cooperate with God in His work of procreation. First, let’s discuss the issue of cost. One of the areas where costs have exploded in colleges is that of middle management: deans, associate deans, directors of this and that. While colleges have added these positions with good intentions, generally to keep faculty from having to take on more and more administrative work — often created by government — the result has been a large number of positions that add to the cost of running the institution but have little or nothing to do with creating income. In addition, colleges have invested in large infrastructures with many amenities to attract students. These amenities come at great cost, and none of them “pay for themselves,” except for housing, if all the housing units are filled. The Collegium is addressing the area of cost in four ways: WE HAVE ALMOST NO POSITIONS THAT ARE EXCLUSIVELY ADMINISTRATIVE. All administrators teach, and all faculty
