What has happened to these schools in the Cleveland Metro area???? (Akron: 2013, house)

[greenvillebuckeye]

I did some research on school enrollments for private schools (catholic) in the cleveland metro area as far back as 1978 (ODE EMIS website has all the enrollment data) and it's amazing how many of these schools have closed their doors and how some of them are barely hanging on by a thread.


School 1978 2013
Benedictine 445 375
St. Eds 1,492 922
St. Ignatius 1,165 1,495
St. Peter 462 234
Trinity 695 352
Villa Angela – St. Joe 1,048 353 (coed)
Central Catholic 746 590
Holy Name 1,298 618
Padua 1,156 729 (coed)
Cathedral Latin 361
Notre Dame – Cathedral Latin 839 (girls) 687 (coed)
St. Joseph Academy 900 (girls) 689 (girls)
Magnificat 796 (girls) 775 (girls)
Regina 842 (girls)
Villa Angela Academy 742 (girls)
St. Augustine 631 (girls)
Lake Catholic 1,351 873
Elyria 793 466
Lorain 557

Notes:
Benedictine, St. Ed, St. Ignatius, St. Peter Chanel, VSJ, Padua, and Cathedral Latin were all boys schools back in 1978.

NDCL apparently went from all girls to coed at some point along with Padua and VSJ.

CL, Regina, VAA, St. Augustine and Lorain are apparently all gone???


Observations and questions????
Why has Holy Name been cut in half!!!!!
Padua and VSJ seem to have dropped severely as well even with becoming coed
St. Ed seems to have a lost many boys as well. 500+ over the last 35 years or so.


how and why has this happened? now i understand public schools have lost enrollments too obviously. certainly some of this is on par with those public decreases.


just curious is all.

[SquareBetterThanAll]

You've got some national trends going on, like the decline of church attendance and affiliation, and some local trends, like where many of these schools are located. I think from the 70s until now, the disposable income that allowed people in places like Lorain or Parma to afford private school has declined with the loss of manufacturing jobs. And then you've got areas where people have just left, like to outer suburbs or Greenville, and there are less potential people overall.

Economically I also believe that for many people, unless you are stringently religious (and there seems to be less of those people going around), it makes more sense to buy a more expensive house in a city with better public schools than it does to plow money down the black hole of private school tuition.

[bjimmy24]

Demographics shift. Catholics used to all live near these schools, like Benny and Cathedral Latin and they'd walk down the block to get to school. Nowadays, there's just fewer people in these immediate areas. As the above poster mentioned, church is getting less and less important, so this isn't surprising. But honestly, it looks like Iggy, Eds, Lake Catholic, and Benny are still doing alright.

[Peregrine]

Not to EVEN mention the population shift and emigration.
A lot of folks moved to Avon and Avon Lake (+26,000 souls from 2000-2010).
I don't care how religious you are, you're not sending your kid to Ed's from Avon Lake. Well... not many would anyway.

More still left the area entirely.

We are down, what... almost a HALF A MILLION across the county since the mid 70's? (Guess)
Not hard to see why the numbers are what they are.

[ECBeastor]

Good points already made. I'll echo that it's just not affordable for the blue collar families anymore. Growing up I knew families with 6 siblings that all went to catholic elementary, jr high and high school and their dad was a machinist or carpenter or something like that. The real world wage gap has really widened and many of those same jobs don't support a family, much less allow them to send kids to Catholic schools. It's magnified when you add to it that the tuition has increased much faster than inflation.

Here is a excerpt from an article on why relative tuition increased so much:

Costs have risen largely because of the collapse of vocations to the religious life in the United States; the number of women religious (in previous decades the primary educators in Catholic schools) declined from 179,954 in 1965 to 57,544 in 2010. Today, only 2.6 percent of teachers in Catholic schools are nuns, 0.1 percent are brothers, and 0.3 percent are clergy, according to the NCEA; 84 percent are laywomen, and 13 percent are laymen.

Catholic schools have thus experienced a transition “from a basically free workforce in the persons of religious priests, brothers, and women (supported by religious communities) to one comprised predominantly of the laity, who rightly must receive a just wage and benefits,” says George Henry, superintendent of Catholic education for the Archdiocese of St. Louis.

“Loss of the living endowment contributed by the ministry of the religious had serious financial implications for operating schools,” says Dr. Dan Peters, superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph. “Within the last school year, the cost of K-12 education in our diocese was more than $79 million.”

[bluecarebear]

Doing general research on Cleveland, the population has gone from over 900,000 in the 1950s to under 400,000 in 2010.

[Cleverfield]

Originally Posted by bluecarebear

Doing general research on Cleveland, the population has gone from over 900,000 in the 1950s to under 400,000 in 2010.

That's true for the city proper. At the metro are level though, the population is largely unchanged.

[Peregrine]

Cuyahoga County 1970: 1.7M
Cuyahoga County 2010: 1.26M

[Cleverfield]

Originally Posted by Peregrine

Cuyahoga County 1970: 1.7M
Cuyahoga County 2010: 1.26M

The metro area is larger than cuyahoga county.

[SquareBetterThanAll]

Cleveland-Akron-Canton, OH Combined Statistical Area - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia