College closing:

Low enrollment and competition are cited as reasons for leaving downtown after less than 1 year.

Westminster College folds its Mesa campus after only one year, citing low enrollment and competition from other universities the city has recruited in recent years.

One of the five colleges that came to Mesa after the city launched a highly publicized recruitment drive announced Tuesday it is closing its satellite campus after less than a year.

Westminster College of Fulton, Mo., agreed in early 2012 to open a campus in Mesa and rented downtown space in a renovated former city court building.

Its inaugural class had 31 students. It had projected its Mesa campus to eventually have an enrollment of 1,100.

College President George Forsythe alluded to the Valley’s changing educational market in explaining the closure.

“Three years ago, Westminster saw both the need in Mesa and the opportunity for a great partnership with the city,” Forsythe said in a written statement. “Since that time a number of wonderful colleges and universities have entered Mesa and the Valley of the Sun, and Westminster — as a small, private, non-profit institution — could only be so competitive and still fiscally responsible in this ever-developing, active market.”

Westminster’s lease with the city required the college to pay $4,200 a month in rent the first year; increasing each year as they used more space.

In addition to the colleges that Mesa actively recruited, Phoenix-based Grand Canyon University, a for-profit institution, announced last year it will build a 10,000-student branch campus in southeast Mesa.

Other municipalities also have caught the college-recruitment bug. Gilbert is building a downtown campus for St. Xavier University of Chicago, which agreed last year to offer classes there. Gilbert leaders have said talks are under way with a second school.

If Westminster’s closing is a blow to Mesa’s college-town ambitions, neither former Mayor Scott Smith nor Mayor Alex Finter saw it as potentially fatal.

Smith made higher education one of his priorities as mayor, noting Arizona’s relative dearth of private fouryear campuses and the state’s low college-graduation rate.

“Obviously disappointed,” said Smith, who resigned last week to run for governor. “We thought that Westminster would have been one that would have hung in there.”

But he noted that of Mesa’s new colleges, Benedictine University, a Catholic school based in Lisle, Ill., “has been by far the most aggressive and has been by far the most successful.”

Smith said of Westminster: “I don’t know what internal dynamics are going on. My guess is they recognized it was probably a longer-term initiative than they expected and therefore wasn’t a long-term investment they wanted to make.

“There’s a reason why we brought five (colleges) in, why we didn’t put all our eggs in one basket. When you take a risk, there’s always a chance it wouldn’t work out the way you thought it would.”

Finter called Westminster’s decision “unfortunate,” but said, “When you look at the entire higher-education effort as whole, a lot of positive things are happening.”

He said Benedictine, which operates out of a refurbished historic hospital on Main Street, is growing so fast it might move into some of the space that Westminster is vacating.

Benedictine, which opened last fall, has 93 undergraduates and aims to eventually enroll 800 students.

Besides Benedictine, the other colleges that Mesa recruited are:

Wilkes University of WilkesBarre, Pa., which shares space in the Mesa Center for Higher Education with Westminster, enrolls 22 masters of business administration students.

Albright College of Reading, Pa., which operates out of a bank tower across from Fiesta Mall, enrolls 11 undergraduates.

Upper Iowa University of Fayette, Iowa, which renovated a former Borders bookstore in the Fiesta District, enrolls 40 undergraduates who attend on campus and 60 who attend classes online.

After Westminster’s announcement, Mesa issued a release saying the other two downtown schools are projecting higher enrollments for next year.

News of the closing stunned Westminster’s staff.

Hillarie Price, the Mesa admissions director, said she did not know about the closing until Tuesday, when she was called into a 9 a.m. meeting with students and school officials.

“Sixty percent of the people in the room were crying,” Price said.

Westminster, she said, gave up on Mesa too quickly.

“They sent a letter saying our enrollment was low and not growing but that is not true,” she said. “You need to give it more time. What company gives something just a year before shutting it down?”

Westminster is offering students who would like to transfer to its main campus free room and board and will honor all scholarships there.

Kairleigh Oakes, 20, is a Mesa Westwood High School graduate who was recruited to Westminster last year, when she was a student at Mesa Community College. She is a junior majoring in business.

“I was going to go to (Arizona State University) but they recruited me, gave me a scholarship and a job in their recruiting office,” Oakes said. “When I went over to look at the Mesa education center, it was bare ground. I said, ‘Are you sure there is going to be a college here?’ ”

She took a leap of faith, enrolled and has been happy, especially with the small class sizes.

On Tuesday, Oakes was in shock after learning the school will close.

“Everyone was crying,” she said. “I am not sure yet what I am going to do.”

She is considering the school’s offer of free room and board at Fulton.