The campus of the now-defunct Birmingham Southern College is being purchased by the U.S. Coast Guard.The decision confirmed yesterday by Alabama Senators Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville, along with Congressman Robert Aderholt, that the Coast Guard plans to use the 192-acre campus as a training center for cadets.In a written statement, the Coast Guard said one of the reasons the historic campus was selected is its capacity to accommodate more than 12-hundred recruits. The repurposing of the college campus is also expected to create about one-thousand jobs.
Birmingham-Southern College, a private liberal arts college in Alabama, closed in 2024 after running into financial difficulties and being unable to secure a financial lifeline from the state. The College Board of Trustees voted unanimously to close the longtime institution, officials said in a news release. The announcement came after legislation aimed at securing a taxpayer-backed loan for the 168-year-old private college recently stalled in the Alabama Statehouse.
“This is a tragic day for the College, our students, our employees, and our alumni,” the Rev. Keith D. Thompson, chairman of the Board of Trustees, said in a 2024 statement from the college. “But it is also a terrible day for Birmingham, for the neighborhoods who have surrounded our campus for more than 100 years, and for Alabama.”
The Associated Press reported last year how a number of small private colleges nationwide are struggling with a declining number of traditional college-aged students and competition from larger, richer institutions. The college of about 1,000 students is located on the west side of Birmingham, one of Alabama’s principal cities.
The decision, in 2024, to close follows years of financial difficulties and efforts to keep the institution open. The college said the financial crash of 2009 caused a $25 million loss to the value of its endowment. An audit in 2010 uncovered significant accounting errors in the budgeting of federal student financial aid, which led to budget cuts and layoffs. Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the college’s bonds after revenue declines caused the college to drew heavily upon its endowment.
The private college had hoped, at that time, to secure a financial lifeline from the state. The Alabama Legislature created a loan program last year to provide financial help to distressed colleges, but state Treasurer Young Boozer denied the school’s loan application. New legislation was introduced this year. The college said in a news release that conversations with House leadership “confirmed that the bill did not have enough support to move forward.”
Supporters of the legislation had hoped to keep the college open not just for the sake of the institution, but because of the impact on the surrounding neighborhoods if the 192-acre campus was shuttered. Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin said at that time, gthat the news of the closure is “disappointing and heartbreaking to all of us who recognize it as a stalwart of our community.”
“I’ve stood alongside members of our City Council to protect this institution and its proud legacy of shaping leaders. It’s frustrating that those values were not shared by lawmakers in Montgomery,” Woodfin said in 2024.
The school dates to 1856, when Southern University was founded in Greensboro, Alabama. That school merged with Birmingham College in 1918 to become Birmingham-Southern, with a campus west of downtown Birmingham.
