Catholic schools across New York City are falling like dominoes thanks to skyrocketing tuition prices and a deteriorating connection to religion, according to experts and dismal statistics.
In just the past month alone, a shocking seven institutions announced they would be shutting their doors for good at the end of the academic year — following 13 others that fell to the same fate in the years since the pandemic, battered by overall enrollment plummeting a jaw-dropping 23%.
The newly announced closures mean 12% of the Catholic Schools that operated in the five boroughs in 2020 will no longer exist by the summer.
That’s not even counting the half-dozen other Catholic schools that merged with other schools to bolster their quickly diminishing ranks.
“I think it’s really nothing more basic than money,” said Robert DiNardo, director of the Institute for Catholic Schools, to The Post.
“They’re not really turning away from Catholic schools — it’s that they can’t afford it,” he said of the families of students.
Parents also might be less willing to shell out for the private education as religion becomes less of a focal point of life across the city, said James Wolfinger, dean of the School of Education at St. John’s University.
“The connection to the parish is not as strong as it used to be,” he said.
The 23% drop in enrollment at Big Apple Catholic schools in the past five years translates to roughly 11,500 fewer students across the five boroughs.
Catholic schools in The Bronx have seemed to suffer the highest concentration of lost students. The borough boasted around 13,400 Catholic students during the 2018-2019 school year now only serves 8,000, according to archival data pulled from the Archdiocese of New York.
Five of the seven schools revealed this month to be shuttering in June are in the borough, including the 177-year-old Immaculate Conception School.
Trustees for the school, billed as the oldest Congregation of Christian Brothers educational institution in the country, blamed “decades of financial distress” and “plummeting enrollment” for the shutdown.
Elementary schools Our Lady of Refuge, St. Lucy School, Sacred Heart and All Hallows High School, which has stood in Concourse since before Yankee Stadium was built, will also close down at the end of this academic year, the Archdiocese of New York announced.
The downward trend is nothing new for Catholic schools across the city, but institutions experienced brief optimism during the pandemic when enrollment saw a boom. The religious institutions were more likely to keep their classrooms open as public schools turned toward remote learning.
But such in-person education was evidently not worth the price. In Brooklyn and Queens, 11 elementary schools and two high schools have permanently closed since. Another four in Staten Island and The Bronx were lost when they merged with other institutions that were also struggling to keep up their numbers.
St. Mark the Evangelist, an elementary school tied to the first Catholic church in Harlem in Manhattan to welcome black practitioners, and Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Academy in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, are the only schools slated to close this summer outside of The Bronx, with the latter citing financial constraints and declining enrollment.”
The 122-year-old elementary school saw its student body halve in the past five years — with just 85 students across grades kindergarten through eighth grade enrolled for the upcoming year.
The seven shutdowns mark an acceleration of the exodus from Catholic schools in the Big Apple — families have been flocking out of the expensive classrooms for years in search of more affordable, secular options.
Some schools have explored more creative options to stay afloat: Fontbonne Hall, an all-girls high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, recently added sixth to eighth grades primarily to support the students from Visitation when that school closed in June, the archdiocese said.
Annual tuition for the high school stands at $16,000 before fees in 2025, compared to $13,330 in 2020.
Last month, the Mary Louis Academy in Jamaica Estates, Queens, announced it would be following the same model but wouldn’t say whether dropping enrollment at the $11,200-per-year school was to blame. The same education at the school cost about $9,000 in 2020, according to one parent, and just $6,000 in 2011.
“Obviously, paying the tuition is a huge expense,” DiNardo said. “And you realize that your tax money is going toward public education, so [parents are] already paying, indirectly for public school education.
“Now they have to get the money that they have to pay out of pocket for Catholic school education. So in a sense, they’re paying double for the child’s education.”
Vouchers — which are government-funded certificates that sponsor students at Catholic schools — is the clearest answer to saving the institutions from completely drying out, according to DiNardi.
The Archdiocese of New York, as well as the Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens, do offer some financial support, but New York state does not have a school voucher program that allows students to use public funds to attend Catholic schools.
Wolfinger said families’ lessening connection to the Church only hurts the situation.
“Life used to be organized much more around the parish itself,” he said. “If you went back a couple of generations, you had a society that was much more religious and, around here, much more Catholic.
“The kind of values that were taught in a Catholic school were really important to a large segment of the population. But, there’s not as much of a deference to institutions that there used to be,” he said.
That’s not to say there’s not a market for the Catholic school experience, Wolfinger said. It’s just not as attainable when parents are also battling skyrocketing inflation.
Public schools require very few fees, for example, compared to the base $4,000 that most elementary Catholic schools go for on average in 2025.
“That extra cost of tuition that accounts for school is just more than they’re willing to spend if money is tight and they think that they have any kind of a decent public school in their area,” Wolfinger said.
