After 41 years in operation, The Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, a graduate school for acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine in Portland’s Old Town, announced Thursday that it will close.

It becomes the latest college training practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine to close across the country, and at least the second private school in Portland, to announce its dissolution this school year. Multnomah University, a private Christian school in Montavilla, announced last fall that it would merge into Jessup University because it could no longer afford to operate independently.

The Oregon College of Oriental Medicine lost half of its enrollment in the last four years, it said in a news release. College officials said fewer students are entering the field amid higher-education enrollment declines and because the cost of getting trained in acupuncture and other forms of traditional Chinese medicine has in many cases outpaced what students can earn in the field.

Administrators also blame a surge in homelessness, crime and drug use near the college that they say turned off prospective students and “gutted” the value of the building at NW First Avenue and Couch Street.

The college relocated from its original campus in southeast Portland to the building in Portland’s historic Chinatown in 2012. College leaders bought the dilapidated former Globe Hotel and spent $15 million renovating it to Leed Gold standards.

Like other Old Town Chinatown buildings, it was affected by the pandemic exodus from the area and the subsequent rise in homelessness.

“People were sleeping in doorways and defecating on the pathways around OCOM and breaking windows and harassing students,” said board Chair Travis Kern. “Our patients didn’t want to come downtown; our students didn’t want to come downtown; our staff didn’t want to come downtown.”

The building, which has a rooftop deck near the Willamette River, used to be a draw for students, Kern said, but in recent years students have withdrawn applications after campus visits. Property values have fallen so far that the college owes more on the building than it is worth, said Phil Lundberg, college president.

Enrollment in the college, which offered masters-level and doctoral programs, fell from around 220 students in 2019 to 135 last fall. School leaders projected a continued decline in the fall of 2024.

Earning a master’s degree in acupuncture at the school was expected to cost nearly $74,000 this year. Completing a graduate program in traditional Chinese medicine could cost students up to $120,000. Tuition, which ranged from $26,000 to $30,000 this year, rose up to an average of 4.7% annually across the college’s programs during the pandemic, when school officials say inflation and the expense of adapting to COVID precautions drove up the cost of providing an education.

“The actual problem here is that the education is extraordinarily expensive,” Cailin O’Hara, a graduate of Oregon College of Oriental Medicine said in a video posted to Instagram. “…If people can’t afford these educations they never will be positioned to pay off their debt. How is this sustainable?”

Kern said regulators of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine schools demand a high number of training hours, which makes the programs expensive to run. Students typically attended the Portland college’s graduate programs full time for three or four years, he said, sometimes taking on additional loans to cover their living expenses. The debt is challenging to pay off when acupuncturists often earn between $50,000 and $75,000 a year, Kern said.

Last year, Kern said the college looked at how it could rebuild programs to cost less money, but discovered it couldn’t cut more than 10% and still be compliant with accreditors. It also went through two rounds of layoffs during the pandemic and received a $2 million COVID relief loan from the Small Business Administration.

“I just see a whole row of barriers preventing us from being able to be agile and make the changes necessary to stay afloat,” Kern said.

The Oregon College of Oriental Medicine has submitted a plan to state and federal officials that would allow current and future students to move their degrees to the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland and Five Branches University in California. Lundberg expects some faculty to be absorbed by other institutions, but said around 100 people will have their livelihoods impacted when the college shuts its doors.

Its closure means the loss of one of the first acupuncture schools in the country, said Amber Reding-Gazzini, an alum and president of the Oregon Association of Acupuncturists. The college helped “level up” the profession, she said, setting high clinical standards, advocating for acupuncture’s inclusion in hospital systems, regulation by the state medical board and coverage under the state’s Medicaid plans.

“It’s really like losing one of the matriarchs of the profession,” Reding-Gazzini said.

Multnomah University, originally founded in 1936, had also been losing students in recent years, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported. Enrollment was in the 900s in the early 2010s but had fallen to fewer than 600 in 2021. University officials announced last fall that it was merging into Jessup, a California-based Christian university that has been growing enrollment in the last decade, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Since May 1, the former Multnomah University campus has been operating as The Multnomah campus of Jessup University, and it is enrolling students for the fall of 2024.

Multnomah filed a notice with the state on May 7 saying that as part of the changeover, 81 full-time employees and seven part-time staff would be laid off. However, the notice says that Jessup university intended to hire those former employees back.

A Jessup representative has not responded to questions seeking to confirm whether all 88 staff members will be hired on.