Oppose the Elon/Queen's University Merger!
Website for alumni group against the Elon/Queen's University merger. Come join us!
About Our Cause
Stop the insanity!
Our group is actively fighting to stop the needless dilution of the Elon brand, but we need your help to convince the administration to abandon the idea.
Links to Stories About the Merger
Specific Questions to Ask at Elon Town Hall Meetings:
-
You use the phrase "stronger together" when describing the merger. Please specify exactly how this merger will:
-
Stem the 18 percent decline in Elon enrollment over the past two years?
-
Stem the 30 percent decline in Queens enrollment over the past five years?
-
-
Queens University is a low-ranked regional school (17th in the Southeast) for B students (3.4 average applicant GPA), how does this merger not seriously dilute Elon, which is a nationally ranked university, for A students (4.05 average applicant GPA)?
-
The "Sprint Team" you announced is primarily staffed by full-time employees of Elon or Queens. How will they be able to make this merger work when it is their side hustle and not their full-time focus?
-
How can you describe this as a "sprint" when even serial corporate acquirers take two years to fully integrate acquisitions?
-
No one on the "Sprint Team" has any experience with merging two schools, why do you think they will have any success at this?
-
You relied on Boston Consulting Group when making this decision, will you make their report public? (And if not, why not?)
-
Separately, what is the turnaround plan for Queens?
-
-
A turnaround of Queens would likely take $70-100 million. Beyond covering the $8.7 million annual Queens budget deficit, you have not announced one dollar of investment to turn around Queens.
-
What is the turnaround budget?
-
Where will you get the money?; and,
-
Why wouldn't that money be better spent at Elon?
-
-
The addition of professional schools (engineering and nursing) at Elon was supposed to boost undergraduate enrollment and address the enrollment cliff. That has failed.
-
Will you shutter those programs since they have not performed as expected?
-
-
Elon has a 75 percent admissions rate and is still losing enrollment. The market is telling you that Elon's value proposition is not convincing.
-
How are you going to change that?
-
*** BREAKING ***
September 19, 2025: Elon tour guides are telling prospective students (today) that the Queens University merger is for graduate school facilities.
(This implies the "Gangster Move Theory" below is the likely explanation.)
Quick Facts and Questions
-
Private college mergers are desperation Hail Mary plays of failing institutions on the verge of bankruptcy.
-
Here aresome private colleges that have merged in the last few years: University of Findlay and Bluffton University, Seattle University and Cornish College of the Arts, Lackawanna College and Peirce College, Bay Path University and Cambridge College.
-
QUESTION: Are these the names that Elon now aspires to associate with?
-
-
Queens University of Charlotte has total undergraduate enrollment of 1,373; is ranked No. 17 in Regional Universities South, and has an SAT Range of 1110-1300.
-
In other words, it is Elon circa 1986.
-
QUESTION: Why is Elon going backwards?
-
-
Queens University is failing and likely heading towards bankruptcy.
-
The school is operating with an interim President, a hallmark of crisis. If the school were healthy, it would have been easy to find a new president before the prior one stepped down.
-
Undergraduate enrollment was 1,766 in the 2018-19 school year. It was 1,373 in 2023-24. That's a 22 percent decline.
-
For a tuition-dependent school like Queens, that represents significant financial hardship.
-
Elon has also had declining enrollment for the past two years.
-
QUESTION: Why are we acquiring a low-quality asset with worse enrollment trends than ours - and declining revenue?
-
If the play is to acquire the Queens real estate portfolio, the smart move would be to let them go out of business and then buy the assets at cents on the dollar out of bankruptcy.
-
-
Elon will lose its name. (Skip to the end of this Axios Charlotte article.)
-
This will be part of the rebrand, where both schools will come to have a new name to operate under.
-
QUESTION: Is this just a backdoor way for Elon to get away from the Elon Musk association?
-
136 years of tradition gone.
-
Pure Speculation on Undisclosed Strategies that Might Explain Things
The Hugh McColl Theory
-
Charlotte billionaire and former Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl has endowed an MBA program at Queens University and is on the Queens board.
-
In order to save Queens, he gets Elon to agree to take it over right away.
-
In exchange for that, McColl gives $1 billion (or pick your number) to the Elon endowment.
-
In the next few years, the new Elon/Queens entity is renamed McColl University.
-
Sound crazy? This exact scenario recently happened with Virginia Wesleyan changing its name to Batten University after an estimated $150 million in total donations by Jane Batten.
Is a billion-dollar donation worth it to Elon? I believe it would be. It would accomplish a number of things, including:
-
Ending tuition dependence for Elon.
-
Allowing Elon to focus on quality instead of quantity (expressed over the past 30 years in a doubling of the undergraduate enrollment).
If this is the plan, then calling the Elon/Queens transaction a "merger" is wildly misleading and Elon President Connie Book should disclose all this now so that everyone can understand the reasoning and evaluate the tradeoffs.
The Gangster Move Theory
-
Elon's true motive just a real estate grab.
-
Post-merger, Elon puts Queens into runoff, keeping the school open for another three years so that all currently enrolled students get their degree, but no new students are admitted.
-
Sports are shut down immediately. (I can't find an annual report that breaks this number out, but I would guestimate the annual athletics budget to be in the $5-6 million range.)
-
-
This scenario is plausible.
-
Queens has a $164 million endowment and $125 million in total liabilities, this means Elon could liquidate the endowment, pay off the debts, and would have a $39 million cushion while closing down the Queens operations.
-
In the end, Elon would have acquired all the Queens real estate for nothing and might still have cash left over.
If (as the Elon tour guides are saying to prospective undergraduates) the merger is purely for graduate school facilities, it is actually interesting. Elon had 805 graduate students last year. Now Elon would be able to offer all of them cheap housing in downtown Charlotte as part of the deal, and still have roughly 600 rooms left over to grow.
As above, if this is the plan, then Connie Book has truly gone gangster-mode and you would have to tip your cap to the pure brass to pull off a Machiavellian deal, while telling a completely different story to the world. The cost would be high. No one would ever trust Elon again, in anything.
Ruthless, but effective. If this is the plan, it should be disclosed.
The Gangster-ish Move Theory
-
As I think this through more, this is becoming my highest probability scenario.
-
It's basically the same as the above, a pure real estate grab, but instead of proactively shutting down the Queens undergraduate operation, Elon just lets it wither until it has to be euthanized.
-
A few more years of double-digit enrollment declines and no one will argue.
-
Then Elon converts all the rooms into graduate school housing, as described above.
-
At the same time, Elon offers any remaining Queens students the ability to transfer their enrollment to Elon with the promise to accept all Queens credits.
-
This plugs the 18 percent enrollment shortfall at Elon over the past two years.
-
-
-
Why is this likely? It's actually obvious from what has not been said in all the official announcements and press releases.
-
If Elon was really going to turn around Queens University, it would take at least $50-70 million, a team of 10-20 full-time staff working on it, and a five-year plan to execute it. In addition, Elon would need to dump in at least $9 million per year just to cover the Queens annual budget deficit. That easily gets you into the $100 million range for the turnaround.
-
That's not going to happen. Elon doesn't have the money.
-
-
Furthermore, we also know this is true because there has not been one word in all the announcements about a turnaround plan or any discussion of how much money Elon is going to pump into Queens.
-
If a real turnaround were planned, Elon would have announced it on day one and touted how much money it was going to invest.
-
Indeed, Elon would already have 50+ percent of the money in hand and be very proud of it.
-
Elon (and all non-profits) never announces any big project without having the funding side at least 50 percent done. Elon lines up the big donors way before it announces any plan to the general public. That way, the plan appears to have huge momentum and it generates excitement.
-
-
There has been no turnaround plan announced.
-
There has been no investment plan announced.
-
The announcements say that Elon and Queens have been planning this merger since mid-2024. A year and a quarter is plenty of time to formulate a turnaround plan and line up the funding.
-
The turnaround and investment plans don't exist... because turning around Queens undergraduate is not the plan.
-
The Queens undergraduate operation is going away and all those rooms will be converted into Elon graduate student housing.
This makes a lot of sense because running two separate undergraduate schools under one roof is just plain weird (which is why Elon's tour guides are not mentioning it to prospective students) and wildly brand dilutive. However, having graduate school operations off campus is completely normal.
Queens University Financial Filings
Queens University has quietly been maxing out on its credit line and heavily withdrawing from its endowment, and (in our opinion) would likely go bankrupt within a few years without an Elon bailout or a transformational gift. Last year, Queens ran an $8.7 million deficit.
It's credit rating is BBB-, barely above "junk" level, and was downgraded in January.
Below are some of the 2024 financial filings, which have been pulled from the MSRB website for the Queens University 5.25% of 47 bond with CUSIP: 74443DHH7:
Connect with Us
Join the fight to stop this truly awful plan and get breaking news updates.