By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
Queens University Charlotte and Elon University in North Carolina will merge, with Elon expected to operate Queens University “in partnership with existing and legacy leaders,” the universities jointly announced in a news release.
The two schools are both private institutions, with Queens having about 1,800 students and Elon having about 7,300 students.
This is a significant merger in the changing American collegiate landscape, and one of the biggest ones yet in a decade of college and university closures and mergers. It also has ramifications for collegiate swimming.
Queens has a highly-successful collegiate swimming program that won 7 men’s titles and 7 women’s titles at the NCAA Division II Swimming & Diving Championships between 2015 and 2022. In 2022, they began the process of moving to Division I, and next season will be their first as a fully-fledged Division I program.
Elon does not have a varsity swimming program, though they do have an active club team. Elon sponsors FCS football, while Queens does not have varsity football.
“We are definitely stronger together,” Elon President Connie Book told The Charlotte Observer. “This bold decision by our universities ensures that in 100 years, the founders’ missions can continue to thrive. This is a decision that creates strength and it’s built on educational opportunity as the necessary seed for a community’s future.”
The conversation began with plans to create a graduate program partnership after the departure of former Queens President Daniel Lugo as the school looked for growth opportunities. In exploring that, they decided that it made more sense to merge the two schools.
“We met in March with the strategic growth committees and started with this conversation around collaboration, and we were very excited about the Elon culture with Connie’s leadership and Elon just being an impressive university,” Queens Acting President Jesse Cureton said. “They’ve been the North Star for Queens for quite some time, we thought, ‘If we were interested enough to talk about partnerships, we should be interested enough to do something much bigger than that.”
The schools said that not much is expected to change in the next two-to-three years. The Queens Board of Trustees will remain active for four years, while current Queens students are enrolled, and then 10 members of that board will join the Elon Board of Trustees to create a single 47-member board.
Students at each school will be able to immediately take courses and pursue degrees that are only available at the other institution. Elon, for example, already has a graduate law program in Charlotte, while Queens has a music therapy program.
The school hasn’t decided what the name of the Queens campus will be, though they both said they would honor Queens University. Queens is a 168-year old institution, while Elon has existed for 136 years. They also said that there will continue to be athletics at both campuses, though the details of the merger are expected to be worked out over the next year.
Queens saw a 13% enrollment drop in 2024, while Elon reported an 11.6% decline in enrollment for fall 2025. Elon cited the “demographic cliff” caused by the falling U.S. birth rate at the start of the Great Recession in 2008.
The combined university is expected to have around 10,000 students and a combined $600 million endowment and be more resilient to anticipated cuts in state and federal funding.
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