Glass doors lead to the light-filled lobby of a redbrick and limestone chapel at one end of a grassy quad, where lectures and receptions were held and students testified about their faith.

Original artwork hangs on the walls on the way to the music department, chaplain’s office and recital hall, along with brass “leaves” listing the names of past financial boosters formed into the shape of a tree.

This visit to Trinity Christian College, in Palos Heights, Illinois, isn’t real. It’s virtual, captured just before the college closed in May so students and alumni could remember the campus, which is being sold off to repay more than $26 million worth of debt and other liabilities.

“Instead of being wiped off the map, this is a way to honor the legacy” of the college, said Shalom Nwaokolo, who, with his wife, Ashley, is creating the permanent digital preservation of it.

Memorializing colleges and universities in virtual reality is among the more sentimental responses to the accelerating pace at which they’re closing and projected to close.

So pronounced has this trend become, however, that it’s also resulting in more consequential steps that speak to the intensifying threat of plummeting enrollments, rising debt and other problems.

The federal government is promising to streamline the process through which struggling colleges are taken over by healthier competitors, for instance. States are ramping up protections for consumers when campuses close anyway, and there is a proposal to do the same thing at the federal level. Lawsuits are multiplying, brought by students and employees against schools that closed. And institutions are trying to identify new sources of revenue.

Twenty-two states now make private higher education institutions pay into “tuition recovery” funds, typically requiring that a percentage of tuition collected be put aside in state accounts from which students could be compensated if the colleges close. While many of these funds were started to protect students at for-profit schools, nearly half have been extended to nonprofit degree-granting colleges.

Read the full article about the wave of college closings by Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report.