Former Birmingham-Southern College students adjust to life on new college campus

MONTEVALLO, Ala. ( WIAT ) — The first day of class is an exciting time for many college students, but for former Birmingham-Southern College students, the occasion is bittersweet as they have to start new schools.

“It’s been an adjustment period, but I’m always looking for, like, a new experience,” said Jay Gillispie, a University of Montevallo basketball player and grad student who transferred from BSC.

Many people say when you pick a college, you’re picking your home for the next four years. Some students thought they had found their home at BSC until the school closed for good in May. Now, those students are having to find their home once again on a new college campus.

“Montevallo really felt like home to me,” said Taylor Barrow, a senior at Montevallo who transferred from BSC.

“I just felt like on my visit here, coach made me feel at home and it’s just the place I wanted to be,” Gillispie said.

Fifteen former BSC students are starting their first week at the University of Montevallo.

”I love BSC with my whole heart, it’s home always and forever, so I think having to accept that I wouldn’t have a degree from BSC,” Barrow said. “I really looked for somewhere else that I knew would be an equivalent.”

While the first half of the year was full of uncertainties and big life changes for BSC students, some of the transfers say Montevallo made it easy to transition to a new school.

“In the first few weeks of trying to figure everything out, it was like all me. And I didn’t, like, of course I had the help from my friends and family, but it was kind of just something you had to figure out really fast,” said Koestler Anderton, a junior at Montevallo who transferred from BSC. “But to have a school come in and be like ‘we will figure this out for you, don’t even look at it,’ that was just, like, the breath I needed, so here I am.”

“It was a really tragic situation, and so you know, our hearts went out to all of the students, the faculty, the staff that were at Birmingham-Southern,” UM executive admissions director Audrey Crawford said. “So just from a humane perspective, being there for the students that needed a transition and somewhere to land, and particularly those that were looking to stay at a liberal arts college and to stay in the Birmingham area.”

Compared to BSC, UM is much larger, with over 3,100 students on campus, but transfer students say it still has the small school feel they fell in love with at BSC.

“Despite the situation with the school and everything, I’ve really enjoyed meeting all these new people, and there’s a different atmosphere here at Montevallo than at Birmingham-Southern, so I’ve loved getting to meet different people from different walks of life that I haven’t known already,” Montevallo junior Sarah Hartley, a transfer from BSC, said. “Forward Ever, Falcons.”

UM says this fall’s freshman class is the largest it’s had since 2012 with nearly 600 freshmen starting classes. The university says over the last couple years it has added majors and a nursing program to boost enrollment as well as bringing additional sports teams to the campus. While this year’s freshman class is one of the largest, UM is preparing for a dip in enrollment come 2026 because the school says less children were born during the 2008 recession.

“Parts of our country will see as much as a 15% decline in the number of college-bound students and so I think it’s going to be harder and harder for universities across our country to have enrollment growth,” Crawford said. “I think we’ll keep working as hard as we can here at Montevallo and continue to add programs and things that are relevant for high school students to combat that.”

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