As a result of the Great Recession, higher education in the United States suffered from the most significant financial crisis since the Great Depression (Breneman 2008; Zumeta 2010). This crisis affected all institutions of higher education since it challenged three major revenue sources: net tuition income, endowment income, and gift income (Hamill 2010; Masterson 2008b).

This study investigated how 20 private colleges and universities, primarily located in the western part of the United States, responded to the 2007–2009 Great Recession and whether and to what degree the adaptive and interpretive strategies they used contributed to their financial recovery. The results of this study describe the characteristics of more and less resilient institutions and how they responded to the Great Recession. The results of this study are based on an investigation of 20 private colleges and universities and are not generalizable to the total population of educational institutions in the United States.