New York, New York, United States

All those trappings of longevity, the bronze doors and marble pulpit and stained glass, were illusory. The graduation ceremony on May 27 was the last ever for Rice, which is being closed, and the event was most significant as a symbol of the continuing contraction of Roman Catholic education in the urban settings where it has been most needed.

Over the last half-century, the number of Catholic schools has fallen to 7,000 from about 13,000, and their enrollment to barely two million children from more than five million. A disproportionate share of the damage has come in big cities.

So when a landmark topples as Rice did — and as Cardinal Dougherty High School did in Philadelphia last year, and as Daniel Murphy High School did in Los Angeles two years before that — it ought to provoke more than sentimentality or tears. It ought to sound an alarm about a slow-motion crisis in American education.

To grasp what is being lost, one needed only to look through the roster in the graduation program for Rice. With a student body that is 98 percent black or Hispanic, with 80 percent of its students requiring financial aid, virtually every graduating senior was bound for college: Penn, Cincinnati, Holy Cross, Fairfield, Iona. Four of the Rice men had received scholarships in excess of $150,000. (Full disclosure: I wrote the introduction to a 2009 book about Rice, "The Street Stops Here," by Patrick McCloskey.)

"It's unbelievable that you have a school that graduates 100 percent of the kids and sends them to college and shuts the door," said Skip Branch, a basketball coach at the school. His own son, Floyd, graduated from Rice in 2002 and went on to Middlebury College with a full academic scholarship.