Concordia University Law School, Boise, Idaho.

Concordia University School of Law is on the brink of shutting down, a collapse that would make it one of seven non-elite law schools to close or merge in recent years.

The parent university of the Boise, Idaho, law school—Concordia University in Portland, Oregon—announced plans Monday to close at the end the spring semester as a result of shrinking enrollment and mounting debt. The university is 115 years old.

The fate of the American Bar Association-accredited law school remains unclear. Officials said this week that they are looking for another institution to take over the seven-year-old law school so that it can remain open.

"As part of the difficult decision to close the campus in Portland, the board also decided to give Concordia Law permission to find a willing and viable parent institution," interim law Dean Latonia Haney Keith told a Boise television station. "This process is underway, and we are currently engaged in active conversations with multiple institutions interested in an affiliation with the law school. We will have more details in coming weeks about Concordia Law moving forward."

Haney Keith did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. But in earlier interviews, she declined to identify the institutions Concordia has approached about taking over the law school. The dean of the University of Idaho College of Law, which is the only other law school in the state, told the Idaho Statesman newspaper that it is not among the entities in talks with Concordia. The law school currently has 190 students, according to the ABA.

If Concordia Law closes, it will be the seventh ABA-accredited law school to close or merge since 2014, joining the likes of Whittier Law School, Charlotte School of Law and Arizona Summit Law School. But unlike those closures, Concordia would be the first law campus to close because its larger university is shutting down. In fact, the law school's fortunes had looked to be on an upswing.

The school gained full ABA accreditation in the spring of 2019 after some early stumbles. That, in turn, helped the school double the size of its first-year class to 90 in the fall of 2019. And Concordia is one of four law schools in the country with an "ultimate bar pass rate" of 100%. (That means that each of the school's 2016 graduates passed the bar exam within two years, according to the latest figures from the ABA.)

But it remains to be seen whether another university will want to take on the law school at a time when legal education is far from a safe bet. Officials at Valparaiso University hoped to transfer its law school to Middle Tennessee State University after deciding in 2018 to close the underperforming Indiana law school. But state regulators in Tennessee rejected the plan after a consultant concluded that the transfer would cost more than anticipated and that the state did not need a seventh law school.

Concordia officials met with law students Monday morning to apprise them of the situation.

"They're hearing it for the first time so they had to take that all in," said Haney Keith. "We have a very family-centric approach to education, and so there is a lot of trust between the students, faculty and staff."