Then came the global economic meltdown, and suddenly that struggle became an impossibility.

Late last month, the small Christian college with just 280 students and $4 million in debt announced it would have to shut down at the end of the current academic year.

"Our hearts would have said we would like to continue trying," said Cascade President Bill Goad, somberly adding he never imagined his duties would include shutting the school down. But on top of their long-term challenges, "small colleges like Cascade just don't have the slack to survive those kinds of impacts," he said.

Colleges are remarkably resilient institutions. Princeton University's Nassau Hall still bears the cannonball marks from the Revolutionary War battle that raged near campus. Dickinson and Bowdoin colleges saw their first buildings burn down, as did the University of Vermont, which also survived its first president going insane.

Still, every year, a handful of institutions go under. And while a wave of college closings is unlikely, the current economic turmoil could accelerate the pace.

In addition to Cascade, another Christian institution, Taylor University, announced last month it would close the undergraduate program at a branch campus in Fort Wayne, Ind., while Pillsbury Baptist Bible College in Owatonna, Minn. announced plans to close.

And on Wednesday, Vennard College, a Christian school in Iowa that was down to about 80 students, announced it would close at the end of the current semester - two years shy of its 100th birthday.

If more college closing announcements come, it would likely be next semester, or next fall, when schools find out how many of their students don't return.

"We've seen what's happened to family income, the financial assets of so many families," said Matt Hamill, senior vice president of NACUBO, a college business officers group. The key question is "how that will manifest itself when it comes time to enroll next fall."

There are about 4,400 colleges in the United States, and the American Council on Education has records show that only four closed in 2007.

Mergers are somewhat more common, but outright closing rare for several reasons. Nonprofit colleges don't have to please Wall Street, and many have endowments they can tap in emergencies. They also have an enviable business model. Students pay up front, often with large government subsidies. And colleges sell a product - education - that families have proved willing to pay more and more for each year, notes Roger Goodman, who analyzes college finances for Moody's Investors Service.

Still, even before the economic crisis, many small colleges were battling long-term challenges, from demographic changes away from the Midwest and Northeast, where many schools are located, to the perpetual difficulty of making the case that they are worth the extra cost over a state school.

While 76 institutions had endowments over $1 billion last year, according to NACUBO figures, about one-third had less than $50 million - even before the downturn. And NACUBO reports figures only from about 800 colleges; the rest have zero or negligible extra cash.

Some colleges - like American consumers and homeowners - may discover they took on more debt than they should have, lured by low interest rates and ambitious growth plans. Moody's figures on private colleges show median debt up 50 percent over the last five years.

That didn't look like a problem, since revenue and donations have also been rising. But in recent months, like homeowners stuck in a variable-rate mortgage, some schools have seen their debt payments surge, thanks to the collapse of a complicated line of dominos that includes bond insurers and banks. Instead of holding long-term debt at lower interest rates, they have gotten stuck with short-term obligations at higher rates - a scenario they knew existed on paper but never expected to happen.

Others have become collateral damage from the collapse of Wall Street firms. Simmons College in Boston was placed on a watch list for a ratings downgrade because of an estimated $10 million exposure in a complex interest rate swap deal with now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers.

The financial crisis is "clearly very serious," said Paul Corts, president of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities. "I think people are sensing that this is not short-term. It's something that's going to take a couple of years to play out."

Enrollment at the 102 CCCU campuses grew 71 percent between 1990 and 2004, and Corts says he has no reason to believe member schools will close. But, "then again nobody knows what the ultimate extent of this whole financial crisis is going to be," he said.

Another potentially vulnerable group is historically black colleges, which, like Christian schools, have a limited recruiting pool. Some such institutions, like Morehouse and Spelman, have healthy endowments.

But others are more fragile, especially those with low graduation rates. Banks are tightening up credit standards, and increasingly denying students at schools where students are too likely to drop out. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education has reported that there are 23 historically black colleges where more than two-thirds of entering black students fail to earn a diploma.

At St. Paul's College in Lawrenceville, Va., the graduation rate fell from about one-third to under 10 percent between 2002 and 2006, according to federal numbers collected by the group The Education Trust. President Robert Satcher said that number is higher now, but acknowledged the school faces serious financial challenges. It needs to add at least another 200 students to reach its goal of 1,000, and somehow despite the downturn must raise money to boost its tiny $4.5 million endowment.

Some students haven't been paying bills, and St. Paul's is bracing for a cut in grants the state of Virginia offers to students.

"I am confident we'll be able to survive," Satcher said. But he added, "There's going to be some difficult days ahead."

All colleges contribute to the colorful tapestry of American higher education, and something is lost when they disappear.

Goad said "micro-colleges" like Cascade, which was a branch campus of Oklahoma Christian University, offer students a level of personal mentoring that students often don't find at other schools. When they close, there's also a loss for the faith communities they are affiliated with - in Cascade's case, the Churches of Christ.

But Cascade would have needed a base of 500 students to survive, and endowment 10 times its current $1.5 million.

Lillo Brancato Jr. was a young actor with a solid resume: He made his debut in 1993 in "A Bronx Tale" opposite Robert De Niro, went on to appear in more than a dozen movies and played a doomed mobster wannabe in HBO's "The Sopranos."

Now, however, at the age of 32, Brancato faces charges of second-degree murder and other crimes in the 2005 killing of police Officer Daniel Enchautegui. Jury selection for his trial begins Monday.

Brancato's real-life troubles began not long after he befriended Steven Armento, a reputed low-level Genovese crime family associate banished for drug addiction, prosecutors say. Then his life went into a tailspin with a pair of drug-related arrests and the death of Enchautegui.

Brancato drove himself and Armento to the home of Enchautegui's next-door neighbor and the pair broke in to steal prescription drugs, prosecutors said. When they were confronted by Enchautegui, who was off duty, Armento shot the officer. Brancato and Armento were both wounded.

Armento, 48, was convicted of first-degree murder Oct. 30 and was sentenced last week to life in prison without parole.

Brancato's attorney, Joseph Tacopina, said his client's case is very different.

"Lillo didn't have a gun. Nor did he know anyone had a gun. Lillo was shot. Lillo wasn't burglarizing anyone's home," he said.

Family and friends of Brancato have said he was a good guy with a drug problem who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"He obviously had problems he kept well hidden, but that doesn't mean he should be held accountable for the actions of the man he was with, especially if that man was under the influence," former "Sopranos" castmate Chris Tardio wrote in an e-mail.

Brancato was discovered at age 15 at Jones Beach on a summer day by the casting director of "A Bronx Tale," directed by co-star De Niro.

He worked consistently through his teenage years with small roles in "Crimson Tide," and "Enemy of the State," but he never became a huge star. He appeared in half a dozen episodes of "The Sopranos" as soldier Matt Bevilaqua in 2000; his character was killed off in the mob hit's second season.

Along the way, Brancato had befriended Armento while dating one of his twin daughters.

In December 2005, prosecutors said, the actor and the older man decided while drinking at a strip club to break into the basement apartment in a hunt for Valium.

Armento, who had a lengthy rap sheet dating to 1979 that included convictions for possession of stolen property and attempted burglary, was armed with a .357-caliber handgun.

Enchautegui, who had just finished a late-night shift, heard glass breaking next door. He alerted his landlord, dialed 911 to report a possible burglary in progress, then grabbed his badge and a gun and went outside to investigate.

Enchautegui shouted "Police! Don't move!" Shots were fired. Enchautegui was struck once in the chest. Armento was hit six times. Brancato, who was unarmed, was shot twice.

Jurors in Armento's trial rejected prosecution arguments that he knew Enchautegui was a police officer, declining to convict him of first-degree murder of an officer. He was instead found guilty of first-degree murder while committing a felony.

Brancato's attorney says he's not criminally responsible for the shooting.

The hillsides ringing the luxury development of Olinda Ranch are blackened, but the neatly tended stucco homes are intact. Fickle wind direction helped, but so did stringent fire-resistant construction and landscaping standards.

Increasingly, new construction in tinderbox regions of Southern California are built with "shelter-in-place" techniques designed to allow people to stay safely in their homes if they can't escape flames.

At Olinda Ranch, what look from afar like tile roofs actually are concrete. The eaves on the 3,500-square-foot homes are boxed in so wind-whipped embers can't lodge and send the whole house up in flames. Outside, brush can't be too close to the structure. Inside, sprinklers sit above every room and in the hallways.

The construction boosted the confidence of residents like Linda Johnson, who on Saturday watched nervously as flames edged toward the 6-year-old neighborhood of 660 homes.

By dawn Sunday, Johnson was out driving, checking the scene with a friend and her bichon frise, Teddy Bear. She glittered in the morning sun, having had donned all her diamonds in case she needed to flee. Instead, she spent an anxious night in her house.

"It's your home, it's your life, it's your history," Johnson said. "It's just really hard to walk away from that."

Tony Ross also stayed put. He owns a fire extinguisher company, so he knows a little about flames.

"After last night, I know all about it," he said.

He could smile because, save for a scattering of ash that he continued to hose down, his house was fine.

Ross said one of the threatening fires started on the hillside right beyond his back yard, where idle white metal oil derricks, relics from when the area was an oil boomtown, now stand in stark contrast to the charred ground.

He was preparing to pressure-wash his side path when he heard a boom. Soon he saw flames. Raging Santa Ana winds pushed the flames across the hillside so fast that they only blackened the few trees - the fire wasn't there long enough to engulf them.

Ross' wife left, but he stayed. During the night, flames from another fire started to bear down from the east but stopped on the development's edge, thanks to crews that worked through the night. Behind them, those flames engulfed several homes in a canyon that connects eastern Orange County with western San Bernardino County.

When wildfires ravaged San Diego County a year ago, the community of Rancho Santa Fe was largely unscathed even though it was in the midst of some of the worst flames. The suburb lost 53 houses, but none in the five subdivisions that embraced "shelter-in-place" restrictions.

Rancho Santa Fe and Olinda Ranch stood in stark contrast to the Oakridge Mobile Home Park, a neatly kept community of modular homes in the San Fernando Valley in northern Los Angeles. A fire whipped by 70-mph Santa Ana winds wiped out 500 homes early Saturday. Unlike Olinda Ranch, the grounds of Oakridge were filled with flammable cypress and eucalyptus trees that lit up like torches.

More than halfway through his 2,000-mile horseback journey across the West, Mark Ryan stopped at Zeb Bell's ranch outside a tiny town in southern Idaho.

"He just showed up at my back door, all of the sudden there he was," recalled Bell, a pro rodeo announcer. "He introduced himself, and asked to just stay here for the night. It's not the first time we've had someone like him."

Bell, 61, described Ryan as a long rider - someone who rides horseback for hundreds or thousands of miles, echoes an era long gone.

For Ryan, riding across the West on his horse - Mister Doodles - to visit a friend was a chance to see the country in a way not many other people do.

"It's part of life, you just kind of get an urge to do something before you get too old," said Ryan, 46. "There's nothing like traveling 2 miles an hour."

He also left an impression on the people he met as he rode through seven states, from Oklahoma to Washington.

Ryan reckons he camped at dozens of different places, stayed with more than 60 people, and his horse and mule wore down almost 10 sets of shoes. He took with him only maps, no Global Positioning System or even a cell phone.

At some places, Ryan said, he rode on highways where cars were an arm-length away from his horse. His border collie, Halfway, accompanied him to Kansas, where she blistered her feet on hot pavement and had to be picked up by Ryan's wife, Eva.

In Wyoming, the prairie was full of rattlesnakes. At one point in the Idaho backcountry, Ryan got lost for a full day.

"It didn't seem like a big of a deal at first, but it was a lot of work," Ryan said. "Some of them mountains, boy, it got cold. Frost on the tent, rainy days and a lot of hot days. All we carried was 60 pounds of gear, at times 50 pounds of feed."

He left his hometown of Kingfisher, Okla. on June 2 and didn't reach Ferndale, Wash., a small town about 20 miles south of the Canadian border, until mid-October, almost five months on the road.

"You can't believe he actually did it," said April Smith, one of the friends Ryan was visiting. "It's kind of a John Wayne story."

She and her husband didn't believe Ryan when he said he would ride his horse to Washington.

While the Smiths waited for him, Ryan was meeting different all sorts of people. There was a county sheriff and the rodeo announcer in Idaho, a widow in Kansas, and many others. He kept the names and addresses of all of them.

In Laramie, Wyo., residents called animal control after seeing Mister Doodles and the mule - named Festus - resting at a park in town. Animal control worker Terese Bingham found Ryan reading his Bible and the animals were fine.

"It takes a lot to pull off a trip like that, not many people call pull off being alone like that," Bingham said.

Outside Brush, Colo., Floyd Pickett helped Ryan get new shoes for Mister Doodles and Festus.

"I had a lot of admiration because he had the guts to go do it," said Pickett, a retired ranch foreman. "I'm 67 years old, and I always wanted to do it."

Ryan stayed with the Smiths for a few weeks, but because the weather was getting cold he decided not to ride his horse back to Oklahoma. He looked for rides, but ended up buying an old truck, with a horse trailer for Mister Doodles and Festus, his wife said.