Are mergers the most likely route that troubled private colleges will take?

Many experts seem to think so:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/07/07/colleges-struggle-some-look-partnerships-and-mergers-relief

When I was a young fellow, fresh out of the military and in my first higher-ed job in the mid-Seventies, private higher education was going through a somewhat similar crisis to the one we are facing today.  The Vietnam war had just ended.  Many young men who were in college only for the draft deferment promptly dropped out.  In Cleveland, where I was an editor-writer in the Communication Department at Case Western Reserve University, the pressure was increased by the emergence of Cleveland State University and Cuyahoga Community College as major competitors at the undergraduate level.  CWRU had in fact only recently (1967) been created via the merger of Western Reserve University and Case Institute of Technology, next-door neighbors along Euclid Avenue in East Cleveland.  The new university suffered through a few years of multi-million dollar deficits and emerged as a strong player, indeed one of the top 25 R1 universities in the US today.

Back int he seventies, it was widely believed that a major flushing out and restructuring would occur.  In fact, only a handful of the weakest non-profit private colleges went away.  Many more did indeed merge.  More recently, I might point to the acquisition of the Westminster Choir College in Princeton by Rider University, just down the road in Lawrenceville NJ in 1992.  WCC is now a world-class music school known as the Westminster College of the Arts.
http://www.rider.edu/academics/colleges-schools/westminster-college-of-the-arts

So... I would predict more mergers, few closings, as the current restructuring of the private, non-profit sector of American Higher ed proceeds apace.