Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Smaller colleges all over New England reliant on tuition-based revenue — including Mount Ida (pictured above), Marlboro and Hampshire Colleges — have struggled to maintain financial stability in recent years.
When Julia Medeiros stepped onto the campus of Mount Ida College, she immediately noticed how close-knit the campus felt.
“The tour guide knew so many of the people walking by and I really like the idea of not being invisible or just lost in the crowd,” she said.
The school had the exact major Medeiros wanted and its Newton location was the perfect balance between access to the city and her home.
But in April 2018, Medeiros was in her high school Spanish class when she got a text from a friend. It was a link to an article that said Mount Ida, the school she had planned to attend, was closing. “It didn’t really solidify until they sent a general email that deposits would be refunded,” Medeiros remembered.
Since 2016, 17 colleges in New England have closed or merged with other universities. Students like Medeiros are left scrambling to find other schools to complete their bachelor degrees. Mount Ida, one of the most publicized institutions to suffer this fate, shocked the college community and the state with how the administration failed to communicate the school’s financial troubles.
Medeiros, now attending the University of Massachusetts Boston, is a first-generation college student.
“My dad cried when I got accepted into my first school,” she said. “To go home and have to tell [my family] that the school that I was so excited to go to [was closing] ... was extremely dif- ficult.” Medeiros also noted that the education at stake was one her parents themselves were never able to receive.
Universities rely on three main sources of revenue: donations, net tuition and endowment. Endowments invest in the stock market, which generally grows eight percent annually. According to Mount Holyoke Professor of Economics Mike Robinson, colleges should spend about four percent of the endowment each academic year.
Robinson said that even a school like Mount Holyoke, with an almost $800 million endowment, is still relatively tuition-dependent. For schools with smaller endowments, like Mount Ida, tuition revenue is even more important. “It’s a competitive market and you have to attract enough students who can pay tuition,” Robinson said.
But in New England, high school graduation totals have been declining, which results in fewer college students and lower enrollment goals. The projected number of new high school graduates in New England in 2031 is 140,273, over 20,000 less than its 2016 numbers.
The pressure from a smaller pool of potential students is amplified for schools whose student populations are mostly from the immediate geographic region. “Most [schools facing closure] are local ... so they’re going to directly experience this decline,” Robinson said.
Mount Ida’s sudden closure was a wake-up call; it sparked an investiga- tion by the Massachusetts Attorney General and a law that increased oversight of college’s financial status.
if they are facing financial situations “that may jeopardize the institution’s ability to fulfill its obligations to current and admitted students.” These colleges are also required to submit a contingency plan for review, which must outline how students can complete their courses of study.
Rankings also complicate the financial struggles of smaller schools. The U.S. News and World Report annu- ally compiles a list of what their criteria deem the best colleges and universities to attend. As graduation totals shrink, more “elite” schools will still have a large number of applicants to fill their quotas, but it creates a trickle-down effect.
In other words, fewer graduation totals mean fewer college applications, and if a high-ranking school accepted more students who might not have met their admissions standards 10 years ago, then a school further down the rankings list will likely admit more students on the lower end of their admissions requirements as well. The pattern would continue until “lower-tier” schools aren’t able to fill their quotas and remain financially stable.
“[Lower-ranking colleges] are going to lose students upstream ... be- cause it is all set up as a hierarchy in everybody’s mind,” Robinson said.
Green Mountain College, Southern Vermont College, and Newbury College have closed in the past year. Marlboro College, a Vermont school of fewer than 200 students, is preparing to merge with Boston-based Emerson College. Marlboro hasn’t accumulated much debt, but its expenses have outpaced its revenue almost every year since 2004. The school emphasizes a student-designed learning approach, similar to Hampshire College.
“It was like being encircled by a community that had your best interests at heart and wouldn’t let you accept anything less,” Amy Tudor, an alumna of Marlboro College said.
Under the plan, Emerson would assume the col- lege’s endowment and land. The spring 2020 semester would be the college’s last.
“Marlboro provides a rigorous academic experience for those with native intellect and strength of character that may or may not have shown itself in traditional school environments,” Tudor said. “The need for such places will only increase.”
While Mount Holyoke has never been in a crisis as severe as the closing schools are facing, it has confronted declining enrollment and has had to find ways to adapt and ensure continued financial stability. “When the baby boomers went to college, schools got bigger, there was lots of money,” Robinson said. “In the late 80s that was the first baby bust, we had classes of 450 [students], that is when we moved more heavily into the international pool.”
Other schools have expanded enrollment pools through online degree programs. Simmons University in Boston, on the eve of a potential financial crisis exacerbated by the 2008 recession, supplemented the historically women’s college campus with on- line graduate programs. Today, online learning is the school’s largest source of revenue, according to WBUR.
In the Pioneer Valley, the financial struggles of Hampshire College came to light in January 2019.
The school looked for a potential partner, entered talks with the University of Massachusetts Amherst for an acquisition and ultimately decided to retain its independence. President Edward Wingenbach has since taken over leadership.
“Our program doesn’t look anything like most oth- er college programs,” John Courtmanche, a spokesperson for Hampshire College said. “It would be a real challenge to try to merge it with a very traditional program.”
Hampshire admitted a small class size for the fall 2019 semester and laid off and redistributed faculty throughout the Five Colleges. Hampshire is now rallying alumni, including filmmaker Ken Burns, to meet its goal of raising $60 million by 2024. In some ways, Hampshire College seems like a potential model of recovery for small colleges, but the previous administration’s decision to admit a class of just 13 students exacerbated the school’s need for revenue beyond tuition. “Our five-year financial plan is to leverage fundraising until we’re back to full enrollment,” Courtmanche said.
Alumni dedicated to the niche environment of Hampshire seem to be the immediate forces behind the school’s financial recovery, an alumni network not all schools have.
Hampshire, with a current enrollment of 700 including a freshmen class of 27 students, considers full enrollment 1,100 students. While declining New England high school graduates may stifle some regional recruitment efforts, Courtmanche said that the school is a national liberal arts college. According to the college’s enrollment numbers, students come from 48 states and 21 countries.
According to Courtmanche, Hampshire’s ongoing road to recovery also involved taking a hard look at the budget and how it can be reduced “to [still] deliver a quality experience to our students.”
Courtmanche also described the school’s public financial struggles as a chance to modernize the school’s curriculum and engage more potential students. The school held weekly talks in the fall semester with the college community “to use this opportunity to innovate a curriculum for fall that will launch the college into its next 50 years,” Courtmanche said.
The deals and mergers that an increasing number of New England colleges have been involved in revealing the financial underbelly of college business. Schools have had to confront if they will be financially viable in the future, and schools interested in acquiring or partnering with closing institutions have also considered how such mergers could improve their own financial viability.
Mount Ida was facing a certain closure by March 2018, and the UMass acquisition was a swift resolution struck between the two schools so that Mount Ida students could be offered a path to finish their studies.
While UMass Amherst took on Mount Ida’s debt to acquire the campus, the University of Massachusetts system also stood to benefit financially from the acquisition. When Mount Ida closed, the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, located about 70 miles from Mount Ida and without some of its spe- cialized majors, granted students in good standing automatic admission. In a memorandum between administration officials in the University of Massachusetts system, UMass Dartmouth was estimated to make $1.6 million in additional net revenue for every 100 Mount Ida students who enrolled at the public university.
“It will have a positive impact on our operational budget, which has declined for the last six fiscal years,” the memo stated. “This would be a huge morale boost for the [UMass Dartmouth] faculty, staff and students and an indication of better days to come.”