Newbury College, a private career-focused college in Brookline, Massachusetts, founded in 1962, announced on December 14, 2018 that it would close at the end of the 2018–19 academic year, and shut its doors after that spring. It was a relatively young institution by New England standards — fifty-seven years old — and a practical one, built to put students into careers rather than to chase prestige. It had once been substantial. In 1996 Newbury enrolled roughly 5,384 students. By 2016 that figure had fallen to 751, and by the fall of 2018 it stood at about 627 — a decline of more than 86 percent in two decades. A college does not survive losing that many students; it simply takes a while to admit it.
The mechanism was the enrollment cliff in its purest form, with no fraud, no scandal, and no single villain to blame. Newbury was tuition-dependent and thinly endowed — its endowment of roughly $2 million was described as tiny even for a school its size — which left it no buffer as the Northeastern student pool shrank and competition for the survivors sharpened. President Joseph Chillo named the cause plainly: the weighty financial challenges pressing on liberal-arts colleges across the country, driven by major changes in demographics and costs. In June 2018 the regional accreditor placed Newbury on probation over its finances; by December the board concluded there was no path forward and chose to close while it could still wind down on its own terms.
Newbury did at least plan the end. Rather than strand students with weeks’ notice, it announced the closure two semesters out and arranged for students to continue elsewhere, with nearby Lasell University serving as the institution of record for transcripts and enrollment verification after the college was gone. The final commencement came in spring 2019, and the winding-down proceeded in an orderly fashion through the year.
The campus told the rest of the story. Newbury’s roughly eight-acre site on Fisher Hill — bought decades earlier from a former Catholic women’s college — was put up for sale, reviewed by the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, and sold in September 2019 for $34 million to Welltower, a senior-housing developer, to become a luxury retirement community. The proceeds more than covered the college’s debt. A campus built to start young people’s careers would spend its next life housing the end of other people’s. What closed was not a famous institution but a workmanlike one, and its death said something quieter and more general than scandal ever could: that a small, tuition-dependent college can be perfectly honest, perfectly useful, and still run out of students.
Southern Vermont College, a small liberal-arts college near Bennington, Vermont, with roots reaching to 1926, announced on March 4, 2019 that it would close at the end of that academic year, and ceased operations after the spring semester. It was a college defined by whom it served. A large share of its students were first-generation and Pell-eligible — young people for whom Southern Vermont, perched on the 371-acre former Everett estate above Bennington, was an academic home they might not have found anywhere else. That is what made its closure sting more than the numbers alone: the institution most exposed to the demographic collapse was also the one serving the students with the least margin to absorb a disruption.
The decline was steep and the finances were thin. Enrollment, which had peaked around 500 in 2012, fell to roughly 330 by 2019, and the college projected the next class would be smaller still — internal forecasts cut expected enrollment from 365 to 275. Southern Vermont carried a roughly $2 million deficit and had spent years recovering from earlier financial setbacks, including the lingering damage of an embezzlement episode and the loss of accreditation for its nursing program. As a tuition-dependent college with no real endowment cushion, it had no way to absorb a shrinking class on top of standing debt.
The decisive blow was accreditation. In January 2019 the New England Commission of Higher Education caught the college off guard, voting to require Southern Vermont to show cause why its accreditation should not be withdrawn or it be placed on probation — over the financial-resources standard the college could no longer meet. A show-cause hearing followed in late February. The day after, the trustees concluded there was no way forward and voted to close. President David Rees Evans called it devastating: a great institution whose kind of greatness had become very difficult to keep going fiscally.
The college arranged teach-out partners — among them Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Castleton University, and Norwich University — so its roughly 330 students could finish their degrees elsewhere. Bennington lost an employer and a point of access to higher education for its first-generation families. NECHE formally withdrew the college’s accreditation effective August 31, 2019, the bureaucratic full stop on a 93-year institution. What closed was not a failing diploma mill but a mission-driven college doing demanding work with the students who most needed it — proof that in the enrollment-cliff era, serving the vulnerable and being financially fragile are too often the same condition.
MacMurray College, a small liberal-arts college in Jacksonville, Illinois, founded in 1846 and for most of its life a women’s college, told its students on March 27, 2020 that it would close at the end of that spring semester. After 174 years — through four name changes, a century as a women’s institution, and a postwar shift to coeducation — its Board of Trustees voted unanimously that the college had no viable financial path forward. Roughly 500 students were enrolled at the end; about 101 faculty and staff would lose their jobs, with no severance, by their final workday on May 25.
The cause was not a single catastrophe but a long arithmetic. MacMurray was tuition-dependent with a small endowment, and it had been running deficits; the closure year would have been its third consecutive year in the red. Its enrollment had fallen by roughly two-thirds from a high-water mark above 1,500 to under 600 in its final stretch, leaving too few tuition-paying students to cover rising costs in a brutally competitive market for traditional-age undergraduates in the Midwest. The board spent more than a year hunting for new capital — a partner, a donor, a lifeline — and found none.
The timing made the diagnosis murky to outsiders, because the announcement came in the first chaotic weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. But MacMurray’s leadership was careful to say the virus was not the cause; it was, at most, the last weight on a structure already failing. The college had flunked the U.S. Department of Education’s financial-responsibility test years earlier, in 2011, 2012 and 2013 — an early, documented warning that the books would not balance forever.
What was lost was a fixture of small-town Illinois. Jacksonville is a town of some 18,000, and MacMurray had been part of it since before the Civil War, educating generations of women teachers, nurses and social workers. The students were steered toward transfers at seven regional colleges; the campus was carved into parcels and sold at auction that November, raising barely enough to pay down a sliver of the college’s debt. A 174-year-old institution closed quietly, in a season when the whole country was distracted, and left a town with one fewer reason to exist.
Wells College, a small liberal-arts college in the village of Aurora, New York, on the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake, founded in 1868 by Wells Fargo and American Express co-founder Henry Wells, told its students on April 29, 2024 that it would close at the end of that spring semester. After 156 years — most of them as a women’s college, the last two decades coeducational — the institution announced it could not continue, and it ceased operations on June 30, 2024. Roughly 350 students and 38 faculty members were affected.
The cause was the demographic and financial vise that has crushed dozens of small colleges: an enrollment cliff that left Wells with too few tuition-paying students to sustain itself. The college’s enrollment had peaked at 574 in 2007, two years after it admitted men, and had fallen to about 350 by its final year. A small college this size, tuition-dependent and carrying a modest endowment of roughly $29 million, has almost no room to absorb that kind of shrinkage. In the year before the closure, Wells posted a net loss of about $3.2 million, the latest in a string of operating deficits stretching back years.
There had been warnings. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education placed Wells on probation in 2019 over concerns about its financial and human resources; the college clawed its way off probation in 2021 when its finances briefly improved, but the reprieve proved temporary. The leadership blamed the familiar litany — the pandemic, the shrinking national pool of undergraduates, inflation, and a souring public sentiment toward higher education — and for once each item on the list was a real contributor.
What stung the Wells community was not only the closure but the speed of it: about a month’s notice, mid-spring, for a 156-year-old institution. Students mid-degree scrambled to transfer; faculty and staff lost their careers; the village of Aurora, which had grown up around the college, faced the loss of its anchor. A teach-out plan eventually steered a large majority of students to other colleges, and in early 2026 the 127-acre lakeside campus found an unexpected second life as the home of a new tribal college — but the institution that Henry Wells built was gone.
Lincoln College, a small private college in the rural central-Illinois town of Lincoln, was founded in 1865 — its cornerstone laid on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday that February, while the president for whom it was named was still alive — and it closed for good on May 13, 2022, after 157 years. By the end it had become a predominantly Black institution recognized as such by the U.S. Department of Education, serving a heavily first-generation, lower-income student body. It died of two compounding wounds: the enrollment and revenue damage of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a December 2021 ransomware attack that crippled the very systems it needed to recruit its way out of the hole. Lincoln became the first U.S. college whose closure was attributed, in part, to a cyberattack.
The financial pressure was already severe. Like most tuition-dependent small colleges, Lincoln depended on each incoming class to fund the year, and the pandemic hammered both recruitment and the auxiliary revenue — housing, dining, events — that a residential college relies on. Enrollment had crested near 1,330 in the mid-2000s; by the pandemic the college was working to keep numbers from sliding further. It was wounded but not yet fatally so. Then, on December 19, 2021, came the ransomware.
The attack, which the college traced to Iran, locked Lincoln out of the systems that ran admissions, recruitment, retention, and fundraising for more than a month. The timing could hardly have been worse: this was precisely the window in which a college recruits and confirms its next fall class. Lincoln paid a ransom — under $100,000 — and regained access in March 2022, but by then it had lost the recruiting cycle and could not see its own enrollment pipeline. When the data came back online, the picture was grim: projections for fall 2022 fell “woefully short” of what the college needed to survive, and leadership estimated it would take as much as $50 million, or a transformational partnership, to keep the doors open.
There was no $50 million and no rescuer. President David Gerlach told staff the institution would close on May 13, 2022, and a GoFundMe appeal raised only a few thousand dollars against a far larger need. The closure stranded a student body that small colleges like Lincoln exist precisely to serve — first-generation students, many of them Black, in a part of Illinois with few alternatives nearby — and emptied a campus that had stood since the Civil War. A college named for the president who saved the Union outlasted him by 157 years and was finished, in the end, by a virus and a hacker.
Goddard College, the famously experimental progressive college in Plainfield, Vermont, was chartered in 1938 — on the older root of an institution dating to 1863 — and announced on April 9, 2024 that it would close at the end of that spring semester, after 86 years. Few small colleges have left a larger mark relative to their size. Goddard pioneered the low-residency degree, a model since copied across American higher education, and built a faculty that at times included writers such as David Mamet and the poet Louise Glück; its alumni run from Mamet and the actor William H. Macy to the members of the band Phish. What it could not do, in the end, was find enough students to pay for itself. Enrollment had fallen from a peak near 1,900 in the early 1970s to roughly 220 by 2024, and the board, facing what it called looming financial insolvency, judged closure the only responsible choice.
Goddard was the work of Royce “Tim” Pitkin, a student of progressive education at Columbia’s Teachers College in the tradition of John Dewey, who founded the college in 1938 as an experiment in self-directed, democratic learning — partly as a bulwark, as he saw it, against the authoritarianism then rising in the world. Students designed their own curricula and received written narrative evaluations instead of grades. In 1963 Goddard developed the intensive low-residency model for its MFA in creative writing — short, concentrated on-campus residencies bracketing long stretches of independent study at a distance — and that innovation rippled outward into MFA and adult-education programs nationwide.
The same independence that made Goddard influential left it financially exposed. It was tiny, tuition-dependent, lightly endowed, and built on a model that, ironically, made physical enrollment optional. By the 2020s roughly 70 percent of its students were choosing the fully virtual path over the in-person residencies, eroding the residency revenue the model assumed and accelerating an enrollment decline already decades old. The college had been placed on accreditation probation in 2018 (lifted in 2020), and in early 2024 it shifted entirely online before concluding that even that could not save it.
The closure stranded about 220 students and eliminated roughly 90 jobs. To soften the landing, Goddard arranged for students to continue at Prescott College in Arizona — a kindred progressive institution — at their current tuition rate, backed by a transition scholarship fund. It was a more graceful exit than many closing colleges manage. But the institution itself was gone: an 86-year-old laboratory of progressive education, whose ideas outran its enrollment, closing in the Vermont hills where it had taught generations to design their own learning.