Mount Ida College, a small private college in Newton, Massachusetts, founded in 1899, told its roughly 1,500 students on April 6, 2018 that it would close at the end of that spring semester — about six weeks later. There was no teach-out year, no orderly wind-down, no time to plan. Students weeks from graduation, and others who had just paid deposits for the fall, learned almost overnight that the institution issuing their degrees would not exist by autumn. The abruptness, more than the closure itself, is why Mount Ida became the defining cautionary tale of the American college-closure era.
The mechanics were brutally simple. Mount Ida was tuition-dependent with little endowment to cushion a downturn, and it was carrying significant debt into a shrinking market for traditional-age students in the Northeast. A planned merger with nearby Lasell College — an orderly combination that would have protected students — fell through. With its options exhausted, the college sold its campus to the University of Massachusetts Amherst for roughly $70 million (UMass assuming the debt), turning the Newton property into a Boston-area satellite, and directed its stranded students to transfer to UMass Dartmouth, a different and struggling UMass campus more than 70 miles away.
The deal optimized for the buyer’s geography, not the students’ degrees. UMass Amherst wanted a beachhead near Boston; Mount Ida’s students wanted to finish what they had started, and many found their credits, financial aid, and specialized programs did not transfer cleanly to a distant campus. Faculty and staff lost their jobs with little notice. Students sued, alleging the college had concealed how close to the edge it was while still collecting their money; the suit was largely dismissed, but the grievance it named — a duty to warn — became the episode’s lasting legacy.
Massachusetts investigated, and in 2019 enacted first-in-the-nation rules requiring financially at-risk colleges to notify the state and prepare contingency plans before they collapse — the “Mount Ida law,” in effect. The college itself was gone, one of the first of a wave that would take Newbury, Southern Vermont, and dozens more. What Mount Ida left behind was not a campus but a template, and a warning: that a 119-year-old institution can vanish in six weeks, and that the students who trusted it are the last to be told.
Green Mountain College, a small liberal-arts college in Poultney, Vermont, traced to a Methodist academy founded in 1834, announced on January 23, 2019 that it would close at the end of that academic year, and held its final commencement that May after 185 years. It was not an obscure school. By the 2000s Green Mountain had remade itself into one of the most recognized environmental and sustainability colleges in the country — a place that built its whole curriculum around environmental literacy, that won national sustainability awards, that declared carbon neutrality, and that drew students specifically because it practiced what it taught. It was, by reputation, the greenest college in America. It could not make the arithmetic work.
The arithmetic was the familiar Vermont arithmetic. Green Mountain was tiny, deeply tuition-dependent, and had no meaningful endowment to cushion a downturn. Enrollment, which had stood above 800 around 2009, eroded to roughly 430 by the end — a loss of nearly half the student body in a decade — as the pool of college-age students in the Northeast shrank and the competition for them intensified. The college also carried heavy debt, including roughly $19 million owed to the U.S. Department of Agriculture on refinanced loans. For an institution living on this year’s tuition to pay this year’s bills, a sustained enrollment slide is not a problem to be managed; it is a countdown.
Green Mountain spent some eighteen months trying to avoid the end, hunting for a partner, a merger, a buyer — anything that would keep the Poultney campus open. The search failed. What the college did secure, in lieu of survival, was a soft landing for the people: it arranged teach-out agreements with seven institutions, and partnered with Arizona’s Prescott College — a sister school in environmental education — to admit Green Mountain students, hire some of its faculty, and host a Green Mountain Center to carry the name and mission forward. Roughly 140 students transferred to Prescott; others finished at Castleton, Sterling, Marlboro, and elsewhere.
What was lost was a college and a town’s anchor. Poultney, a village of a few thousand in the Vermont slate country, lost its largest employer and roughly $7 million in direct payroll. The campus sat empty, sold at auction in 2020 for $4.5 million, its future uncertain for years. And the broader lesson stung precisely because of who died: not a poorly run school, but an admired, mission-driven one. Green Mountain proved that doing the work well — being beloved, being green, being right — is no defense against a balance sheet with no reserve and a market with fewer students every year.
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.
The College of New Rochelle, a private college in New Rochelle, New York, founded in 1904 as the first Catholic women’s college in the state, closed in the summer of 2019 after a financial concealment that its own trustees did not discover until the man responsible had already retired. It was, by the end, a secular-operating institution serving a substantially adult and minority student body, much of it through a network of branch campuses in New York City. Roughly 3,000 students were enrolled when the board announced, in February 2019, that the college would not survive the year.
The mechanism was not the familiar enrollment cliff but a fraud. The college’s longtime controller, Keith Borge, had for years failed to pay over more than $20 million in federal and state payroll taxes while falsifying the college’s financial statements to hide the hole. When he retired in 2016 and trustees brought in outside accountants, the investigation surfaced roughly $31 million in misappropriated funds and concealed liabilities — unpaid taxes, a drained endowment, federal grant money spent on operating costs, donations counted twice. Borge pleaded guilty in 2019 to securities fraud and failure to pay over payroll taxes and was sentenced to three years in prison. By then the institution could not be saved.
What followed was, by the grim standards of the closure era, a comparatively humane landing. Mercy College — a larger neighbor in Westchester and the Bronx — entered a teach-out agreement in March 2019, registered nearly 1,700 New Rochelle students for the fall, made offers to roughly 70 faculty and staff, leased three of the campuses, and took custody of the alumni transcripts and history. The College of New Rochelle held its final commencement on August 20, 2019, ceased operations, and entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September with some $80 million in liabilities.
What was lost was not only an institution but a particular kind of access. The School of New Resources had been built in 1972 expressly to bring a liberal-arts degree to working adults who had been shut out of one; its students were disproportionately Black, Latino, and older than the traditional undergraduate. They did not run the college’s books, and they had no warning of what was on them. The dry edge of this story belongs to the concealment — a single officer who falsified the ledgers of a 115-year-old college for years. The students belong to the sober part.
Dowling College, a private college in Oakdale on the south shore of Long Island, founded as a branch campus in 1955 and chartered as an independent institution in 1968, closed in the summer of 2016 after years of declining enrollment and roughly $54 million in debt it could no longer service. It granted its last degrees and ceased operations on August 31, 2016 — the day the Middle States Commission on Higher Education’s withdrawal of accreditation took effect — and filed for bankruptcy three months later. Its closing was chaotic even by the standards of a college collapse: it announced its end, rescinded the announcement days later, and then closed for good a few weeks after that.
The arc was the familiar one of the small Northeastern regional college, compressed and accelerated. Dowling had once enrolled close to 6,746 students at its 1999 peak; by 2016 it was down to roughly 2,400, an enrollment that had fallen 53 percent in the four years before it defaulted on its bonds in July 2015. The college carried about $54 million in debt — including some $47 million in tax-exempt bonds issued through local industrial development agencies — against an endowment of under $2 million. There was no cushion. A college that thin cannot ride out a single bad year, and Dowling had strung together many.
Its survival strategy was to find a partner, and for a while it seemed to have one. In early 2016 Dowling reached an arrangement with Global University Systems, a for-profit international education company, that was meant to keep it open. On May 31, 2016, the college announced it would close in three days; on that same day, with talks reportedly revived, it rescinded the closure. The reprieve did not hold. On July 13 the board confirmed the Global deal had collapsed, and with Middle States set to revoke accreditation on August 31, the end was fixed.
Roughly 2,400 students had to find somewhere else to finish; the federal government’s closed-school provisions and transfer arrangements caught some of them. Faculty and staff lost their jobs. The Oakdale campus — anchored by a Gilded Age mansion on the Connetquot River — emptied out and, in the years after, fell to vandalism and neglect, a grand and decaying monument to a college that ran out of both students and money at the same time.
Burlington College, a small alternative college in Burlington, Vermont, founded in 1972, closed on May 27, 2016, brought down by debt it took on to buy a lakefront campus far larger than its few hundred students could ever support. The board of trustees, citing the “crushing weight of debt,” voted to shut the college’s programs, and with its accreditor declining to renew accreditation, Burlington graduated its final class — 55 students — and ceased to exist after 44 years.
The college had always been tiny and unconventional. It began as the Vermont Institute of Community Involvement, an experiment for adult learners and veterans that, in its early days, met in its founder’s living room. Even at its largest it enrolled only around 200 students, and by the fall of 2015 that had fallen to roughly 123 full-time students. It had no endowment cushion and no margin; it was, in the language of higher-education finance, a college with almost nothing behind its tuition.
The decisive event was a real-estate purchase it could not afford. In 2010, under then-president Jane O’Meara Sanders, Burlington bought a roughly 32-acre lakefront property on North Avenue — the former headquarters of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington — for about $10 million, financing it with bank loans and a note to the Diocese. The acquisition was premised on donations that had been pledged but not yet collected and on enrollment growth that was projected but never arrived. The pledged gifts came up short, the new students did not materialize, and a college of a couple hundred students found itself carrying roughly $11 million in debt against a campus it had bought for a much larger institution it never became.
What followed was a slow strangulation. Burlington sold off portions of the land to pay down the debt and reduced the balance over several years, but the financial damage and the loss of confidence had been done; its accreditor placed it on probation in 2014 over financial resources, and in 2016, when a bank declined to renew a $1 million line of credit, the college could not go on. These are the facts of a financial mechanism — an overlarge purchase financed against money that did not arrive — and they are stated here without reference to the political controversy that later attached to them.