Marlboro College, a liberal arts schoolhouse in southern Vermont with fewer than 200 students, is looking to fold into a larger institution after years of declining enrollment and mounting financial troubles.

College officials announced potential plans Wed to transfer Marlboro's academic programs to Emerson College, a individual institution in Boston, by the start of the fall 2020 semester. Marlboro'south campus is expected to close at the end of the 2019-20 academic year, co-ordinate to a statement from Emerson emailed to Education Dive.

Marlboro had been exploring whether it could proceed to operate on its own. But a "baleful" drop in tuition revenue — from $7 million in 2012 to $2 one thousand thousand in 2018 — made that impossible, Kevin Quigley, Marlboro'due south president, told Didactics Dive in an interview.

As office of the deal, Emerson'southward Establish for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies will exist renamed the Marlboro Plant for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. Marlboro students volition accept the option to keep their studies at the Plant. Tenured and tenure-rail kinesthesia may choose to teach there, according to a joint press release from the two colleges.

Meanwhile, Emerson will get Marlboro's $30 one thousand thousand endowment and its real estate holdings, which are valued at $x million. Those funds will be used to endow the Institute and could assist Emerson improve its credit rating, The Boston Globe reported .

Emerson has been expanding its footprint away past partnering with strange universities and has seen recent growth in its awarding numbers, but its finances take been hampered by debt taken out to renovate facilities.

"Emerson'south vision is to become a global hub for the arts, communication, and the liberal arts," Emerson President Lee Pelton said in a statement emailed to Didactics Dive. "With this new brotherhood, Emerson is even better poised to proceed this forward momentum now and well into our future."

"When my colleagues and I await at Emerson … it really feels similar at that place's a great alignment," Quigley said. "We run across the potential to strengthen and deepen the Establish every bit part of our brotherhood."

Emerson and Marlboro hope to confirm what they telephone call "a strategic alliance" past July 2020.

If the deal goes through, Marlboro will go one of the latest small liberal arts colleges to either shut or consolidate with another institution as competition heats upwards for students amid enrollment declines. Schools with fewer than i,000 students and loftier tuition disbelieve rates are particularly susceptible to closure, co-ordinate to a contempo report from EY-Parthenon , which has worked with Marlboro to observe a partner.

The trend has hitting New England particularly hard, and it'southward probable to worsen in 2026 , when the supply of high school graduates in the region is expected to dramatically pass up.

"There's going to exist a ton of mergers across the landscape," Michael Horn, a higher ed consultant and writer, said in an interview with Education Dive. "A lot of schools are hurting in New England right at present ... (and) the pressures on these schools are going to go worse before they go better."

A 'cardinal claiming'

Marlboro, which was founded in 1946, is similar to other small New England liberal arts colleges that take shut down in recent months. Students create their own courses of study, grade sizes are kept small and the entire campus can vote on collegewide issues.

It has been rocked in contempo years by issues that are plaguing other minor institutions beyond the country. The college'southward enrollment has steadily declined later on peaking at around 350 students a decade and a half ago. And its operating deficit was expected to hitting $iii million to $4 million in 2018, the Brattleboro Reformer reported.

That forced Marlboro to consider iii options: reform the college so information technology could stay open on its own, look for a partner or shut down entirely. Knowing the get-go possibility might non pan out, the college pitched itself as a potential partner to 70 other colleges, Quigley said.

Its proposed arrangement with Emerson isn't the get-go such bargain the higher has pursued, notwithstanding. Before this year, it floated the possibility of combining with the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, simply halted those plans "due to concerns around the sustainability of a merged institution," according to Marlboro officials.

At the aforementioned time, the college was in the process of overhauling in a bid to stay open. The faculty and staff had revamped the curriculum to cater to what students want, and the higher had invested more in fundraising and student back up, Quigley said.

"In that location's going to be a ton of mergers across the landscape. A lot of schools are hurting in New England correct now ... (and) the pressures on these schools are going to get worse before they get meliorate."

Michael Horn

Higher ed consultant

But all that wasn't plenty to counter falling tuition revenue. "I'll tell you lot, information technology'southward very, very hard ... (to) say you tin't make it on your own even though we've taken all those steps," he said. "All those successes we had weren't sufficient to address our fundamental challenges."

Beyond the latest revamp attempt, in 2015 Marlboro launched a since-abandoned program called the Renaissance Scholars that offered iv years of tuition to one pupil from each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. And late last yr, the college announced it was slashing its tuition by a 3rd — from nearly $40,000 to $26,500 offset in 2019-20 bookish year — every bit a way to make pricing more transparent and recruit more students.

Tuition resets have grown in popularity as a fashion to concenter students, merely only about half of colleges that cutting their prices see a bump in freshmen enrollment the get-go year, co-ordinate to a recent study from Lucie Lapovsky, an economist and onetime college president.

Other small-scale colleges have used strategies similar to Malboro's to stay open, but not all of them have been successful. Several colleges — including New England's Green Mountain, Newbury and Southern Vermont colleges — have airtight this year under financial and enrollment pressures.

Simply other small New England schools take been successfully picked up past larger, more stable institutions. In 2018, Boston University merged with Wheelock College to create a new school of teaching named later on the latter institution. And the Berklee Higher of Music combined with the Boston Conservatory in a similar manner in 2016.

Horn, the education consultant, sees an opportunity for colleges to go ahead of looming market pressures by using mergers strategically, not as a terminal-ditch attempt to avoid total closure.

"Students tin win if these mergers occur earlier," he said. Some institutions "are forgetting about the impact on students when they close in a rush."