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"Agonizing Options for Marlboro College To close or not to close? This is the question confronting many small colleges in the United States.

A number of factors have created these dire circumstances. First, student enrollment in higher education across the United States has declined due to a strong economy (Nadworny & Larkin, 2019). Second, states are no longer funding higher education to help subsidize costs, so institutions are more reliant on the tuition dollars of enrolled students. As a result, tuition at private colleges increased by more than 29% from 2008 to 2018 (Hess, 2019). Third, the coronavirus pandemic in 2019-2020 resulted in increased online education offerings, making students second-guess the need for a residential, small-college experience. Finally, the number of high school graduates has plateaued, making the landscape for interested college applicants highly competitive. These factors have resulted in sizeable drops in enrollment at many schools. Low enrollment means less revenue, and that decline has forced colleges to make difficult decisions, like choosing to cut staff and faculty to make up for budget deficits (Harlow, 2019) or simply making the choice to close their doors (Jaschik, 2019). Marlboro College, a small liberal arts college in rural Vermont, recently faced the decision of whether or not it should continue to operate as an institution of higher education. Marlboro served a specific type of studentthose who wanted to create their own academic plan, to graduate having written the equivalent of a master's thesis, and to have intentional interaction with faculty (ratio 7:1) (Zahneis, 2019). Was Marlboro's philosophy academic utopia or sadly doomed to fail? To the students who found Marlboro, it was an academic dream, but with the myriad of factors impacting its enrollment, staying open was becoming a harder reality. Marlboro president Kevin F. F. Quigley wanted to explore options rather than simply closing. He cared deeply about Marlboro and did not want it to fail. To that end, he initiated a Strategic Options Task Force, comprised of the board chair, the president, four trustees, two faculty members, and one student, to review the options for Marlboro (Marlboro College, 2019). Among the questions the team investigated included these: Could the campus still operate, but as a branch campus of another institution? Would there be a way to ensure current students didn't have a break in their academic journey? How would a campus closure impact the small town (also called Marlboro) in which the college resides? What would happen to the history and values of the school? How would students, faculty, and alumni handle a change that would most certainly impact the identification they had with the school? As the school entered the 2019-2020 academic year, it became clear that Marlboro, at best, could only remain open for a few more years (Audette, 2019b). In collaboration with the task force, President Quigley put out a call to other institutions to see if they wanted to partner with the college, ultimately talking to 10 (Audette, 2019a). The task force narrowed the options, landing on the University of Bridgeport, the only partnership that would allow Marlboro to maintain its rural campus. Marlboro signed a letter of intent with Bridgeport, a vocationally oriented institution that focuses on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and enrolls 5,000 students annually, in late July. But it was not to be. Negotiations between Marlboro and Bridgeport broke off in September 2019 (Zahneis, 2019). Surprisingly, in November 2019, a new deal was reached. Marlboro and Emerson College in Boston announced that there would be a partnership between the two institutions (Zahneis, 2019). The agreement would wind down operations at Marlboro College at the end of the 2020 school year, with the opportunity for all remaining students to transfer to Emerson College in Boston to finish their studies with their current tuition packages. Emerson agreed to hire all Marlboro's tenure and tenure-track faculty and accept any current Marlboro student, honoring Marlboro's current tuition rate if the students did not change majors. All other positions at Marlboro would cease to exist at the end of the academic year. In this process, Emerson received a transfer of assets from Marlboro, including a $30 million endowment and $10 million in buildings. Emerson College indicated that the Marlboro campus would close, and that it had no interest in having a campus in Marlboro (Audette, 2019a). Many were surprised by the announcement. President Quigley said negotiations with Emerson had been intentionally kept under wraps. "Since the collapse of the talks with Bridgeport in the middle of September, my community has really been on pins and needles, waiting for the shoe to drop," he said. "We changed how we talked about it on campus and who was involved in the process, so we had a tighter circle of people involved. There were really no updates to the community" (Zahneis, 2019). The move created a mix of feelings among Marlboro's students and alumni. A previous Marlboro faculty member felt the situation was mishandled, saying, "All of this has taken place through secret negotiations. Nobody knew what was happening" (Zahneis, 2019). This sentiment was also expressed by the residents of the town of Marlboro, many of whom were employed by the college. As soon as word became more public, one alumnus attempted to buy the institution with plans to have it run by alumni sharing (Zahneis, 2019). Through Facebook, a large following of alumni pledged to quit their jobs, take pay cuts, and help to rebuild their alma mater. They felt as though campus leadership did not think about all the alternatives to the campus closure. But, the agreement with Emerson was binding, and the university needed to move forward with the plan. Many faculty and alumni were disheartened by the course of action, and to help ease fears, Marlboro students and faculty made a number of visits to Emerson (Marlboro College Board of Trustees, 2019) to ensure that the Emerson experience would fit with the Marlboro philosophy. Current students have expressed a sense of unity over the situation. One shared, "I'm pretty optimistic about the merger. We recognize that it's the best of a bad situation" (Zahneis, 2019). At the same time, however, there was considerable concern by residents as to what would happen to the college's campus located in a prominent part of the town. To address that, Marlboro College established the Marlboro Campus Working Group, comprised of Marlboro alumni, trustees, staff, faculty, students, and a representative from the town of Marlboro, to seek proposals "for endeavors that would benefit the community and make productive use of the Marlboro campus" (Audette, 2020).