Henry Neil wasn’t just an Eastern Nazarene College student; he grew up there. Right in the apartment building next to the tennis courts, in housing for employees like his mother, who worked in the finance department.

The rhythm of college marked his whole life – sleepy summers and fresh energy in the fall when students returned to the small Christian school in Quincy, Massachusetts. The ENC community was his lifelong community, and ENC was always going to be his college. And then it was gone, with one email that arrived on a sweltering June day.

“One of my friends said to look at our emails, and that he was sorry, and he was going to pray for all of us,” Neil recalled.

The email announced the school was closing after more than a century in Quincy. With that, ENC became the latest college in New England to shut its doors.

In the last decade, 32 colleges in New England that offered four-year degrees have closed or merged, including 11 since 2020. Massachusetts has seen 12 schools shut down or merge since 2015, the most in New England. Vermont is next with 11.

Losing a college is a blow to communities big and small, where students bring life, jobs, local investment, spending, and eventually resumes to local employers. And it’s a jolt to a region famed for higher education.

But warning lights have long been flashing for higher education, in New England and nationwide. More people are questioning if college is worth the cost, and now, college-aged populations are set to shrink as the dreaded “demographic cliff” looms.

The so-called cliff began forming with the start of a dip in U.S. birth rates between 2007 – 2008 that continued for years. Next fall, there just won’t be as many 18-year-olds to fill freshmen classes. The Western Instate Commission for Higher Education projects a 13% decline in the number of high school graduates from 2025 through 2041, and experts say more college students are going to be receiving emails like the one Neil got last summer.

New England has more at stake as pressure on higher ed keeps rising

The pressure on higher education may be nationwide, but how well colleges handle the stress is particularly important in New England, according to Riley Sullivan, a lead policy analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston who studied the regional impact of COVID-19 campus closures.

That’s because higher education employs about 4% of the region’s workforce – more than twice the national average, according to a report from the Boston Fed’s New England Public Policy Center. The percentage rises to about 10% in some more rural areas, Sullivan said.

Nearly 277,000 New Englanders are directly employed in higher education, and the sector has created about 562,640 regional jobs, according to the New England Board of Higher Education. Sullivan added the impact extends well past those numbers to the indirect employment colleges and universities generate.

“It’s the students and money these schools bring in from outside the region, the local businesses they support, and the vendors they contract with,” he said. “Some schools are major anchor institutions in their communities.”

These schools all need a steady stream of students, and New England is doing less than other regions to supply them. The six New England states have six of the nation’s seven lowest fertility rates, with Vermont's being the lowest.

Collectively, New England’s colleges and universities serve more than 1.1 million students, and Sullivan said they need to attract more from outside the area “in order to sustain the colleges and universities.”

Drawing students from a shrinking population base is just one pressure facing colleges in New England, and everywhere else.

The College Board estimates it costs $62,990 a year to live at a four-year private college (before financial aid and scholarships), and many families aren’t willing to take that on. The total amount of U.S. student loan debt has increased 248% since 2006 (to $1.81 trillion), and it seems to be wearing people out.

A recent Pew Research Center survey asked if a four-year college degree is worth it if it requires taking out student loans. Just 1-in-5 respondents (22%) said yes. That may be in part because for many jobs today, employers are emphasizing developing skills over obtaining formal degrees.

Schools are also dealing with a significant drop in international students. NAFSA: Association of International Educators estimated that as many as 150,000 fewer students would attend college in the U.S. this fall after a variety of visa restrictions were enacted before the start of the 2025 – 2026 academic year.

And schools took a big hit during the COVID-19 pandemic – especially those heavily funded by student tuitions. Enrollments at private and public four-year colleges dropped for three straight years between 2021 – 2023 before rebounding, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Amid all this, colleges – especially in the Northeast – are being hit by universally high costs in energy, health care, labor, and more, said Rob McCarron, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts, or AICUM.

“I think a lot of people fail to acknowledge that these … institutions are operating in an environment of significant cost pressures,” he said.

Once-thriving experimental school succumbs to common problem: plummeting enrollment

Ben Koenig arrived at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, in 1968, the year before playwright David Mamet graduated and exactly two decades before Goddard awarded a diploma to Trey Anastasio, lead singer of the rock band Phish.

Goddard was founded in northern Vermont in 1938 as an experimental school that encouraged innovation and self-sufficiency, and its unique approach drew Koenig, a New York City native. Goddard was offering a new program in which Koenig spent two weeks on campus connecting with faculty and students. Then, he could continue his studies back home in New York and return to Vermont periodically.

But Koenig found he preferred life in Plainfield. The community was active and alive. Regular gatherings to hear musical performances by artists from Indonesia to Ireland were just one example of that.

“All this culture had come (to Plainfield), and it really was because of Goddard,” he said. “After my second year, it was just so attractive and so different here … that I ended up staying here, and I basically haven’t left.”’

Goddard, however, is gone. It closed in 2024.

Koenig, who’s run The Country Bookshop in Plainfield since 1974, said it was no secret the college – Plainfield’s largest employer for years – was struggling financially. Town clerk Bram Towbin said a critical shift came in the early 2000s, when Goddard switched to a “low-residency” program, which meant students would live on campus for only a few weeks each year.

“From an economic point of view, having those students around all the time was vital (to Plainfield),” Towbin said. “It really just changed the whole tenor of the town.”

In January 2024, the school announced it planned to go completely online. Then, it announced in April that it was closing, citing “looming” financial insolvency and low enrollment, which had dropped from 1,900 students in the 1970s to 220.

The Goddard campus has since been purchased by developer Mike Davidson’s company, Ledgeworks. He’s planning new housing, which this flood-stricken area in Vermont desperately needs. He also envisions the property hosting arts and cultural offerings, to continue the spirit Goddard established.

Koenig said it’s part of a “new beginning” for Plainfield.

“Yes, Goddard is closed … but it seems like there's a lot of new energy,” he said. “It’s like a rejuvenation of the place.”

Davidson said Vermont’s recent string of college shutdowns has huge implications, which he’s hoping his project can help counter. Vermont has just nine four-year colleges and universities left.

“Once you eliminate six or seven educational institutions – the magnets for youth – the flow of future Vermonters will slow to a trickle,” he said. “We are combating that.”

What do struggling schools look like?

Goddard and Eastern Nazarene College shared two characteristics common to struggling schools: They were smaller and private.

Private colleges don’t have the possible backstop of state money when finances get shaky. And smaller schools can be more dependent on student tuition to fund operations, said Dubravka Ritter, a special advisor on higher education finance at the Philadelphia Fed.

“Larger institutions are generally more resilient, because they tend to have a more diversified mix of revenue,” said Ritter, who has studied how to best predict college closures. “They don't rely on tuition revenue quite as much.”

Even some smaller, private schools that seem flush with funding are facing major stresses in the current higher ed environment, as shown in public disclosures.

Earlier this year, Middlebury College in Vermont projected a $14.1 million deficit for its fiscal year, noting that enrollments were “lower than we planned for.” The school said the enrollment shortfall accounted for $8.7 million of the deficit.

In June, Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, announced it would cut the faculty size by up to 30% over three years and eliminate some majors. It cited, in part, “unprecedented pressures on institutions from national demographic changes impacting enrollment.”

Middlebury has an endowment of nearly $1.6 billion. Clark’s is $501 million.

Sullivan, the Boston Fed lead policy analyst, said that while a large endowment can help cover some of a school’s costs, it doesn’t necessarily mean an institution is financially healthy. He added that a lot of endowment funds come with tight restrictions on how they can be spent.

“Schools with a large endowment are more likely to have higher investment returns,” he said. “But if a college is continually operating at a loss, they can’t just keep dipping into their endowment funds.”

While some schools are public with their struggles, it’s not always easy to tell when a college is in danger. Mount Ida College in Newton, Massachusetts, spent $30 million on a campus makeover in the years before it abruptly announced in the spring of 2018 that it would close at the end of the semester.

The announcement left students and faculty reeling. Transfer options for the fall were limited and unclear, scholarships that families had been counting on to pay for college disappeared, and 280 faculty and staff were suddenly unemployed.

The closure was so unexpected and chaotic that Massachusetts passed a law in 2019 to prevent similarly sudden shutdowns. The law requires the state’s Department of Higher Education to annually assess whether each institution has the resources to continue operating for 18 months.

If an institution can’t meet that standard and is deemed “at risk” of imminent closure, the school must post that notice publicly. It must also devise “contingency closure plans,” which include multiple transfer options for students in every program offered.

Could similar requirements be useful in other states?

Constantia Papanikolaou, chief legal counsel at the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, said the law is about consumer protection at heart.

But she said it can also help institutions assess and adjust their strategies to try to avoid the “at risk” designation and abrupt closure.

“ENC always bounced back,” until it didn’t – how do schools relieve the pressure?

In retrospect, ENC’s closure wasn’t really all that sudden.

Rob Purpura is a Quincy native, Eastern Nazarene College graduate, and the former director of the college’s education department. He saw decline during his 15 years at ENC, but he said the holes always seemed to be patched up somehow.

Purpura was there as ENC’s undergraduate enrollment dropped from around 500 to 200. He was there as dorms closed, the theater and English departments were disbanded, budgets were slashed, and jobs were combined. He never once got a raise. But he also says he never worried the school would shut down. The ongoing challenges just became part of everyday life at ENC.

“ENC always bounced back in some way,” he said. “Something, you know, magically happened, and we were able to continue through.”

Some of ENC’s decisions in recent years are certainly up for debate, Purpura said. But in the end, he thinks the school just couldn’t keep up in the ultra-competitive higher ed environment in New England, which is filled with larger schools with bigger pockets that offered more programs and degrees.

“We didn't have the resources to be able to jump on every bandwagon,” he said.

So, what can colleges do when facing daunting competitive pressures and inescapable demographics?

Two miles away from ENC, Quincy College is figuring that out. The two-year commuter school now offers four-year degrees to add to its appeal, and it strives to be sure its value is clear to prospective students. President Rick DeCristofaro said colleges can’t just say a degree will lead to a good career. They need to lay out exactly how the college can make it happen.

“What we're doing is we're creating these pathways,” he said.

Robert Merth, associate director of policy and research at the New England Board of Higher Education, said the free community college Massachusetts began offering last year is one route to a less expensive four-year degree.

Postsecondary schools are also expanding dual credit/enrollment programs that allow high schoolers to earn college credit to save time and money in pursuit of their bachelor’s degree. And Merth said some schools are experimenting with shortening the time it takes to earn a bachelor’s to three years.

Meanwhile, colleges are trying to expand the market of adult learners.

“A lot of adults want to better position themselves financially at their employers or at another employer, so they'll go back to school and get a degree,” Merth said.

McCarron, from AICUM, thinks more schools will seek to save resources and strengthen themselves through collaboration on things like research, equipment, and whatever else can work.

Do emerging demographic trends come with a silver lining?

But no matter what tactics they adopt, few doubt some tough times are ahead in higher ed, and people and places everywhere will feel it.

Henry Neil, the former ENC student, is now finishing up his degree at Gordon College, north of Boston. His family found a new home close to Quincy, but he still feels the loss of his old one.

One of his former neighbors oversaw shutting down the ENC campus. He told Neil it was like “living at a funeral every single day, every moment of the week.”

“Which is dramatic,” Neil said. “But I do think there's truth to it, too.”

Ritter, from the Philadelphia Fed, said there’s a silver lining to consider: The coming decline in birth rates is less like a cliff and more like a gradual downward slope, or a “bunny hill.” Schools have more time to prepare than many think.

McCarron is confident colleges will rally to meet what’s ahead, and communities will pitch in.

He said higher ed’s benefits are so numerous – including a healthier tax base, workforce, and cultural life – that it makes sense to help strengthen colleges when you can. 

 “Colleges and universities are kind of the cultural and economic fabric of Boston and the whole New England region," he said.