Imagine a prospective college student from Maryland. Let’s call him Thomas. He isn’t sure what he wants to study, but he loves the idea of being a student in New England, where he could ski on winter weekends and hike the coast of Maine in the fall.
So he opts for a new kind of college with several campuses around New England, a couple in the heart of Boston, another nestled in the Green Mountains, another smack in the middle of Massachusetts, and so on. The campuses each specialize in different disciplines, with connections to local employers and close-knit relationships with the surrounding communities, which give each campus a unique flavor.
Thomas spends his first academic year of college reading “Crime and Punishment,” “The Odyssey,” “Beloved,” and other foundational texts on a leafy campus in Maine, sharpening his critical thinking and analytical skills in small reading and discussion groups. He spends weekends hiking, skiing, and making friends in an idyllic setting while also taking a course that helps prepare him for his first professional work experience the following summer in Worcester, where he will be a paid intern at a community nonprofit tackling poverty. He’ll spend that summer living on the school’s Worcester campus with peers and getting to know people in the city through his work.
Thomas will then be on his way to the two Boston campuses for two semesters — studying business, economics, and ethics at one campus and American history at the other. He’ll also take an art history course at the Museum of Fine Arts. He spends his second college summer in Boston interning at the State House before he heads to Western Massachusetts for an academic year spent interning at an advanced manufacturing company, while he takes courses in artificial intelligence and the visual arts.
He decides to spend his final year of college back in Boston studying economics before he starts his career working for the advanced manufacturing firm in Springfield, which encourages its employees to pursue graduate degrees after a few years of work experience. Thomas also goes back to the Western Mass. campus for sporting events and occasional training sessions to learn new artificial intelligence systems. He becomes a lifelong, loyal customer.
This dynamic regional college experience does not now exist, but it could and should.
There is currently a window of opportunity to build a uniquely New England college with multiple campuses — one that preserves some of the rich history and character of the region’s higher education system while adapting to the realities of the moment. To create this regional experience, college and university leaders would need to form a consortium. They could call it the College of New England. (Not to be confused with New England College, in New Hampshire, or the University of New England in Maine — maybe someone else will have a better idea for the name.)
The campuses in this consortium would work together to coordinate academic offerings and workforce partnerships while sharing resources, students, faculty, staff, and facilities. Centralizing many administrative and back-office functions would save the new institution hundreds of millions of dollars.
Schools could keep their individual identities and brands, but they would bring faculty and administrators from different campuses together to reimagine the student experience.
To make the concept more appealing to prospective students seeking to form a group of lifelong friends, students could move around in cohorts, depending on their studies of interest.
Moving students around would also help break the insularity that sometimes develops inside colleges. Students would become more adaptable and resilient as they worked and studied with different types of students in very different places. Spending time in several parts of New England could open students’ eyes to how communities in rural and urban areas differ, and help students figure out who they want to become and where they can make an impact.
But they could also choose to remain in one location for their entire college experience, taking online courses if their home campus didn’t offer all of the classes they needed.
Now, I know that what I am suggesting is a big ask for institutions that have for decades operated independently, but New England’s campuses need to learn to work together before any more historic schools shutter, leaving ghost campuses in their wake.
Individually, small and midsize colleges have big problems — enrollment losses, anemic working capital, rising costs. But if they joined forces, the College of New England would be built for the future. It could become a destination for students around the country.
About two dozen private colleges across New England lost at least 20 percent of their students between 2014 and 2024, and that’s even before the effects of the so-called demographic cliff — a decline in US births that began around the 2008 financial recession — really began to be felt.
Imagine if 10 or more of these campuses decided to build the College of New England together. The schools could share one president, one board (perhaps composed of the current colleges’ presidents), one admissions office, one finance department, one IT department, one fundraising team, one public relations team, and one athletics program.
There is precedent for this kind of project in higher education, mostly among public institutions, including state universities in Pennsylvania, which combined forces during the pandemic. The state merged six campuses into two to stabilize the system’s finances and better serve a dwindling number of undergraduate students. Early indications signal that the project has worked, but it faced a lot of pushback from faculty who felt unheard while the changes were being made. Critics remain concerned that the merged schools lack an identity and culture.
Learning from that experience in Pennsylvania, the College of New England could take some of the savings from real estate or facilities that no longer serve the reimagined school and reinvest it into upgrades and renovations that emphasize the unique character and history of each of the existing campuses. Young people are nostalgic for heritage brands and vintage aesthetics from the predigital age, which could give this concept a competitive edge over tech startups trying to disrupt higher ed from the outside. These schools could remain important assets for the surrounding communities and could do more to invite businesses and organizations to campus to boost revenue.
It could launch a joint capital campaign to cover startup costs associated with building new programming and connections between campuses, soliciting donations from foundations, alumni, and community members who believe higher education needs to be reimagined to better serve a changing society.
Of course, this venture would require enormous collaboration, creativity, and sacrifice on the part of faculty, students, alumni, and trustees who are attached to the brand and identity of their own schools.
I reached out to the press offices of two dozen private colleges in New England to see what their presidents thought about this hypothetical consortium, and three-quarters of them declined or did not respond to my interview requests.
One of the presidents who was willing to jump on the phone with me, Jay Gonzalez at Curry College in Milton, was intrigued by the idea of the higher ed sector adopting a more proactive approach to consolidation. He believes New England is struggling from an oversupply of colleges and acknowledges that more closures are coming. A more intentional approach to rightsizing campuses and offerings makes sense to Gonzalez, who is relatively new to higher education and seems more willing than some of his peers to challenge conventions.
He applauds the leaders of Labouré College of Healthcare, who announced in February, after 134 years of operations and several months of discussion, that it would be best for Curry College to acquire its students and academic programs, giving students and employees plenty of time to prepare for the transition. Hampshire and Anna Maria colleges, in contrast, announced their respective closures this year, leaving students and families confused and scrambling, while employees lost their jobs and received no severance pay. Now the schools’ surrounding communities are left worried about what will happen to the physical campuses.
Gonzalez says it’s hard for colleges to come to the conclusion that they are not going to survive on their own.
“There are so many pressures and stakeholders who are emotionally [involved with] the place,” he says.
A few presidents, including Joe Hartman, the new president of Western New England University in Springfield, who previously served as the provost of UMass Lowell, tell me that schools need to work together more than they currently do to share costs and improve the student experience. But he questions whether many schools will proactively link up in a formal capacity.
“How much do you anger your alumni base?” Hartman asks.
The question many leaders of New England colleges need to consider is: What would anger alumni more — teaming up with other campuses to build something innovative and lasting, or ceasing to exist?
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com.