Lessons From Vermont’s Demographic Crisis

If you typed “Bennington College” into Google last month, an ominous question would pop up in the “People also ask” section, just beneath a link to the college’s website: “Is Bennington College closing?”

It’s not. Either the algorithms underlying Google or the humans using the search engine were confused. Bennington College was merely caught up in an association with Southern Vermont College, a nearby institution that closed at the end of May after struggling for years to stay afloat. Bennington, which has a national reputation and famous alumni, would seem to be the sort of place that has little to worry about.

And yet in Vermont — at the leading edge of a decline in students that is looming in other parts of the Northeast, the Midwest, and parts of the South — no institution can be too comfortable. Southern Vermont was one of four colleges in the state to die in the past year. The others were the College of St. Joseph, Green Mountain College, and, situated just 30 miles east of Bennington, Marlboro College — although the last was more like a closure in the guise of a merger with Boston’s Emerson College. In 2016, Burlington College shuttered after an ill-conceived real-estate purchase. Vermont’s Goddard College, which has reinvented itself time and again, has been put on probation by its accreditor.

The shakeouts in Vermont and the rest of the country will play out the way they usually do in other industries: The institutions with a name and other material advantages will pull ahead and leave others behind. Bennington has started a major fund-raising campaign, beginning with a $12-million gift from a shopping-mall heiress and alumna that will pad the college’s endowment. (Known for its arts programs, the college has also started taking gifts of art from alumni, which will be sold for scholarships.) But even Bennington College, with only 700 students, an endowment of just $50 million, and a rural location, has vulnerabilities that would make a higher-ed analyst worry.

What people are experiencing in Vermont — trying to push their own institution forward, while watching others around them wither and die — may be what those in places like Iowa, Maine, Ohio, and Pennsylvania will experience in the coming decade, as the demographic crisis deepens for colleges. Administrators in those states will come to ask the same questions that educators in the Green Mountain State are asking about their own institutions: Are demographics destiny, or will colleges with a niche and stalwart financial discipline find a way through? Will a college die-off leave more students for the survivors or pull everyone down? Of particular importance in Vermont, a land of tiny, experimental institutions: What does this moment portend for the future of the small American college?

“The concerns about the future of really small colleges extend beyond New England,” says Matthew Derr, president of Sterling College, a work college with an agricultural focus and just 125 students, located in Vermont’s remote “Northeast Kingdom.” “Historically, these are the institutions that have been incubators for new ways of thinking about undergraduate education.” With the death of each Marlboro, each Southern Vermont College, the region’s higher-education options become more homogenized.

Derr says he has been asked repeatedly if the demise of other small colleges has been a boon for Sterling. “My answer to that is no,” he says. “It creates all kinds of pressures and questions about other small colleges, particularly those that are in rural places.” Sterling’s strategy — originated when the college nearly closed in the 1970s — has been to focus on sustainable agriculture, rural skills, and ecology. “We feel really strongly that we have to be a measure of the times,” Derr says.

But a niche will get a college only so far. Green Mountain College, which had consistently been rated the “greenest” college in the country, had an enviable niche that did not translate into financial sustainability. The college was sunk by debt, an inability to raise money from alumni, and internal strife.

The demographic trends have been known for years, so the closing of colleges can’t be attributed to a decline in students alone, says Will Wootton, a former president of Sterling and former vice president at Marlboro, who has written extensively about the fate of small colleges in Vermont and elsewhere. Rather, it’s about business fundamentals and a “fear of change.”

“The cause is short- and long-term leadership decisions on the parts of boards and college presidents,” he says. Small colleges have grown unsustainably, brought properties they couldn’t afford, hired the wrong leaders, and, most of all, avoided making the tough decisions that would ensure viability. “Invoking deep change in these small institutions is very difficult, and to survive the current wave, change is necessary.”

“It’s a narrowing road,” Wootton continues. “State institutions, especially, are throwing themselves at each other and growing by leaps and bounds.” Meanwhile, state governments hardly acknowledge the existence of small institutions, he says, even though they buttress whole communities.

Many rural towns through the Northeast and Midwest rely on the colleges within them. Many of these places have already seen surrounding farms slide into bankruptcy and factories shut down as jobs move overseas. The closing of a college further unravels the rural American fabric.

‘We Are Aging’

So it is in Bennington, which took an economic and cultural hit when Southern Vermont College closed. Families here used to go up to the college, in a mansion overlooking the town, to watch Division III games, and local kids enrolled there, says Stuart A. Hurd, the town manager.

“Southern Vermont was accessible to the people of Bennington,” he says. “People could enhance their educational background at a place like Southern Vermont. Those same people are not going to go to Bennington College.” After the closing of a battery-manufacturing plant in town, he says, the lack of places to retrain workers became even more apparent.

Vermont’s population grew by about 15 percent in the 1960s and ‘70s, when hippies and back-to-the-landers sought the freedom and isolation the place offered. Hurd — with a wave of gray hair, a black sweater vest, and a stud earring — moved here from Connecticut fresh out of college in 1973 and rose through the ranks of Bennington’s municipal government.

“Our population in Bennington has been relatively stagnant, but we are aging,” he says. The effect of a declining population on the local colleges “is something that perhaps as managers we should have been anticipating.” The state, he complains, puts more effort into luring outsiders to vacation in Vermont rather than trying to build a young, permanent population there.

The demographic slide and the decline of regional colleges puts an institution like Bennington College in a curious position: Although located in Vermont, it is not of this place. It draws students primarily from markets like Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, not the surrounding community. And the institutions its administrators and faculty members see as peers are distant aspirational colleges, looking up the ladder to the elite rungs above.

None of the surrounding colleges that closed had the status of Bennington, yet those closures have shaken people here.

“People are definitely paying attention in a way that up to now, on a relatively insular campus, you wouldn’t have felt so much,” says Isabel Roche, Bennington’s interim president. “It’s important in these moments for people to see the ways in which the college is moving forward and addressing tough challenges.”

That means finding partnerships, building on its reputation, and looking for chances to reconnect to place.

Locally, the college has formed an alliance with Middlebury College’s well-regarded language school, and three programs will move to Bennington next summer. The college won a $1-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to study and address food insecurity in Bennington County, and it is examining ways to revitalize parts of downtown Bennington by moving offices and residences there. Bennington is considering how to extend its brand of progressive education — in which students determine their own academic plan — to adults and other nontraditional learners.

Roche and other administrators see the crisis in Vermont as a kind of “reset” for higher education — a moment of creative destruction that prompts the institution to examine how it is serving students and what it needs to change.

How faculty members fare in a world of destruction and change will be a great test for institutions in the coming decade. For some it might be a shock. At Bennington, some speak of an “underlying nervousness” about the future of the sector. For Tatiana Abatemarco, though, it’s merely a way of life in academe today.

“It’s just the water we swim in,” says Abatemarco, who has a three-year appointment to work on Bennington’s food-security initiative. She graduated from Green Mountain College and taught at her alma mater and another pressured small institution, Paul Smith’s College. Her contract at Bennington is the longest she has ever had.

The closure of Green Mountain earlier this year was “devastating” to her.

“As someone who based her whole life off of an amazing experience at an institution, and then seeing that institution crumble, it makes you question all of your choices,” she says. “Like all of the things you based your life on, maybe they’re not sustainable. Maybe they’re not the right way to go.”

But maybe the point of a college is not being a perpetual, permanent institution, she says, but offering the education the world needs in that moment. Before Green Mountain passed away, it inspired scores of students to go into the world to fix communities, change laws, and start businesses. Peers from Abatemarco’s class have started farms and are working on breeding new kinds of cold-hardy crops, for example.

“They’re doing all this really cool stuff that is going to serve us in the long run, but it didn’t serve the college,” she says. “I wrestle with that, because I think the things that really benefit the world we live in don’t necessarily generate financial stability.”

Megan Zahneis contributed to this article.

Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.