Lebanon College — A Downtown Two-Year College That Ran Out of Gas

Summary

Lebanon College, a small private two-year college in Lebanon, New Hampshire, founded in 1956, posted a notice on its website in August 2014 announcing it had canceled all fall classes — and, in effect, that it would not reopen. There was no final semester, no commencement, no orderly wind-down. The college simply ran out of money in the weeks before a term that never began, and the few dozen students who had planned to return found the doors closed. "At Lebanon College we are out of gas," the board chairman, Arthur Gardiner, told reporters, which is as honest an epitaph as a college has ever been given.

The mechanism was the familiar one for a tuition-dependent institution with almost no endowment: a small school in a small market had bet its future on a single growth program, the bet failed, and there was nothing in reserve to cushion the miss. Lebanon had pinned its hopes on an Allied Health expansion — nursing and radiography degrees authorized in 2008, housed in a second downtown building — and projected a surge of new enrollees for fall 2014. Fewer than half the anticipated students signed up. The college was already carrying roughly $2.2 million in debt against its two academic buildings on the city's pedestrian mall. With neither the enrollment nor the cash to operate, it folded almost overnight.

The college had no campus in the traditional sense. Beginning in the late 1990s, under its tenth president, Donald Wenz, Lebanon had reinvented itself as a downtown institution, buying and renovating the old Woolworth's building into a campus center as part of a "Campaign for Renewal." It was a civic asset as much as a school — a two-year college woven into the storefronts of a New England mill town, training adults and traditional-age students alike in business, the liberal arts, and latterly the health sciences. When it closed, the town lost not a leafy quad on a hill but a working part of its downtown.

The students absorbed the damage. There was no teach-out: enrolled students, some more than a year into radiography coursework, were left to scramble for transfers to Franklin Pierce, to a future River Valley Community College program that did not yet exist, or into nursing as a fallback. The state of New Hampshire ultimately bought the facilities and the better part of the college's mission, opening a Lebanon campus of River Valley Community College in January 2016 in the same downtown rooms. The public system finished the job the private college could not afford to.

Timeline

The College on the Mall

Lebanon College was, for most of its history, exactly the kind of institution that does not make headlines: a small two-year college in a small city, useful and unglamorous, serving the working adults and recent high-school graduates of the Upper Valley who wanted an associate degree, a credential, or a transfer-ready start without leaving home. It was not a campus you toured for its architecture. For decades it simply existed as a regional convenience, modestly endowed and modestly enrolled, paying its bills out of tuition the way most small colleges do.

Its golden age, such as it was, came late and was a feat of civic reinvention. Beginning in 1997, President Donald Wenz pulled the college into the heart of downtown Lebanon, buying the shuttered Woolworth's on the pedestrian mall and renovating it into a campus center — a college that would be part of the streetscape rather than apart from it. The "Campaign for Renewal" gave the institution a visible identity and a real downtown footprint, and the recruitment of figures like C. Everett Koop, the former U.S. Surgeon General, as honorary fundraising chairman lent it a stature beyond its size. For a small two-year college, planting a permanent flag in the commercial center of its town was an ambitious, genuinely good idea.

But the reinvention was built on borrowed money and thin reserves. The downtown buildings came with debt — eventually about $2.2 million against the two properties on the mall — and the endowment never matured past a rounding error. A 2006 drive to raise $3 million in endowment was the right instinct; it did not produce the cushion the college needed. Lebanon entered the 2010s as what it had always essentially been: an institution one bad enrollment year away from the edge, now with a mortgage.

One Bet, No Cushion

The bad year arrived dressed as a growth strategy. Authorized in 2008 to grant bachelor's-level degrees in nursing and radiography and housing them in a second acquired building, Lebanon treated Allied Health as the engine that would carry it forward — the regional demand for healthcare workers was real, and a small college that could train them had a plausible niche. The college planned for a meaningful jump in enrollment in the fall of 2014 on the strength of those programs. The projection was the whole plan.

When fewer than half the anticipated new students materialized, there was no Plan B, because a tuition-dependent college with no endowment does not have a Plan B; it has this year's tuition. Carrying its building debt and short the students it had counted on, the college could not assemble enough revenue to operate the coming term. Rather than open a fall semester it could not pay for, the board chose to stop — and chose to stop in August, after students had registered but before classes began, which is among the worst possible moments for the people enrolled.

The decision was abrupt by any measure. A local business owner described the news as "rather abrupt," and the students agreed; one 35-year-old radiography student, a year and a half into his coursework, said he "never thought it would come to this." There was no teach-out arrangement to let enrolled students finish their programs in place. The college that had spent fifteen years embedding itself in downtown Lebanon exited the same way Mount Ida and Newbury and so many others did in those years — by informing the people who depended on it almost last, and almost too late to plan.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

For the students, the closure landed hard and without a net. The roughly few dozen who had planned to return in the fall — and the wider body the college had served — were left to find their own way out. Some sought transfers to Franklin Pierce, which offered to host business programs at the Lebanon site; others waited, hoping River Valley Community College would eventually offer the radiology training Lebanon had provided, or pivoted into nursing as a fallback. Students mid-program in radiography, a specialized credential with few local alternatives, lost the most: time, money, and momentum that no quick transfer could restore. Faculty and staff lost their jobs in a town where the college had been a downtown fixture.

The buildings fared better than the people. In 2015 New Hampshire's community college system bought the facilities and key programs, and in January 2016 a Lebanon campus of River Valley Community College opened in the renovated downtown rooms — the civic asset preserved, the institution that built it gone. The lasting mark is modest but real: Lebanon College became another tally in New Hampshire's list of closed colleges, a case study in how a small, indebted, tuition-dependent two-year college can vanish between one semester and the next, and how the public system, not the market, is what finally caught the mission as it fell.

Lessons

References

• Lebanon College Planning To Close Due To Low Enrollment New Hampshire Public Radio
• Lebanon College Students Lament Closure, Look For Options Vermont Public
• Lebanon College Wikipedia
• Closed Colleges and Universities New Hampshire Department of Education