Chester College of New England — An Arts College That Reinvented Itself Into Insolvency

Summary

Chester College of New England, a small private arts college in Chester, New Hampshire, founded in 1965 as White Pines College, announced on May 20, 2012 that its board of trustees had voted to close at the end of that academic year. The 47-year-old college had disclosed in April that it was carrying an operating deficit of roughly $750,000 and that it could no longer sustain itself; enrollment had fallen to about 144 students, well below what the campus needed to survive. After a frantic, weeks-long effort by students and faculty to raise money and save it, the board concluded the math was final.

Unlike many of its peers in the closure wave, Chester did not strand its students. The college arranged an orderly teach-out: it reached an agreement with nearby New England College under which every currently enrolled or admitted Chester student could transfer at their existing tuition rate, with all Chester credits recognized, and four Chester faculty members were hired for one-year appointments to ease the transition. The New Hampshire Institute of Art offered similar terms for arts students and hired the heads of Chester's creative writing and photography programs. The institution died; its students were given a real path to finish.

The deeper story is one of a college that reinvented itself into the danger zone. For its first three and a half decades it was White Pines College, a two-year institution founded by Faith Preston that admitted its first class in 1967. In 2002, under its third president, William Nevious, it took a bold turn: it renamed itself Chester College of New England and expanded into a four-year, arts-focused liberal arts college, building majors in creative writing, photography, media arts, graphic design, fine arts, and interdisciplinary arts. It was a distinctive and admirable identity — a tiny dedicated arts college in rural New Hampshire — and a financially perilous one.

The 2008 recession finished what the model started. A four-year arts college needs scale to spread its fixed costs, and Chester never reached it; the downturn left it with fewer than 150 students and a structural deficit it could not close. A devoted community of students and faculty could rally affection but not the millions the college needed. When the board voted to close in May 2012, it ended a 47-year history — and, more pointedly, a ten-year experiment in whether a small two-year school could remake itself into a four-year arts college and survive.

Timeline

From White Pines to a College of the Arts

For its first thirty-five years the institution was White Pines College, and it was a quiet thing: a small private two-year college founded in 1965 by Faith Preston in Chester, a rural town in southern New Hampshire, admitting its first class in 1967. It served the function such colleges serve — an associate degree, a foothold, a place to start — on a wooded 70-acre campus far from any city. It was never large and never aspired to be. For three and a half decades it persisted in the modest register of the American junior college, neither growing dramatically nor failing, simply being useful to the students who found it.

The transformation came in 2002, and it was genuine ambition. Under William Nevious, its third president, White Pines reinvented itself wholesale: a new name, Chester College of New England, and a new identity as a four-year, baccalaureate, arts-focused liberal arts college. This was the institution's true golden age and its defining bet. Over the following years Chester built a curriculum that was unusually coherent for so small a school — creative writing and professional writing, photography and media arts, graphic design, fine arts, communication arts, and an interdisciplinary arts major that tied them together. It became, in effect, a tiny dedicated arts conservatory in the New Hampshire woods, the kind of intimate, faculty-close program that a certain student wants and few places offer.

The identity was admirable and the danger was structural. A four-year arts college is an expensive thing to run: it needs studios, equipment, specialized faculty, and a residential campus, all of which are fixed costs that demand enrollment scale to absorb. White Pines had been a two-year college precisely because that was a model a small rural school could sustain; by stretching into four-year arts education, Chester took on the cost structure of a much larger institution without the enrollment base to support it. For half a decade, in a healthy economy, the bet looked viable. Then the economy turned.

A Devoted Community, Below the Line

The 2008 recession was the test the model could not pass. Families grew cautious about the price of a private arts degree from an unknown college, and enrollment — never large — sank below 150 students. That number is the whole tragedy in a single figure: a four-year college with studios and dormitories and a full arts faculty cannot break even on roughly 144 students, no matter how devoted they are. The fixed costs of the reinvention now sat atop an enrollment base too small to carry them, and the result was a chronic operating deficit that compounded year over year.

By April 2012 the deficit had reached about $750,000 and the board acknowledged publicly that the college was in danger of closing. What followed was, in its way, the most moving part of the story: students and faculty did not go quietly. They rallied, organized, and tried to raise the money to keep the college alive — a measure of how much the small arts community in Chester meant to the people inside it. Affection, however, does not retire a structural deficit. A college that needs to roughly double its enrollment to survive cannot get there in a spring, and the trustees, after what President Robert Baines called an in-depth exploration of all the options, concluded that their efforts to grow enrollment could no longer sustain the institution.

On May 20, 2012, the board voted to close, and Baines delivered the news by email. The wording was characteristically gentle for a Final Bell case — no fraud here, no concealment, no board gambling with other people's futures, simply a small college that had reached for something bigger than it could afford and run out of runway. The closure was the honest end of a ten-year experiment, conducted by people who believed in it and could not make the numbers work.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

Chester's students were the rare cohort in a college closure who landed softly. Those enrolled or admitted could continue at New England College or the New Hampshire Institute of Art at the tuition they had been paying, with their Chester credits intact, and several found their former professors waiting in the new classrooms. The distinctive arts programs the college had built — creative writing, photography — were partly carried forward by the institutions that hired their program heads. It was not the same as the college surviving, but it was the difference between an interrupted education and a destroyed one, and Chester's trustees deserve the credit for choosing it.

The faculty and staff bore the harder loss: only a handful secured the one-year appointments, and the rest joined the diaspora of academics displaced by the closure wave. The campus, at least, endured. In 2015 the 70-acre property was sold and reopened as Busche Academy, a coeducational boarding and day school whose students now live in the dormitories Chester built. The lasting mark of Chester College is a quiet one — not a scandal or a landmark law, but a clean example of a closure done about as well as a closure can be: a small college that overreached, failed honestly, and got its students out before it turned off the lights.

Lessons

References

• Chester College Will Shut Down Inside Higher Ed
• Chester College of New England Wikipedia
• The Ticker: Chester College of New England to Close The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Welcome | Busche Academy (former Chester College campus) Busche Academy