Notre Dame College of New Hampshire — A Teachers’ College That Ran Out of Teachers to Sell

Summary

Notre Dame College, in Manchester, New Hampshire, founded in 1950 by the Sisters of Holy Cross as a college to train Catholic women to teach, announced in November 2001 that it would close at the end of that academic year, and graduated its final class in May 2002. It had lasted fifty-two years. The institution that closed was not in free fall — roughly 1,100 students still held degree candidacies, and the college had no scandal, no fraud, no creditor at the gate. What it had was the quietest and most common of higher-education ailments: a small, tuition-dependent college with a thin endowment, in a small city, watching a cheaper public competitor offer the same degrees down the road.

Notre Dame grew out of a Teacher Training Institute the Sisters of Holy Cross of Montreal had opened in Manchester in 1945, and for its first decades it did one thing well: it turned out schoolteachers, mostly women, for the parochial and public classrooms of southern New Hampshire. Over the second half of the century it broadened — adding liberal arts and sciences, business, fine arts, communications, and health sciences — and in 1985 it went fully coeducational, having already opened its graduate and evening programs to men in the 1970s. By the mid-1990s it reached its high-water mark of about 1,350 students, a comfortable size for a college of its kind. It never went much higher.

The decline was gradual and, in hindsight, structural. Enrollment drifted from roughly 1,200 to about 1,025 by the fall of 2001, with barely four hundred full-time undergraduates — the students who actually paid the bills — propping up a campus scattered across eight acres of a residential neighborhood, with no land to consolidate or expand. The endowment sat under two million dollars; the last capital campaign, five years earlier, had raised only about three million. And a few miles away, the University of New Hampshire's Manchester branch offered comparable programs at public-college prices. President Anthony J. De Conciliis, a Holy Cross priest who had taken the job in July 2000, said the college had explored every alternative — cut the undergraduate side and grow the graduate side, or the reverse — and found no version of the arithmetic that worked.

When Notre Dame closed, it did so with more grace than many. Five of its education programs and a portion of its library went to Southern New Hampshire University, the rising Manchester institution then transforming itself from a business school into the online giant it would become; students within a year of graduating could finish at member schools of the New Hampshire College and University Council. But seventy-five full-time faculty lost their careers, and a fifty-two-year-old college — the alma mater of generations of New Hampshire teachers — simply switched off.

Timeline

A College Built to Make Teachers

Notre Dame College was, at its origin, a single-purpose machine, and that purpose was honorable. In 1945 the Sisters of Holy Cross — a teaching order based in Montreal — opened a Teacher Training Institute in Manchester to prepare young Catholic women for the parochial classrooms that the church's expanding school system needed staffed. Five years later, in 1950, the institute matured into a degree-granting college, set up in two repurposed buildings in the north of the city: a Norman-style mansion and a carriage house turned to academic use. It was small, female, religious, and local, and for its first two decades it asked to be nothing else.

Those decades were the golden age, and the alumnae who returned for reunions decades later remembered them with affection — a tight, spirited women's college where, as one put it, "we were fun." The product was schoolteachers, and Notre Dame supplied them in steady numbers to the public and parochial schools of southern New Hampshire, a quiet engine of the region's classrooms. Like most colleges of its type and era, it eventually had to broaden to survive a changing market: it added liberal arts and sciences, then business, fine arts, communications, and health sciences; it opened its graduate and evening programs to men in the 1970s; and in 1985 it went fully coeducational. By the mid-1990s the broadening had carried it to its peak of about 1,350 students. It was a respectable institution doing respectable work. It was also, by then, structurally precarious in ways its enrollment figures concealed.

The Arithmetic That Would Not Close

The trouble with Notre Dame was not that it was failing dramatically; it was that it could not generate the margin a tuition-dependent college needs to weather a soft decade. Its endowment stood under two million dollars — a rounding error against payroll — and its most recent capital campaign, conducted around 1996, had raised only about three million. With so little cushion, the college lived on tuition, and the tuition lived on a surprisingly narrow base: of the roughly 1,025 students enrolled by the fall of 2001, barely four hundred were full-time undergraduates, the cohort that actually sustained the budget. The rest — commuters, evening students, graduate and continuing-education enrollees — never made up less than half the student body, and that population was volatile, matriculating unpredictably from year to year. Revenue planning on such a base is closer to weather forecasting than to budgeting.

The campus itself worked against the college. Notre Dame's eight acres were scattered through a residential neighborhood, leaving no room to consolidate operations or build the dormitories and facilities that might have drawn more full-time, full-paying residential undergraduates. And the competitive landscape had hardened: the University of New Hampshire's Manchester campus offered comparable programs at public-university prices, and a small, modestly priced Catholic college found itself underpriced by the state and outmatched on amenities by larger private rivals. President De Conciliis, who arrived in July 2000, ran the alternatives in every direction — shrink the undergraduate program and expand graduate offerings, or do the reverse — and concluded that none of them produced a sustainable institution. The problem was not a single bad year. It was a model that had quietly stopped working.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

Students fared comparatively well. Those within a year of graduating could finish their degrees at member institutions of the New Hampshire College and University Council, and the five education programs that moved to Southern New Hampshire University carried some students and curriculum into a stable new home. SNHU's absorption of those programs and part of Notre Dame's library was a tidy transfer of the founding mission — teacher preparation — to an institution then beginning its own dramatic rise. For the roughly seventy-five full-time faculty and the staff, the ending was harder; placement help was minimal, and many careers built around a single small college ended with it.

The campus dispersed building by building rather than selling as a whole. Holy Cross Hall, the college's anchor, became home to Mount Saint Mary Academy, a K–8 Catholic preparatory school, keeping the property in religious educational use. Vezeau House became the headquarters of the Manchester Community Music School. Other structures were converted to private residences and offices, folding back into the neighborhood that had always surrounded them. The lasting mark is mostly an alumni diaspora: a Notre Dame College Association of Alumni and Friends still gathers each summer, septuagenarians among them walking the halls of the academy that now occupies their old college. The institution is gone, but its graduates — the teachers it was built to make — taught a generation of New Hampshire children, and that work outlived the school.

Lessons

References

• Notre Dame College (New Hampshire) Wikipedia
• New Hampshire's Notre Dame College Will Shut Its Doors The Chronicle of Higher Education
• 'We were fun' — Alumni of closed Notre Dame College reunited in Queen City New Hampshire Union Leader
• Notre Dame College (New Hampshire) Theses — Archives of Southern New Hampshire University Southern New Hampshire University