Trinity College of Vermont — A Women’s College the State University Bought for a Campus

Summary

Trinity College of Vermont, in Burlington, founded in September 1925 by the Sisters of Mercy of Vermont as New England's second Catholic women's college, voted to close on July 7, 2000, after seventy-five years. The decision came from the college's board of trustees together with the executive council of the Vermont Sisters of Mercy — the founders pulling the plug on their own creation — and it was driven by a combination as old as small private colleges: too few students paying tuition, and too much debt against the revenue that remained. The college's last full year operated in 1999–2000; a skeleton teach-out ran into 2001 so that a handful of seniors could finish, which is why some accounts date the closure to 2001. The closures-by-year reckoning here uses the year of the decision and the final full operation: 2000.

For three-quarters of a century, Trinity did what the Sisters of Mercy had built it to do — educate women in a state where, in 1925, women's higher education was scarce. Its curriculum began in the liberal arts — English, French, religion, mathematics, the classics, and practical business skills — and over the decades it added graduate programs and, in its last twenty years, adult and coeducational offerings in undergraduate and graduate study. Across its lifetime it educated roughly five thousand students. But the traditional women's undergraduate college, its historic core, was shrinking against the tide that thinned single-sex Catholic colleges across the country, and Trinity could not refill the seats.

The numbers at the end were grim and specific. Over its final four years the college accumulated an operating deficit of about $2.7 million, and it carried long-term debt of roughly $5.6 million. It had set a goal of 120 new freshmen and transfer students and was struggling to reach half of that. Its continuing-education enrollment, once a reliable cushion, had collapsed from 673 students in 1990 to 304 by 2000. With about 225 returning undergraduates and 210 graduate students, and no realistic path to grow either, the trustees and the Sisters concluded that closing on their own terms was better than continuing toward insolvency.

What followed was, by the grim standards of college closures, comparatively humane — and it had an unusual second act. The University of Vermont, whose campus sits directly across Colchester Avenue, bought Trinity's entire campus for $14.3 million, instantly giving the property a future. Trinity taught out its remaining seniors, arranged transfers with five other colleges, and seeded a successor nonprofit, Mercy Connections, to carry the Sisters' mission forward. The college died; the work, in fragments, lived.

Timeline

A College for Vermont's Women

Trinity College opened in September 1925 to answer a plain absence: in Vermont, a young Catholic woman who wanted a college education had almost nowhere to go. The Sisters of Mercy of Vermont, a teaching and service order based in Burlington, founded it as New England's second Catholic women's college, and the mission was as much about access as about faith. The first curriculum was the recognizable liberal arts of the era — English, French, religion, mathematics, the classics — leavened with practical business skills, because the women Trinity educated would need to make their way in the world as well as understand it. The campus rose on Colchester Avenue, a compact set of buildings that would, over the decades, grow into a seventeen-building, twenty-acre quarter of the city, directly across the street from the state university.

For its first half-century Trinity was, in the best sense, unremarkable: a small women's college doing steady, dignified work, sending generations of Vermont women into teaching, nursing, social work, and public life. Among its alumnae were a U.S. Marshal, state legislators, and the novelist Mari Tomasi; over its full lifetime it would educate roughly five thousand students. These were the golden years — modest, mission-driven, and stable — when the women's college model still had a robust national market and a religious order's commitment behind it. Beginning around 1980, sensing the shifting ground, Trinity broadened: it admitted adult students of both sexes into undergraduate and graduate programs, building a continuing-education arm that by 1990 enrolled 673 students. For a time the diversification worked. Then both the traditional women's college and the continuing-education cushion began to shrink at once.

When the Founders Decide to Stop

By the late 1990s, Trinity was caught in the vise that closed so many small Catholic women's colleges. The national pool of women seeking a single-sex Catholic education had thinned for decades, and Trinity's recruiting reflected it: a target of 120 new freshmen and transfer students that it was reaching only at about half strength. The continuing-education program that had once supplied 673 students had fallen to 304 by 2000 — a more than fifty percent collapse that gutted the very revenue source the college had built to compensate for its shrinking undergraduate enrollment. With roughly 225 returning undergraduates and 210 graduate students, the college simply did not have enough tuition payers to cover its costs.

And the costs had outrun the revenue conclusively. Across its final four years Trinity ran a cumulative operating deficit of about $2.7 million, and it sat under roughly $5.6 million in long-term debt — a heavy load for an institution that small, with no endowment large enough to service it. There was no villain here, no looted treasury or fraudulent recruiting; there was an honest college that had run out of students and money at the same time. On July 7, 2000, the board of trustees and the executive council of the Vermont Sisters of Mercy made the decision together. It is a particular kind of grief when the founders of an institution vote to close it — when the order that built a college to serve women decides that the most responsible act left is to stop before the debts compound and the closure becomes a default. The Sisters chose the dignified exit over the disorderly one.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

Students landed about as softly as a closure allows. Education and social-work seniors finished on the Colchester Avenue campus during the 2000–2001 teach-out; students with at least ninety credits could still earn Trinity diplomas while completing requirements elsewhere; and five New England colleges agreed to accept Trinity's undergraduates and their credits without penalty. For the twenty-six full-time faculty and roughly one hundred ten staff laid off in stages from September 2000 on, the ending was the familiar hard one — careers built around a small college that no longer existed.

The campus had the cleanest afterlife of almost any closed college: the University of Vermont absorbed all twenty-odd acres and seventeen buildings for $14.3 million, expanding its main campus across Colchester Avenue and filling the buildings with its own students within a couple of years. The mission, too, found a successor. In 2001 the Sisters of Mercy founded Mercy Connections in Burlington, carrying forward the order's commitment to serving women — most visibly through a Women's Small Business Program descended from Trinity's offerings — so that the practical, access-minded work the college began in 1925 did not end with it. A Trinity College of Vermont Association of Alumni and Friends, established as the college wound down, keeps the institutional memory alive. Roughly five thousand Trinity graduates carried their educations into Vermont's classrooms, hospitals, statehouse, and businesses; the college is gone, but its alumnae and its mission both outlasted it.

Lessons

References

• Trinity College of Vermont Wikipedia
• Mounting Debt and Dwindling Enrollments Force Vermont's Trinity College to Close The Chronicle of Higher Education
• UVM Purchases Trinity The Vermont Cynic
• Mercy Connections' Founders, Sisters of Mercy of Vermont, Honored at Annual Event Mercy Connections
• Collection: Trinity College Records — Finding Aids University of Vermont Special Collections