Labouré College of Healthcare — A 134-Year Nursing School Folds Its Programs into a Neighbor

Summary

Labouré College of Healthcare, a Catholic nursing and health-sciences college in Milton, Massachusetts, traced to 1892 and the Carney Hospital Training School for Nurses founded by the Daughters of Charity, announced in February 2026 that it would cease academic operations on August 31, 2026 — and that its nursing programs had been acquired by nearby Curry College. After 134 years of training nurses for Boston, the institution will not graduate another class under its own name. It will instead survive as a memory and a unit on someone else's campus: the Labouré Center for Advancing Healthcare Opportunity at Curry College, about four miles away.

What closed is, in the best reading of a hard story, a relatively gentle ending. This was not an abrupt cash-crisis shutdown that stranded students with weeks of notice. It was a planned, negotiated wind-down in which the central asset — the nursing programs, the faculty who taught them, the diverse adult students who relied on them — was handed to a willing successor before the doors shut. Curry College agreed to hire roughly 15 of Labouré's nursing faculty and about 20 staff, to let current nursing students continue in the fall with their credits intact and tuition held at Labouré's announced 2026-27 rate, and to inherit the college's $9.4 million endowment, pledged to the new nursing center. As college closures go in this decade, it is closer to a transplant than a death.

But it is still a closure, and the arithmetic behind it is the arithmetic killing small specialized colleges across the country. Labouré served a particular and admirable population — working adults, English-language learners, current healthcare workers, students whose average age was around 31 — through part-time, commuter, evening study. That model is hard to scale and harder to cushion. Enrollment, which crested near 1,188 students in the fall of 2020, fell to about 530 by the fall of 2024, a decline of more than half in four years. President Lily Hsu named the cause plainly: "persistent financial and enrollment challenges and regulatory hurdles." A college with no large endowment, almost no residential revenue, and a falling head count had run out of room to maneuver. The mission was worth preserving; the institution, by 2026, was not viable enough to preserve it alone.

Timeline

A Hospital's Training School Becomes a College

Labouré was, for most of its life, an extension of a Catholic hospital's vocation. It began in 1892 as the Carney Hospital Training School for Nurses, one of the era's apprenticeship-style programs in which a religious order trained the women who would staff its wards. The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul ran it as a matter of mission — nursing as an expression of the order's charism, the corporal work of mercy made into a curriculum. For more than half a century it produced nurses the way the hospital produced patients: steadily, locally, without pretension to being a college in the academic sense.

The midcentury consolidation changed that. In 1949 and 1950 three Daughters-of-Charity nursing schools merged into the Catherine Labouré School of Nursing, named for the nineteenth-century French sister of the order, and in 1954 it settled at the Carney Hospital site in Dorchester. The 1971 authorization to grant degrees turned a training school into a junior college; successive renamings through the 1980s and 1990s dropped "Catherine" and then the hospital framing, leaving Labouré College — a real degree-granting institution with its own accreditation rather than a ward annex.

Its golden age, such as it was for a commuter health-sciences college, came in the years around its 2013 relocation to Milton. The $9 million move from the aging Dorchester site to a campus on Adams Street, on grounds once occupied by Aquinas College, signaled ambition: a freestanding nursing and allied-health college serving the precise population that Boston's hospitals most needed and least often produced. Enrollment climbed through the 2010s toward its 2020 peak of roughly 1,188. Labouré had found a defensible niche — affordable, accredited, part-time, built for working adults and immigrants and aides who wanted to become RNs — and for a decade it filled that niche better than almost anyone. The trouble was that the niche, however worthy, was thin, and the institution sitting in it had almost no financial cushion beneath the floor.

The Half-Empty Classroom

The decline came fast and it came in the head count. From a peak near 1,188 students in the fall of 2020, enrollment fell to about 843 by some interim counts and then to roughly 530 in the fall of 2024 — losing more than half its students inside four years. For an institution with little endowment, no dormitories, and tuition revenue as nearly its only fuel, that is not a soft landing; it is a stall. A college built almost entirely on net tuition has no other lever to pull when students stop arriving, and every empty seat removes revenue that fixed costs — accreditation, a campus, a faculty, a payroll of some 23 full-time instructors and 49 noninstructional staff — do not forgive.

The causes were the familiar trio of the era, compounded by the specifics of the model. A national decline in the traditional college-going population met a particularly volatile adult and allied-health market, in which prospective students chase the shortest, cheapest credential to a paycheck and abandon programs the moment a competitor undercuts them. The COVID years scrambled nursing education nationally, and a commuter college that depends on working students is acutely exposed when those students' lives are disrupted. President Lily Hsu's reference to "regulatory hurdles" points to a further pressure: the rising compliance and clinical-placement demands on small nursing programs, where the cost of staying accredited and finding clinical sites does not shrink when enrollment does.

By late 2025 the board faced the same question every small tuition-dependent college eventually faces: spend the last of the reserves trying to reverse a four-year slide, or use what remains to engineer a dignified exit while there is still something worth handing over. Labouré had a $9.4 million endowment, a strong and specific brand in nursing, faculty who could teach, and students who needed somewhere to land. Those were assets a larger neighbor might want. The board chose to negotiate rather than to gamble, and in doing so it preserved the one thing that mattered most — the students' path to a degree — at the cost of the institution's independent existence.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The students were Labouré's first priority, and the structure of the deal shows it. Current nursing students may continue their studies at Curry in the fall of 2026 with their credits transferring and their tuition held at Labouré's announced 2026-27 rate — a teach-out by acquisition rather than the cut-off that has marked harsher closures. Articulation agreements were being finalized for students in other programs, such as respiratory care, who could not be folded directly into Curry's nursing pipeline. No graduating cohort was abandoned weeks from a degree; the central promise of the institution was kept by someone else.

Faculty and staff fared comparatively well by the standards of college closures. Curry planned to hire roughly 15 of Labouré's nursing faculty and about 20 support staff, carrying a meaningful share of the workforce across with the programs — though that still left a portion of the college's roughly 70-person staff without a seat in the new arrangement. The endowment of $9.4 million was pledged to the new Labouré Center, and the alumni council was set to move to Curry as well, so the institutional memory and the donor base would have a custodian. The fate of the physical campus at 303 Adams Street in Milton was not specified at the time of the announcement, leaving the real estate as the one open question in an otherwise orderly wind-down.

The lasting mark is a name preserved inside a larger institution and a mission that did not die with its host. Labouré's distinct contribution — accessible nursing education for the adults and immigrants who become the backbone of a region's healthcare workforce — was deemed valuable enough that a neighbor agreed to carry it forward under the founders' name. That is not nothing. But it is also a reminder that for a small, single-purpose, tuition-funded college, doing necessary work well is not the same as surviving, and the kindest outcome available may be to give the work away before the institution can no longer afford to do it.

Lessons

References

• Labouré College to close in August, transition nursing programs to Curry Higher Ed Dive
• Curry College acquires Labouré College of Healthcare The Boston Globe
• Labouré programs transition to Curry College Milton Times
• Labouré College Wikipedia