Marian Court College — A Tiny Catholic Commuter School in a President’s Summer Home, Closed by the Math

Summary

Marian Court College, in Swampscott, Massachusetts, founded in 1964 by the Sisters of Mercy as a two-year secretarial school for women, announced in mid-June 2015 that it would close at the end of that month, and shut its doors on June 30, 2015, after fifty-one years. It was a small institution by any measure — roughly 266 students at its recent peak, a final graduating class of 67, a staff of 61, and an endowment of just $413,000 — and it never pretended otherwise. What it offered was access: an inexpensive, Catholic, entirely commuter college on the North Shore where working adults could earn a credential at night, the only school in the area where a full-time student could go entirely after dark.

The college sat on six acres of oceanfront that gave its modest mission an outsized backdrop. Its main building was White Court, a twenty-eight-room 1895 mansion that had served as President Calvin Coolidge's summer White House in 1925. A secretarial school in a president's summer home was a fitting emblem of the institution: serious, unpretentious, and improbable. Marian Court grew slowly into its ambitions — a junior college of business by 1980, associate degrees by 1984, the name Marian Court College in 1994, and finally, in 2012, its first four-year bachelor's programs in business and criminal justice.

The four-year leap came too late to outrun the arithmetic. Marian Court was, in its president's words, "a highly tuition-dependent educational institution," and tuition dependence without scale is a slow strangulation. The college had posted three consecutive years of losses; in its last full year, expenses exceeded revenue by roughly $500,000 against gross receipts of just $2.8 million, and the endowment that might have cushioned the gap was a rounding error. Declining enrollment over the prior decade left too few students paying $16,500 a year to keep the lights on. The trustees called the challenges "insurmountable," and they were.

The closing was orderly and humane in the way the smallest closures sometimes can be. There was no fraud, no stranded mid-degree cohort — only a board that ran out of road. Students were given transfer paths to Salem State University and North Shore Community College, with credits honored as closely as possible; the final class of 67 walked first, 41 of them collecting the school's first four-year degrees just weeks before the doors shut. A late effort by students and faculty to win a reprieve was declined. The oceanfront campus was later sold and the historic mansion demolished, its façade re-created to wrap a development of age-restricted condominiums — the seaside, in the end, worth far more than the school had ever been.

Timeline

A Secretarial School in a President's Summer Home

Marian Court began in 1964 as a practical answer to a practical need. The Sisters of Mercy, a Catholic teaching order with a long tradition of educating women of modest means, opened a two-year secretarial school on the North Shore of Massachusetts — a place where young women could earn the skills and the credential that led to steady office work. The setting was extraordinary for so workmanlike a purpose: White Court, a twenty-eight-room Colonial Revival mansion built in 1895 on six acres fronting the Atlantic in Swampscott, a house grand enough that it had served as President Calvin Coolidge's summer White House in the summer of 1925. The Sisters put typewriters in a president's drawing rooms and called it a college.

For its first decades Marian Court did exactly what it was built to do, and slowly enlarged the doing. It became Marian Court Junior College of Business in 1980, began awarding associate degrees in 1984, and took the simpler name Marian Court College in 1994, by which point it was a regionally accredited Catholic college recognized by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Its identity through all of this stayed remarkably consistent and remarkably narrow: a small, affordable, faith-rooted commuter school serving working adults and first-generation students from the surrounding towns. It had no dormitories and never wanted any. It was, by its own description, the only entirely commuter Catholic college in the country, and the only school on the North Shore where a student could attend full time entirely at night. That was its whole proposition — accessibility — and for half a century it delivered it to people other colleges did not reach.

The Arithmetic of a Tuition-Dependent School

A college that small has almost no shock absorbers. Marian Court charged about $16,500 a year, drew the bulk of its budget straight from those tuition dollars, and carried an endowment of roughly $413,000 — not enough to fund a single year's deficit, let alone weather a run of them. President Denise Hammon named the vulnerability precisely: "As a highly tuition-dependent educational institution, Marian Court can no longer maintain our operations given declining enrollment numbers." When nearly all the revenue walks in the door as tuition, every empty seat is a direct subtraction from the operating budget, and there is no investment income, no large alumni base, and no denominational war chest to fill the hole.

The hole had been widening for years. Enrollment had fallen across the prior decade, and although the head count ticked up to 266 in 2013 from 174 the year before, the trend and the totals were both too small to sustain the institution. The college posted losses three years running; in its final full year, expenses outran revenue by about half a million dollars on gross receipts of only $2.8 million — a deficit equal to nearly a fifth of the entire budget. The 2012 move into four-year bachelor's degrees in business and criminal justice had been the strategy to reverse the slide, an attempt to offer something that would hold students for four years instead of two. It produced its first graduates in the spring of 2015 — 41 of them — at almost the exact moment the board concluded the school could not continue. The bet had been placed too late and at too small a scale to change the math. The trustees, the Sisters of Mercy ultimately responsible, deemed the financial challenges "insurmountable."

The Five Factors

Aftermath

For its students, the closing was a disruption rather than a catastrophe, which is the best that can be said of any college's death. The final class of 67 — including the 41 who earned the school's first four-year degrees — graduated before the doors shut. Those still enrolled were given a path to Salem State University, with North Shore Community College as an alternative, and their credits were honored as faithfully as the receiving institutions could manage. The sixty-one faculty and staff lost their jobs in the space of a few weeks; for a small commuter college, the payroll was the community, and it was dispersed in a single summer.

The campus had a far richer second life than the college ever enjoyed. In December 2017 the six-acre White Court estate — assessed at $5.8 million — sold for $2.75 million to a development entity. The historic 1895 mansion that had housed Coolidge's summer White House and then five decades of typing classes and night students was demolished; in its place rose a cluster of age-restricted condominiums, behind a carefully re-created Colonial Revival façade, with units later listed for figures in the millions. The land that had subsidized a $16,500-a-year college for working adults turned out to be worth more as luxury seaside housing than as a school. That is the quiet mark Marian Court left: a reminder that a tiny, tuition-dependent college can occupy priceless ground and still be undone by the most ordinary arithmetic — too few students, too small a reserve, one deficit too many.

Lessons

References

• Marian Court College in Swampscott to close its doors The Boston Globe
• Students mount effort to save Marian Court College The Boston Globe
• Swampscott buyers purchase Marian Court property for $2.75M The Daily Item
• Former Calvin Coolidge residence to be developed into condos Boston.com
• Marian Court College Wikipedia