Notre Dame College (New Hampshire) - Closing of The College

Closing of The College

The total enrollment of degree candidates at Notre Dame at the time of its closing in 2002 was around 1,100 students, clearly not a figure that would suggest an institution struggling to survive. This would lead to speculation by some that the college made a rash decision to cease operations, and led others to charge that administrative and financial mismanagement was the cause for closure as opposed to problems relating to student matriculation. However, it should also be noted that full-time undergraduate enrollment at the school, its primary source of revenue, was barely over 400. In addition, tuition at Notre Dame was markedly lower than at most non-public colleges in the region, while many continuing education and graduate students would simply take a few classes without actually receiving degrees, thereby contributing to even more unstable matriculation numbers. The location of the school would also prove to be a liability in that the eight acres of land it occupied were scattered throughout a two mile residential area with no room to consolidate or expand among all the privately owned homes. At one point in the 1990s, college officials contemplated a two campus scenario, with the second campus to occupy either a parcel of land across the Merrimack River in West Manchester or on the same land in South Manchester where the Sisters of Holy Cross maintained their mother house. Brief consideration was also given toward relocating all facilities to the 550-acre (220 ha) campus of the defunct Mount Saint Mary College in the neighboring town of Hooksett, but in the end, none of these plans ever came to fruition. To some extent, Notre Dame was also compromised when the University of New Hampshire established a thriving branch campus in Manchester. The latter was strictly a commuter school which offered many of the same degree programs as Notre Dame at less expensive costs, and thus siphoned away a significant portion of local area students who otherwise would have considered attending Notre Dame. Finally, with an increasing dependence on local residents to avail themselves of its academic offerings, coupled with either an inability or unwillingness to attract students from beyond the immediate area, the college had placed itself in a grave demographic situation.

In effect, the creation of the highly selective graduate programs in physician assistant studies and physical therapy marked the last-ditch effort by Notre Dame to both carve out an academic niche for itself, as well as to simply survive. However, the announcement in the late summer of 2001 that the school would graduate its last class after 52 years of existence in May 2002 would come as a shock to many. Those students with one year or less remaining in their academic programs would be permitted to study at other institutions within the New Hampshire College and University Council for the purpose of obtaining Notre Dame degrees, while others were to be worked with individually in terms of securing proper transfer arrangements to other schools. The outlook for faculty and staff members, in stark contrast, would be much more bleak, as little could be done with regard to helping them secure employment elsewhere.