Officials aren’t looking to close Northern Vermont University’s campus in Lyndon, or to replace brick-and-mortar programs with the university’s online college, according to the head of the Vermont State Colleges system.
“We have not finished our assessment of our system to achieve the educational and fiscal results we hope to achieve,” Chancellor Jeb Spaulding said in a statement released Wednesday. “However, due to recent, unfounded rumors, we have addressed NVU first.”
The college system’s board of trustees passed a resolution that day affirming support for the “on-going unification efforts at thriving campuses in Lyndon and Johnson,” while Spaulding explicitly said no proposals had been made to disband either location.
The announcement Wednesday came less than a week after scores of students, faculty members and area residents criticized officials at a meeting in Lyndon.
Many speakers during the three-hour forum expressed fear that leaders would move to close the Lyndon campus as a cost-saving measure.
The meeting came as part of five campus visits statewide to gain input on the college system’s “Securing the Future Project,” which began in June as an effort to evaluate enrollment declines, lack of government funding and apparent competition from online programs.
That month, Spaulding released a report detailing “the negative and powerful external forces that continue to bear down on almost all colleges and universities generally, but that are particularly acute in Vermont.”
The Lyndon campus experienced a more than 27% decline in enrollment from 2012 to 2018, according to fall headcount data, going from 1,508 students to 1,092.
At the same time, scholarship expenses have risen — from more than $1,878,000 for the 2017 fiscal year to a projected total of almost $3,595,000 for the third quarter of the 2019 fiscal year.
