This story was updated at 5:33 p.m.
PLAINFIELD — Goddard College is no longer on probation with its accreditor.
The New England Commission of Higher Education, the region’s accreditor, in 2018 placed the school on probation and told the college it had two years to shore up its finances, stabilize its leadership, and reform its governance if it wanted to remain in good standing.
The Plainfield school has apparently succeeded. Goddard leaders were back before the commission last Thursday, and the following day, Bernard Bull, the college’s president, announced that the school had been reaccredited and taken off probation.
“This is a significant recognition of the incredible work of many in our community from an external organization,” Bull wrote in an open letter to the college community. “I am confident we will find more ways to celebrate while continuing the important work of stabilizing and strengthening Goddard College. It is a joy to have this surge of optimism that we are well on our way to creating a thriving Goddard College that will serve students for future generations.”
Larry Schall, president of the accreditation commission, said in an email that a formal announcement from the commission will come in the next few weeks.
“Goddard provided strong evidence to the commission that it had resolved the issues that led to it being placed on probation, which were largely financial ones,” Schall said. “It is always our desire that an institution use (probation) to make the changes that are necessary to comply with each of our standards. Goddard is to be commended for doing just that.”
Accreditation is technically voluntary, but schools must maintain this credential if students want to use federal financial aid — a key source of revenue for colleges — to attend, and a loss of accreditation is usually a death blow for institutions of higher education. Southern Vermont College in Bennington and the College of St. Joseph in Rutland, for example, both closed after accreditors yanked their stamp of approval.
Accreditation is often thought of as a baseline indicator of quality — credits from unaccredited institutions often do not transfer — but accreditors are also charged with making sure colleges have enough money to meet their obligations.
What ailed Goddard is the same malady that has shuttered several smaller, tuition-dependent colleges in Vermont and the rest of the country in recent years — declining enrollment. There were about 800 students at the school in 2010. When accreditors issued their warning, headcounts had been cut in half.
The school has worked to raise new revenues. It announced a $4 million fundraising campaign and is recruiting like-minded organizations, such as the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism, to rent underutilized space on its Plainfield campus as part of its “Village for Learning” initiative.
But Bull, who took over at Goddard within a month of accreditors making their probation decision public, said the school didn’t try to grow its way out of its predicament. Instead of banking on fundraising or ambitious enrollment targets, the college leader said the school instead opted to right-size.
The college has whittled its budget down by about $1 million, Bull said, in order to arrive at its current $7.5 million spending plan, and continues to scrutinize expenses. And while this year’s incoming class is larger than those of the past several years, enrollment is still quite low: 372 students in total.
“We didn’t try to grow rapidly. In fact, we wanted to stay small, until we knew that we were stable and secure so that we could have incremental growth. We wanted to be as responsible as we could,” he said.
The school, which specializes in a low-residency model, was also quick to announce it would go all-remote this fall and not require students to travel to its campus amid the pandemic. Most schools held off on making such an announcement out of a fear it would depress enrollment. But at Goddard, Bull said, the opposite happened.
“By making that decision early on, we actually had a bit of a boost in enrollment. That helped us out quite a bit, because the students didn’t have to wonder,” he said.
