David Chard served as the 14th and final president of Wheelock College, which closed and merged with Boston University in 2018. At the time, the son of factory workers from Michigan lived in the historic president's house along the Riverway in Brookline.
Today, the retired educator lives in a small Cape house in Provincetown, where he volunteers as a master gardener at local public schools.
"The garden is a lot of work," he said, wearing a broad-rimmed straw hat and holding a pair of thinning shears, which he uses to deadhead plants in his backyard. "But for me, it's therapeutic, and when things work for you, it's just a tremendous feeling of success."
While tending a garden on this sandy peninsula at the tip of Cape Cod is very different than leading a small college in a competitive higher education landscape, Chard sees a lot of parallels.
"You spend a lot of time experimenting, trying to understand the environment that you're working in," he said. "You have to understand your foundation and what can grow here and what can't. Particularly at small institutions, you're trying to do things that will attract young people to grow and develop, just like plants."
Wheelock's 133-year history
Enrollment growth at Wheelock peaked in 2015. Then, like a poorly placed spruce tree, it began to wither.
"Wheelock was a very special place," Chard said. "It was 133 years old and started by a woman who was not allowed to vote."
Lucy Wheelock founded the college in 1888 as a training school for kindergarten teachers. For decades, the independent college focused on education and social work. By December 2016, just months after taking the top job, Chard says he recognized that the college could no longer survive independently.
The decision to close and merge with Boston University in 2018 prompted angry calls from parents, professors and alumni. Chard had many sleepless nights and his mental health suffered. But he says he had no choice, since the college was not growing.
"No matter how much money we put into recruitment, it was just not changing, and that was just disconcerting," he recalled.
Massachusetts has the dubious distinction of leading the nation in private college closures: Twenty-seven — including Wheelock, Mount Ida College, Newbury College, Hampshire College and Anna Maria College — have closed or announced plans to close here since 2014.
Now, fewer prospective students, rising costs, fierce competition from larger universities and mounting financial pressures are forcing more colleges to confront a painful, existential question: What's worth saving?
Analysts warn that as many as a quarter of the nation's colleges and universities could face closure or major restructuring over the next decade, so the stakes are high. When a college closes or downsizes, students can be displaced, faculty and staff lose their jobs, and communities can lose a major employer, cultural institution and source of civic identity. Part of the problem, analysts say, is basic supply and demand: too many colleges for too few students willing to pay even heavily discounted tuition.
At small New England colleges, tuition discount rates are nearing 70% — a sign of financial strain, not value. So a growing number of academic leaders and foundations are asking a new question: What if saving the mission matters more than saving the institution?
"The outcomes for students when institutions close, particularly if they close badly, are really pretty dire," said John MacIntosh, managing partner of SeaChange Capital Partners, a nonprofit that provides funding to other nonprofits.
Before SeaChange, MacIntosh worked in private equity, where restructuring was about protecting a business's value. In higher education, he says, the value to protect is the student.
Fewer than half of students whose colleges close continue their education, according to analysis by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Among those who transfer, only about half go on to earn a degree.
So his foundation-backed fund helps struggling colleges explore mergers, partnerships and other ways to remain viable.
"In light of a whole range of forces — demographic, political, financial — many institutions of higher education recognize that the status quo is far from ideal and may not even be sustainable," he said.
Since 2020, the fund has worked with nearly 400 institutions across the country and awarded nearly 60 grants, including one that helped support a partnership between the Urban College of Boston and Southern New Hampshire University.
But MacIntosh says the goal isn't to save every college.
"It's not all about mergers," he said. "This is 100% charitable and it's 100% to try to be a resource for schools that are doing the very difficult work of exploring these sorts of transactions without for a moment suggesting that these transactions are always the answer."
For some colleges, survival may require a different way of thinking about growth.
"The mission of those institutions, wherever they are, somehow needs to be perpetuated, but the contraction is inevitable," said Michael Benson, president of West Virginia University.
After a difficult period of cuts and program consolidations, Benson says his university is seeing some encouraging signs: Last year's freshman class was its largest in five years.
But West Virginia still faces a major challenge: steep demographic decline in a small, rural state with fewer than two million people and stiff competition from nearby schools like Pitt, Ohio State, Virginia Tech and Maryland.
So the university is getting creative with its marketing, including a new ad that plays on flights.
"If you're on a flight out of one of their major hubs, if you want to get on Wi-Fi, you have to watch two WV ads," Benson said, laughing in his wood-paneled office. "One's not enough!"
And the marketing blitz doesn't stop when prospective students land. On the ground in Morgantown, the university is focusing on what Benson calls "curb appeal" — keeping up the campus, investing in the community and making the place look like somewhere students would want to be.
"The way a place looks, even if you've gone through a difficult period, it doesn't mean you can't cut the grass or pick up trash," he said.
Christina Alexis is managing director of the HBCU Brilliance Initiative at the Reinvestment Fund, a community development financial institution that supports capital access in underserved communities. The initiative, created in 2025, invests in chronically underfunded historically Black colleges and universities, as well as healthy food financing, early childhood education, housing, and clean energy.
Alexis says decades of deferred maintenance on aging campuses have created serious infrastructure challenges that schools lack reserves to address. Meanwhile, philanthropic funding has become less predictable, and the current political environment has added further pressure.
"There are some opportunities now for us to depend more on the philanthropic and investment and corporate community," Alexis said. "We have demonstrated in the past eight to 10 months how much stronger we can be with all of us working together and across sectors."
Alexis says schools also need to look outward, asking communities what they need rather than pursuing board-driven visions directed at traditional aged college students.
"It's particularly important for HBCUs that typically exist in communities that are disinvested, but it's also important for every institution that plays an anchor role in their community," she said. "By seeding into the community, working closely with their city government, municipality, I do think that these institutions could be more sustainable over time."
Back in Provincetown, David Chard takes a break from tending his garden and the August heat. Inside, at his dining room table, he shows mementos from his days leading Wheelock, including a bronze medal bearing the college's seal.
"That is what the president wears around his or her neck for ceremonial events like graduations," he explained. "The oak leaves and these acorns are the symbols of Wheelock College, meaning adults and children focused on development."
"To be the last president in that succession is very emotional and meaningful," Chard said.
Looking back, he says the merger worked, and BU was able to preserve Lucy Wheelock's promise of improving the lives of children and families.
"I hope we did a good job of closing the college that was respectful of her ideals," he said. "
In the end, the outcome for students was strong: more than 80% of Wheelock's remaining students transferred to Boston University, most of them graduating on time and at the same tuition rates they had been promised. All tenured faculty received lifetime appointments at BU.
For Chard, those results are the clearest argument for preserving a college's mission even when the institution itself can't survive.
"If you can't be really clear about what the value is, then people are going to wonder: Do you do more than just collect tuition dollars and teach the groups of students you get? What else do you offer?"
Chard says the strength of American higher education is its variety of options. But for small colleges without large endowments, preserving that variety may require rethinking how they grow — and who they serve.
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