BOSTON — State higher education officials said their meeting with leaders from Mount Ida College went well, but it may be weeks yet before a state board is in a position to vote on the Newton college’s closure plan.
Higher Education Commissioner Carlos Santiago said his staff met with Mount Ida officials Thursday. The University of Massachusetts announced April 6 that it had reached an agreement to acquire Mount Ida, and that UMass Amherst plans to use the 74-acre campus to host Greater Boston career preparation programs for its students.
“We see progress in the information they provided. It is far from complete, but we think this is a good-faith effort on their part to answer our questions and from our perspective we have really been most concerned about the students and the closure plan is a great part of what will impact those students as they decide to continue to study elsewhere,” Santiago told reporters in his office. “We still have a few more weeks of work to do, we think, but we want to complete it as quickly as possible.”
Santiago said the Department of Higher Education is expecting to receive additional information from Mount Ida on Monday and expects that the two sides will meet again next week to continue their discussions. He said the Department of Higher Education has been focused on making sure that the students enrolled at Mount Ida have options when it comes to transferring elsewhere and making sure that the credits they received at Mount Ida can be applied elsewhere.
“There are specific majors that need to be tended to. There are specific areas where some campuses have indicated, or some institutions have indicated, ‘well we’ll take students in that area’ when the programs have not been approved. So we need to ensure the programs will be approved,” Santiago said, referring to the other schools that have proposed assuming some of Mount Ida’s students or programs. “We’re willing to do so on an expedited basis — usually the program approval process can take a while but we certainly would like to do as much as we can so that by the summer whatever programs need to be approved would be addressed by the department.”
Mount Ida students in good standing will be offered automatic admission to UMass Dartmouth with a clear path to degree completion, Mount Ida and UMass said when the sale was first announced, and UMass Dartmouth will also facilitate expedited transfer admission opportunities at the university’s Boston, Lowell and Amherst campuses.
Regis College is in talks over taking students enrolled in Mount Ida’s veterinary and dental hygiene programs, while Lasell College has said it could take over the closing school’s Applied Forensic Science and Biology programs. Becker College and Curry College are also among the schools who have visited Mount Ida in recent weeks to discuss program offerings with students.
Santiago said Thursday that the department’s goal “is for the students to have options, no one campus or one institution has a monopoly on where these students are going to go.” Mount Ida has about 1,450 undergraduates.
The UMass-Mount Ida deal has generated a wave of headlines since it was announced and appeared to have taken public higher education officials by surprise. Santiago said Thursday that he learned about the closure and acquisition on April 6 from media reports. The department was formally notified on April 10.
More than 80 people have called the Department of Higher Education with complaints about the Mount Ida closure plan, the department said, and those people will be given a chance to air their frustrations next week at a public meeting.