NORTHFIELD — Thomas Aquinas College still expects to open its Northfield campus next fall, “with the large caveat that we receive approval,” said the school’s Director of College Relations Anne Forsyth.
The soonest the school could be approved would be at the Board of Higher Education’s meeting on Oct. 23. Department of Higher Education Associate Commissioner for External Affairs Katy Abel said that it is still possible for Thomas Aquinas to be submitted for the October meeting’s agenda.
If the school is not reviewed in October, the next opportunity would be Dec. 11.
The California-based Thomas Aquinas College submitted an application to the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education in April 2017, planning to open a satellite school at the former campus of Northfield Mount Hermon, which is now located in Gill.
At the time, the school’s administrators had hoped to open the campus for the fall 2018 semester. This past March, they revised their expectations and said that the school would likely open for the fall 2019 semester, acknowledging that initial hopes to open in 2018 may have been too ambitious.
On Monday Forsyth said that Thomas Aquinas has not had any problems in the Department of Higher Education’s approval process, and that the school still expects to open next fall.
“I don’t think we’ve gone beyond anything that’s normal,” Forsyth said of the timeline for the approval.
Abel said that approval for a new school typically takes up to 540 days, or about 18 months.
The U.S. News and World Report released its latest college rankings on Monday. Thomas Aquinas was listed as No. 43 in national liberal arts colleges. It was one of only two Catholic colleges in the top 50, according to a press release from the school.
Among liberal arts colleges, Thomas Aquinas also got high rankings in “lowest student debt load at graduation” (No. 11) and “best value” (No. 35).
According to the school’s press release, Thomas Aquinas was also ranked highly in other recent college guides, including the Princeton Review, the Washington Monthly, and the Cardinal Newman Society.