Rivier leaders say balance of new, old key to long term success

NASHUA Like many New England colleges, Rivier University is facing a dilemma: Should it emphasize the brick-and-mortar traditions of the past or the click-and-interact possibilities of the future?

For the moment, the answer to that question seems to be yes. It is expanding online courses for students who rarely or never come to Nashua even as it spends millions on making the approach to campus from Main Street better looking and the rest of campus more like an academic enclave. ... Subscribe or log in to read more

NASHUA Like many New England colleges, Rivier University is facing a dilemma: Should it emphasize the brick-and-mortar traditions of the past or the click-and-interact possibilities of the future?

For the moment, the answer to that question seems to be yes. It is expanding online courses for students who rarely or never come to Nashua even as it spends millions on making the approach to campus from Main Street better looking and the rest of campus more like an academic enclave.

Call it the clicks-and-mortar approach, which is partly an economic juggling act, partly a reach for new horizons, and partly the latest example of change that belies the staid image of what many still think of as a Catholic nursing school.

We have been expanding our mission for a long time, said the university president, Sister Paula Marie Buley, in a recent interview about the schools present and future.

She ticked off a variety of steps, from night and weekend classes for adults, to the 2006 addition of Ph.D. programs that now have 79 students, that have changed the school in recent decades. The growth in online-only or online-and-classroom hybrid degrees the school offers eight of them, with more coming is the latest step, she said.

To an extent, these are steps born of necessity.

The number of high school graduates in New Hampshire and New England is falling and probably will continue to fall for many years. A college or university that depends on more tuition-paying teenagers to keep the lights on will face troubles. Part of the adjustment involves cutting back; Rivier still faces some criticism for dropping the Music and Art Department and cutting the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

Its not alone in cutting programs in an attempt to balance costs and income. Daniel Webster has made huge changes since ITT bought it, notably dropping the flight programs that were its foundation, while Franklin Pierce University in Rindge has eliminated several degrees, including mathematics. Looming over all private schools is the reminder of Chester College, a small New Hampshire school that closed abruptly in 2012 when its tuition-dependent finances failed.

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Rivier leaders say balance of new, old key to long term success