Burlington College is going to close. From looking at their website as well as Google images, this college has a traditional campus. I’ve seen some for profit universities close, but they’ve never had a traditional campus, just a setup similar to an office building. Easy enough to convert them to another use.
What can you do with an abandoned college campus? I can’t imagine anyone going in and starting a brand new college there. I guess you could bulldoze all the buildings and start over.
Perhaps University of Vermont can lease the properties and put them to good use?
Most likely, some sort of business incubator. Small businesses can use the buildings for office space.
The University of Vermont is located in Burlington. They might be able to use the space to expand programs.
From images of the campus, that main building looks to me like an insane asylum.
Turn it into a prison.
Colleges close all the time. Sometimes the campuses are in fact taken over by brand-new schools, or existing schools relocate or expand there. Sometimes the buildings are re-purposed, perhaps for residential use. I have no idea what the real estate market is in Burlington Vermont, so I don’t know if someone might want to turn the buildings into condos or apartments.
But I expect this to happen more and more. College costs have risen to a ridiculous level and I don’t think it’s sustainable. One of my brother’s kids is graduating from college this week and the other kid is starting college in the fall. In both cases, these are smaller liberal arts schools in Connecticut, with sticker prices of $50-60,000 each year.
Turn it into a Coat Factory?
Sometimes old colleges/universities are simply abandoned and eventually torn down, such was the fate of Huron University.
Here’s one that was turned into a resort.
And here’s one that’s being redeveloped for a mixed-use retail/residential/office space concept.
I snorted!
(Still) Not affiliated with Burlington Industries.
Morris Brown College is another school that has nearly shut down entirely. Unfortunately, the school has refused to “end it all” and sell off its property. The City of Atlanta and neighboring colleges can easily put it to use but so much time has gone by the buildings are turning into teardown jobs. The area used to be fairly rundown but has been coming back for a while. It’s not a prime redevelopment location, but fairly decent.
That’s the fate of closed colleges in areas such as healthy cities: redevlopment. In the rural or failing city areas, there’s usually little hope. (Sometimes someone with a big ego, e.g., a televangelist, will buy a small dead rural school for a religious “college”. Most of those soon fail. Lather, rinse, repeat.)
The main question about Burlington is: is the city healthy enough that the location, on the edge of town is desirable for development? It all seems borderline to me.
This article in the Burlington Free Press says: “[Carol] Moore, the college president, said Burlington developer Eric Farrell would purchase the college’s North Avenue campus from the bank. Burlington College in 2015 sold 27.5 acres of its waterfront campus to Farrell, who plans to develop the site into housing and a park.”
I had totally forgotten about Mike Durfee prison mentioned above, I grew up across the street from Yankton Federal Prison Camp which is on a former college campus. It was a stroke of brilliance and has been a great addition to Yankton.
I think the lesson from this thread is: Don’t open a college in South Dakota.
From their own website header:
Burlington College
Start a fire
BTW, before anyone gets the wrong notion about “campus”, that one big building, number (1) in the fancy “master plan” maps, was pretty much it when the end came. Those were former quarters for the Archdiocese of Burlington plus lakefront undeveloped land, that were put on the market by the Church in 2010 to pay off child abuse claims and that the College gambled and overleveraged itself on to get out of their old cramped quarters. Most of that land remained undeveloped until the end.
Said gamble the doings of Jane Sanders.
The OP should have had the integrity to state the political motivations behind this thread. Its a passive aggressive slap at Bernie Sanders from a (judging from his posts in the Elections forum) rabid Hillary supporter.
My undergrad college closed in 2000. Took almost 5 years to find a buyer (many of the buildings are on the National Historic Register so no teardowns). A bible college bought the entire campus. They show no signs of closing.
