Mount Ida students will ‘have options’
Higher ed chief, college officials hammer out details
The state’s higher education commissioner says he is working to give Mount Ida students the option to transfer to more schools and said he’ll put any new programs at other colleges and universities on the fast track for approval to serve the students.
Department of Higher Education staff and Mount Ida officials met yesterday morning in a closed meeting to hammer out details of how the Newton school plans to close ahead of Tuesday’s 9 a.m. board meeting where dozens of angry students, parents and teachers are expected to protest.
“We see progress in the information they provided,” Commissioner Carlos Santiago told reporters, adding that the two sides will meet again Monday. “It is far from complete . ... From our perspective we have really been most concerned about the students.”
Mount Ida’s 74-acre campus will become a satellite of University of Massachusetts Amherst, which will take on the school’s estimated $55 million to $70 million debt in a deal announced earlier this month that has rattled state officials, students and parents. The plan was to send Mount Ida students more than 50 miles away to UMass Dartmouth and have UMass Amherst use the campus as a career center.
The higher education board was originally caught off guard by the deal, learning of it in the media. Officials immediately slammed the process for lacking transparency and demanded information on how Mount Ida students will be able to finish their schooling.
Santiago said he hopes Mount Ida students will be at new schools and new programs established by the end of the summer. He said the state is working with several campuses who expressed interest in starting new programs.
“We want to complete it as quickly as possible,” Santiago said. “Our goal is for the students to have options — no one campus or institution has a monopoly on where these students are going to go.”
Lasell College, meanwhile, announced yesterday it is adopting the biology and applied forensic science program from Mount Ida College, offering both majors in their entirety with no change in curriculum or loss of academic credit for transferring students.
The school is also hiring three full-time Mount Ida faculty members — James Jabbour, associate professor and program director of the applied forensic science program; Barbara Akum, assistant professor of biology; and Angeline Wairegi, assistant professor of chemistry — to teach the expanded program courses in biology, chemistry and applied forensic science.
Mount Ida biology and forensic science students in good academic standing who wish to transfer to Lasell can be accepted for the fall 2018 term.