Former college towns left to adapt to business loss

POULTNEY, VT. » As colleges and universities come alive this fall, some campuses sit closed and empty after succumbing to a recent wave of fewer students and financial challenges.

Now communities that long hosted those historic institutions and relied on them for an economic boost — and their very identity — are left to adapt to the vacancy and wondering what comes next.

In Poultney, Vermont, population 3,300, Green Mountain College had occupied a prominent spot at the end of the main street for 185 years. That changed in the spring, when the environmentally minded liberal arts school closed after commencement, citing a drop in enrollment and financial challenges.

The closure “literally changed the entire town of Poultney,” said Mel Kingsley, who runs Mel’s Place Hair Salon, several blocks from campus, and got 30% of her business from students.

“The town came alive every time the students came back, and you can feel the difference,” she said.

Besides the day-to-day loss of students and school employees, communities also lose the graduates who stick around.

Sophia Vincenza Milkowski, of New York City, graduated two years ago and stayed in Poultney because she liked it so much.

“We’re still trying to figure out what Poultney even is now without it there,” she said during a break from work at a taco restaurant.

“We’re all feeling its absence,” she said, “whether we were a part of the college or not.”

Across the country, 71 private nonprofit colleges and universities have closed since 1995, including schools that announced they would shutter in June 2020, according to the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

Just 12 independent institutions have opened in that period, while 29 have merged, the association said.

Schools have grappled with a shift toward more career-oriented training and a decline in the number of college-age students. Now towns are left dealing

with the fallout.

In Bristol, Virginia, the campus of the former Virginia Intermont College has stood vacant on the edge of the small city for more than four years.

“When you lose a significant number of people that’s coming into your downtown area on a daily basis, that does hurt the local surrounding businesses by virtue of students not spending cash and buying food or goods that they would have normally bought when they were here in town,” said Randy Eads, the city’s manager and attorney. “So that has had an impact on some of the local businesses, which in and saw no rebound in data collected through Sept. 18. At the state level, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Nevada and Montana all saw drops of one-third or more, while California fell by 6%.

Oregon, among the earliest of the 11 states that legalized recreational marijuana, has seen a 62 percent drop in market share for vapes, said John Kagia, the firm’s chief knowledge officer. The big decline occurred after the state’s first death was announced and officials said the victim had used vapes purchased at legal retailers.

Yet as vape sales sink, some retailers report sales of other cannabis products going up. Bridge City Collective, for example, saw its usually lackluster edible sales increase about 40% the same week vaping sales plummeted. Consumers also are showing more interest in the dried flower used in joints.

Analysts are watching to see if vape sales erode further after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday turn has an impact on city revenue.”

Hiwassee College closed that the number of suspected vaping-related illnesses had grown by 52% in the past week.

“This is a very, very fastmoving issue, and it will likely be a couple more weeks, if not months, before we understand the impact it’s really had on the retail ecosystem and on consumers’ attitudes,” Kagia said prior to the announcement.

Doctors have said the illnesses resemble an inhalation injury, with the lungs apparently reacting to a caustic substance. So far, no single vaping product or ingredient has been linked to the illnesses.

Health officials in New York are focusing on vitamin E acetate, a viscous solution that’s sometimes added to marijuana oils. Retailers in some markets are pulling products from their shelves that contain that and other additives. Other companies have proactively released public statements saying their vape oils contain only pure THC.

Medicine Man, which operates five retail outlets in Colorado, announced Thursday it has stopped selling in the spring in rural, mostly white Madisonville, Tennessee. Not only will the community be losing one of its largest employers, but also “one small but important window into a larger, more diverse world,” wrote Roland King, former spokesman for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, in a newspaper editorial.

In urban areas, some private colleges that have closed have been taken over by larger institutions, or developers.

This month, the Newbury College campus in the Boston area sold for $34 million to investors in senior care housing and medical office-related projects. vape products with propylene glycol or vitamin E acetate.

“The decision to take this particular product off our shelves was significant, as the confidence and trust of our consumers is paramount to our core values,” Medicine Man President and Chief Executive Officer Sally Vander Veer said. “Hopefully the rest of the industry will also conclude that removing these cannabis products with the chemical additives under scrutiny from the market is in the best interest of consumers and all of us as operators.”

In Illinois, a message board for medical marijuana patients banned posters from sharing home vape recipes.

“I just do THC. No flavor additives. I won’t even take that chance,” said Lisa Haywood, a medical marijuana card holder who lives outside Chicago and follows the board for advice and support.

State regulators track the cannabis sold to consumers but don’t monitor what additives are in marijuana oil vapes. That’s led states to

The city council in Denver have approved a general vision for the redevelopment of the former Colorado Heights University in Denver into mixed uses, including housing with new public gathering spaces.

New fits for shuttered college campuses in smaller cities could be harder to find, leaving those communities in limbo.

There is hope in Bristol, where a Chinese businessman and his company, U.S. Magis International Education Center, bought the shuttered Virginia Intermont campus and want to open the Virginia Business College next fall.

In Vermont, besides Green Mountain College, the shuttered Southern Vermont begin discussions of how to tighten restrictions on vaping products even as retailers themselves try to determine which of the products on their shelves contain socalled cutting agents.

“We haven’t evolved our system that far to think about what we would test for in those products. A lot of these additives were conceptual at the time when the (marijuana legalization) law passed and the program came into place,” said Steve Marks, executive director of the Oregon Liquor License Commission, which oversees the state’s cannabis industry.

“Figuring that out is part of the evolution that we have to do as a consumer protection agency,” he said.

Hilary Bricken, a Los Angeles-based attorney whose firm specializes in cannabis business law and regulatory issues, said the legal marijuana industry is moving so fast that many states are “literally making this up as they go,” and the vaping scare has stripped away the sense of security that consumers get from buying from a licensed dispensary. College is also up for sale, and the College of St. Joseph in Rutland is trying to reinvent itself into a professional training and education center after it lost its accreditation last spring.

There’s interest in the Green Mountain College campus but no deals have been signed, said Robert Allen, the last serving president of the school.

Down the street, the customer count is down at Bob Williams’ hardware store, where students would buy fans and desk lamps and college maintenance workers would sometimes be in several times a day.

“We’re anxiously looking forward to having something take over,” Williams said.

The vaping crisis will undoubtedly hasten tighter regulation at the state level and force the industry to patrol itself better to avoid crippling lawsuits, she said. The idea of more regulation unnerves some medical marijuana.

If there’s a ban, “what does it do for all these people who have been seeing relief? ... It is going to really impact patients and the industry that we’ve fought” to create, said Melanie Rose Rodgers, a Colorado medical cannabis patient and leader of the state’s chapter of Americans for Safe Access, which advocates for medical marijuana patients.

Bobby Burleson, an analyst with Toronto-based investment and financial services company Canaccord Genuity, said the initial problems for the vape segment of the cannabis industry should moderate, and the health scare may in the end help the legal marijuana industry.

The crisis “should ultimately accelerate the shift away from the black market for cannabis products in the U.S.,” he said.

AP PHOTO/LISA RATHKE In this Sept. 20 photo, a sign points to an auction at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vt. The school closed in May and now its hometown is awaiting to hear what will become of the campus.

AP PHOTO/LISA RATHKE A Green Mountain College sign is on display among the goods to be sold at an auction at the school in Poultney, Vt. The school closed in May and now the town that hosted it for 185 years is awaiting to hear what will become of the campus.