BOSTON (WHDH) - A former Mt. Ida College student who transferred to Newbury College is now looking for her third college in less than a year after the Cambridge campus announced last week it was closing at the end of the school year.
When Newton’s Mt. Ida College could no longer afford to operate and abruptly closed its doors, student Samantha Marshall was recruited to attend Newbury College, but before committing, Samantha’s mother, Barbara, says her daughter asked Newbury’s admissions counselor one important question: “How are the school’s finances?”
The email she got back read, in part: “Newbury is doing well financially and there are no plans of merger or closure anytime soon.”
So, Barbara Marshall tells 7News, her daughter successfully completed a semester at Newbury College.
“When she got her grades Thursday night, she was literally jumping around the living room,” Barbara said. “She was so happy she did so well and then one of her professors sent her a note saying it was a pleasure having her in class and thanking her for her participation, and then Friday morning, the bomb dropped.”
Newbury College is set to shut down in the spring of 2019.
“She’s completely disheartened,” Barbara said of her daughter. “She doesn’t know if she can trust another school to do the right thing.”
In a statement, Samantha says she was blindsided by Newbury College, writing: “What really gets me is that they made a decision to come to Mount Ida to recruit new students when they knew they would be closing. I had been lured into another institution after a rough semester thinking that it will now all be OK.”
And, Samantha says, despite asking the right questions about the stability of the school, questions she didn’t ask Mt. Ida, she finds herself in the same situation all over again.
Newbury College President Joseph L. Chillo tells 7News: “I apologize and take full responsibility for the correspondence Newbury College had with Samantha. While the email mischaracterized Newbury College’s financial situation, it was written by someone who would not have been briefed on the challenges we were facing at the time.”
“Why didn’t they have the appropriate information?” Barbara asked. “They have the admissions people. They went out to Mt. Ida to recruit these students and then they deceived them.”
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