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A two-year wait is finally drawing to a close for a small Upper East Side college, with a long-pending change of hands now expected to wrap up within weeks.
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Marymount Manhattan College, the liberal arts school on East 71st Street, will officially complete its absorption by Boston-based Northeastern University this summer once the U.S. Department of Education signs off on the final piece of the deal, Bloomberg reports. The university expects clearance on or before June 30, with the school to be rebranded as Northeastern – New York City once the merger closes.The two institutions first announced the tie-up in May 2024, after Marymount struggled for years to maintain enrollment in an increasingly difficult market for small liberal arts colleges. At the time of the announcement, roughly 1,400 students were enrolled at the UES campus, and the school was operating at a loss. Northeastern, by comparison, had more than 48,000 students across its global network as of fall 2024.
What’s taken so long? The federal review process for college mergers has grown more complex as the volume of deals has climbed — more than 50 college mergers and acquisitions have been announced since 2020, per consulting firm Huron — and the Department of Education has been conducting what one higher-education attorney described as a deep dive into both schools’ finances to ensure federal student aid programs like Pell Grants and loans are properly handled. Some recent transactions have waited as long as three years for final sign-off.
Regulatory scrutiny tightened further in 2024 when the Biden administration introduced new financial tests for universities acquiring other institutions. The Trump administration has since cut staff at the Department of Education, though Education Under Secretary Nicholas Kent recently signaled the agency wants to streamline the merger process going forward.
Even so, attorneys who specialize in higher-education transactions say it would be highly unusual for the Northeastern deal to fall apart at this stage. One lawyer noted that only a single merger in the past two decades has failed to win federal approval, and that case involved a financially unstable buyer — not a concern with Northeastern, which has been actively investing in Marymount throughout the wait.
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Northeastern hasn’t been sitting idle during the regulatory delay. The university has built out a dedicated mergers and acquisitions team and now operates 14 campuses globally, with more than 10 million square feet of real estate. Since 2016, it has merged with schools in California and London and opened satellite campuses in Toronto and Miami. The integration with Marymount is already underway: hundreds of Northeastern students were sent to the East 71st Street campus in fall 2025, ahead of the formal closing.The Department of Education already approved the change in ownership back in November. The remaining hurdle involves the disbursement of federal student aid — the second of the two-step federal review. Once that’s complete, New York State is expected to convert the merged institution’s temporary charter into a permanent one. The deal has also already cleared its accreditor and received a green light from the New York State Department of Education.
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