COA Leadership Points to Enrollment Interest and Community Ties as They Plan Ahead

Carrie Jones

May 14, 2026

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Window Panes Home and Garden.

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BAR HARBOR—At a time when headlines about higher education often focus on closures and financial strain, leaders at College of the Atlantic say the small Bar Harbor college is leaning on community ties, strong donor support, and new career-focused programs to chart its future.

It’s a future interwoven with the future of both Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Island.

“You can almost not pull COA out of the community and have MDI look the way it does,” said new interim President Lynn Boulger.

The college’s vice president of institutional advancement, Boulger will be filling in while the college looks for a replacement for President Sylvia Torti who has left to lead Westminster, in Salt Lake City, Utah, beginning this summer.

Torti was COA’s eighth president since the college began in the late 1960s. She was hired in June 2024. She had succeeded president Darron Collins, PhD ’92 in 2024. Collins had led the college for 13 years.

Since it began in 1969, the liberal arts college nestled on the edge of Mount Desert Island, has been led by multiple presidents beginning with Edward Kaelber (founding president), Dr. Judith Swazey, Dr. Louis Rabineau, Dr. Steven Katona, David Hales, Andy Griffiths (one-year interim president), Collins, and Torti.

“I continue to believe deeply in the mission of College of the Atlantic. Its human-ecological approach, its connection to place, and its commitment to linking learning with real-world challenges make it not just relevant, but essential,” Torti said in a press release announcing her resignation. “The foundation is in place for what comes next, and I’m excited to see where that work leads.”

For now, the person leading that new work will be Boulger, who has been a part of the college community as well as the Hancock County community for years.

Those same years, the college has been building its $95 million endowment, which helps buffer it from some of the financial issues of other institutions who are also dealing with visa restrictions for foreign students and increasing costs for education and the infrastructure that supports it.

According to the college, “Boulger served as dean of institutional advancement at the college for 13 years before leaving in early 2021 to become executive director of the Authors Guild Foundation. She returned to COA in 2025 in her current role.”

For Boulger, the college’s evolution continues in multiple positive ways.

“The thread of our values-laden curriculum and dedication to life-changing education is still the resonant note on campus,” she said.

And, for those same years, the college has been integrating with the larger community.

Many alumni stay in the area, working, starting businesses, and putting down roots. That weaving together creates a college that has both continuity and evolution.

“I think maybe that’s rare, or that (it happens) no matter who’s at the helm,” Boulger said. “They say culture eats strategy for lunch every day. The culture of the college is palpable in the air. The students want it, they hold us to it…. It has to do with the sense of community. It has to do with our pedalogical approach.”

Despite the interwoven fabric of the community and the college, there are occasional tension points.

One of the tension points in the community has been the purchase of homes for student housing. Many of those homes had already been housing students. They are on the town’s tax rolls and pay full property tax. Part of the impetus for the purchases was it allows the students to not have to move out before the weekly rental season.

Instead, the college uses those properties for weekly rentals (after the students go home for the summer) and then uses the profits from those rentals to help students pay for housing. The weekly rental season at those properties is much shorter. The college also bought a home for its president, which is a year-round home in Bar Harbor that will continue to house a year-round family, specifically the college president’s.

The college paid $108,987 in direct property tax in fiscal year 2024.

The college hosts events and summer camps. It brings students into area farms and clam flats. It is where Diver Ed docked, where gardens bloom, and where conversations and ideas begin and then move out into the towns and world.

“We have students that are here now that have spent their whole careers here working in a lab at Jax or the Bio Lab doing graduate level work all because of the really open and collaborative stance of our partners and co-organizations and just the people that live here and staff, those places have been so welcoming of COA students over the years that the college has just been so enriched by these many communities,” Boulger said.

Its annual budget is $19 million.

Leaders said those dollars are ones that go into employee bank accounts, prop up local vendors. Employees buy homes and send their own children into schools.

There’s a ripple effect from COA’s payroll into the community.

There are 189 jobs supported, have been $29.2 million in capital projects from 2020-2024, $16.9 million in additional economic activity, $1.2 million in state and local tax revenues.

According to its economic impact report, “Students alone spent an estimated $744,000 annually at local businesses. Over the past four years, COA’s capital projects have added $29.2 million in cumulative value to the regional economy and supported more than 300 jobs during construction, renovation, and property improvement efforts. These impacts extend well beyond the numbers. Faculty and staff live and volunteer locally, strengthening civic life and contributing to the year-round economy through spending, leadership, and engagement. Students are active consumers and volunteers in Bar Harbor and neighboring towns, supporting small businesses even outside of peak tourism months. Alumni continue this cycle of impact—many remain in Maine, applying their education in environmental science, agriculture, education, and professional services, founding new businesses, and reinforcing the region’s skilled workforce.”

The ripple effect isn’t just about dollars; it’s about community and engagement, leadership and volunteerism. And it’s all happened just sense the late 1960s.

“When you think about it, when the college began, in the world of colleges, it’s not all that long,” Boulger said.

The college typically has approximately 350 students at a time, though enrollment shrank a bit recently. It’s expected to expand toward that number again. Those numbers won’t be finalized until after May 15 when the transfer student deadline has passed. The college expects to accept many students from Hampshire College, which has just closed.

Though the enrollment numbers are small, the college has made an impact, she stressed, on multiple levels: personal, community, state-wide, and beyond.

It’s impacted Boulger as well.

“When I started working with the students and faculty…I fell in love with how people saw the world, how earnestly they wanted to be part of a solution,” Boulger said. “I felt that these are people who are going to change the world. And I have seen that. I mean, 20 years later, I have watched some of them do that. But there’s just a wonderful sense of how you are working towards something so much bigger than yourself when you are on the COA campus. You are part of this community that I just feel that is quantifiably different.”

Part of that difference, she said, is the agency of the students.

“They come and they want to do something, and at COA, they’re able to do it, and my life has been enriched in so many ways because of the college friends,” Boulger said. “The alumni network, just colleagues that have been wonderful…. This position is a little bit of a way that I can give back for what the college has given to me and my family.”

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LINKS TO LEARN MORE

College of the Atlantic President Stepping Down.

Carrie Jones

Apr 15

Read full story

COA’s economic impact report.

COA

Correction: We wrote panlogical instead of pedagogical in the above story. This was a mistake that was fixed on May 16, 12:12 p.m.

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