THE HIGHER EDUCATION APOCALYPSE IS COMING.

It's up to my one-time colleague, former Wisconsin-Milwaukee chancellor Carlos Santiago, to implement a retrenchment plan for higher education in Massachusetts.

Within months, Massachusetts officials went from monitoring the effect of market forces on their higher education industry to actively playing a role in mitigating future risks.

In response, Santiago and state lawmakers convened a working group that quickly prepared a report detailing the emergency and outlining eight specific recommendations to ensure that the state – along with students and the campus community, more importantly – isn't caught off guard again.

Apparently Mount Ida College, in Newton, is the canary in the coal mine, playing the same role in New England higher education that the Rutland Railroad did in New England transportation.

Santiago is quick to note that what happened at Mount Ida, where administrators kept its flailing financials largely secret and did little to ensure a smooth transfer process for students, is an exception. Other schools have navigated much more responsible paths, he says.

That is, the Rutland doesn't connect to the Boston and Maine and the New Haven, yet ...

In Massachusetts' case, Santiago says, the vast majority of colleges are doing OK. But many of them, especially the small, private liberal arts schools, have been operating similarly to how someone might live paycheck to paycheck, some having survived that way for 20 years or more at this point.

The new monitoring strategy, which Santiago describes as part science, part art, will allow the state better oversight of those slipping into the red.

"We will have metrics and we will have indicators, but until you have a conversation with the individual institution, you're really not going to know," he says. "What makes this different from what we've done in the past, is that in the past we've been really reactive. We want to be more proactive."

While most of the closures are impacting smaller private schools, which are more dependent on tuition, larger research universities and schools with major endowments are also taking note and positioning themselves strategically.

The Massachusetts economy relies heavily on higher education, well outside sighting distance of the Old North Church.  But some of the strategies higher education is trying, including combining weak universities with stronger ones, remind me of the merger activity among railroads in the years following the Rutland's collapse.