In 1975, U.S. President Gerald Ford survived an assassination attempt, The FBI arrested Patty Hearst, and a new massage school – Boulder College of Massage – opened its doors to its first class of students.
Those doors shut this month, for the second time in six months, and Boulder College of Massage, in Boulder, Colorado, the second-oldest massage school in the nation, is now officially out of business.
A statement regarding the most-recent closure is posted on the school’s website, and reads in part:
“This is the second closure of BCMT in the last six months. The first closure was the result of multiple factors related to the financial health of the school over the past several years. However, in the last 18 months BCMT had increased enrollment, revamped its curriculum, raised job placement rates, and improved its financial solvency. Despite these efforts, the school was unable to overcome a constellation of issues related to the previous years of financial losses and the decrease in value of the real estate asset, the BCMT campus. Multiple attempts to reach an agreement with the real estate bondholder, as well as multiple attempts to be acquired by larger educational entities, were unsuccessful.”
Elective classes ran through Oct. 5, and the school’s final graduation took place in late September. The only massage school in continuous business longer than Boulder School of Massage is Swedish Institute College of Health Sciences, in New York, New York.
In July of this year MASSAGE Magazine reported that a private donation had allowed the school to reopen, after it closed for the first time in June 2013. The donor withdrew the funds, however, citing “issues with the Colorado Department of Education: Division of Private Occupational Schools (DPOS) had not been resolved,” the statement on the school’s website noted.