Inquirer: Chestnut Hill College outlines $500 million expansion

Inquirer: Chestnut Hill College outlines $500 million expansion

Chestnut Hill College – once a small women-only institution wrestling with a deficit and a shrinking student body – has more than doubled its enrollment since going coed in 2003 and operates well in the black today.
Now, the school is preparing to make another major leap. It is planning a multi-decade, $500 million development project, including 10 new buildings on a 32-acre property known as Sugarloaf, near its 45-acre main campus. The college purchased the property, at Bells Mill Road and Germantown Avenue, across from the Woodmere Museum, from the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation in 2006.
Under the master plan, several years in the making, the college would grow from about 900 undergraduate students to 1,500 during the next four to six years and add a second doctoral program and several other new programs.
Calling it “the European city on two hills,” the college’s president, Sister Carol Jean Vale, said the terra cotta roofs, gray stone buildings, open courtyards, and walkways would give the new campus the same feel as the current one – much like a French hillside town.