Notre Dame was founded as a college exclusively for the education of women in 1950 arising from the "Teacher Training Institute" which the Sisters of the Holy Cross had established five years prior.
Most of the additional buildings to the campus were private homes of various sizes purchased in succeeding years to serve as residence halls for the growing number of students from further distances as well as for administrative offices.
The carriage house was renovated and expanded to become the Paul Harvey Library, named in honor of a local businessman and benefactor, and at its height contained 60,000 volumes and 700 periodical subscriptions, as well as faculty offices and seminar rooms.
This would lead to speculation by some that the college made a rash decision to cease operations, and led others to charge that administrative and financial mismanagement was the cause for closure as opposed to problems relating to student matriculation.
In addition, tuition at Notre Dame was markedly lower than at most non-public colleges in the region, while many continuing education and graduate students would simply take a few classes without actually receiving degrees, thereby contributing to even more unstable matriculation numbers.
Finally, with an increasing dependence on local residents to avail themselves of its academic offerings, coupled with either an inability or unwillingness to attract students from beyond the immediate area, the college had placed itself in a grave demographic situation.
In effect, the creation of the highly selective graduate programs in physician assistant studies and physical therapy marked the last-ditch effort by Notre Dame to both carve out an academic niche for itself, as well as to simply survive.
Those students with one year or less remaining in their academic programs would be permitted to study at other institutions within the New Hampshire College & University Council for the purpose of obtaining Notre Dame degrees, while others were to be worked with individually in terms of securing proper transfer arrangements to other schools.