Limits to Nichification?

This news about the closing of Green Mountain College in the American state of Vermont shows that even a well-honed market niche is not always the path to financial viability. Green Mountain built distinctiveness around environmental sustainability to the point of winning nationally acclaim for this niche, yet in the end was unable to translate this into enough paying customers to sustain the school.Maybe some schools are beyond saving. Maybe we need a way to recognize and respond to this eventuality before things become so dire that students only have a few months notice before closure—a hospice program of sorts for educational institutions.