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The closure of Hampshire College sent a shock wave across higher education. The news wasn’t entirely unexpected or unprecedented: We have read for years about the various and existential threats to liberal arts colleges, alongside the particular financial and enrollment challenges Hampshire faced. Yet somehow, the college’s announcement still had the power to stun.
For Hampshire students, faculty, staff and alumni, the loss isn’t abstract. They’ve lost the material security of a degree pathway, a job, a home, an alma mater. The college was also a place they loved, a common ideal and a repository for countless memories.
For the rest of us in higher education, what is disappearing is something harder to name, but we feel it in ways both instinctive and profound. As F. Scott Fitzgerald might have framed it, our collective “count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.” As both a singular representation and a warning against greater loss to come, Hampshire’s closure threatens a uniquely American vision for education and its role in democratic society.
Perhaps due to its outsize role as a proud standard-bearer of “weirdness,” Hampshire’s news heralds the start of the era we’ve been worrying about. The halcyon years of the ’90s and ’00s are gone, and so too are the years of pulling rabbits out of hats. Even transformational gifts from singular donors are no longer sufficient protection against declining enrollments, reduced research funding, endowment pressures, job-market uncertainty and broader economic disparity. Moreover, some have lost faith in the value of environments that foster creative, self-driven learning: Institutions grounded in that legacy have lost the narrative.
But amid so many headwinds, it is instructive to remember that Hampshire’s creation in 1965 also signaled a new era in higher education. Famously the result of a collaborative effort between four other institutions (Amherst, Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst), Hampshire’s founding documents call for a radically new approach to undergraduate education: one focused on student-driven learning, exploration rooted in curiosity and real-world experience, and above all, flexibility. Colleges like Hampshire formed in reaction to hidebound, traditional education characterized by strict walls between disciplines and a reliance on grades as the artifact of knowledge and capacity. These critiques are as valid today as they were in the time of Hampshire’s founding.
There are many things Hampshire got right. Plainly visible in the outpouring of alumni stories online, Hampshire provided a compelling, rigorous and transformative educational experience for its students. The institution created tens of thousands of individuals, all of whom understood that they had agency and freedom in their educational choices, alongside the ability and the imperative to transmit their knowledge to others. We know that this model worked because more traditional institutions quickly adopted it as well: Terms like “interdisciplinary,” “project-based learning” and “critical thinking” abound on college websites today, regardless of how well an institution makes good on those promises.
Hampshire students could thrive in uncertain times: the social revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s, the economic instability of the late 2000s, or the unfolding political and technological upheaval in the age of AI. To befriend a graduate of Hampshire is to have an ally on stormy seas: These are people who can navigate complexity and thrive in ambiguity.
Where Hampshire went wrong is harder to pin down. Sure, there are the widely reported financial and enrollment concerns, a $21 million bond debt it wasn’t able to refinance, a real estate transaction that fell through. The underlying dynamics of rising costs and dwindling revenues are familiar to all of us in higher education. It is a perilous time for many institutions of higher education, but particularly those small, rurally situated liberal arts institutions that have not carved out a clear niche or audience.
But lurking beneath these surface challenges is something much more complex and pernicious: a question of what college is for. Amid rising college graduate unemployment and the destruction of our social safety net, students (and their parents) are increasingly gravitating toward experiences that they perceive as safe and secure. For many, this means enrolling at the highest-ranked institution they can attend and afford. For others, this means focusing on a vocational sure thing.
Institutions that don’t check these boxes will struggle with enrollment, declining tuition revenue and questions about the return on investment for the time (and money) required to graduate. Why pay to attend college if it won’t guarantee you a secure future? It was this question, perhaps, that Hampshire struggled to answer.
Still, we have much to learn from the Hampshire experiment, even—perhaps especially—in its premature conclusion. They are lessons that all of us need to hear.
- First, students want ROI. There is real pressure on students to think about college as an investment. Tuition has outpaced inflation for decades and student debt has become a defining feature of young adulthood. Families faced with six-figure sums have rational reasons to ask what the degree will deliver. The aggregate data continues to show that college graduates earn more than those who don’t go to college. But data compiled by the federal government on earnings by college and by major tell a more nuanced story. If you studied engineering (or, until recently, computer science) at an elite technical school, you’re doing quite well; if you studied the visual arts at a small liberal arts college, you’re probably earning less. Of course, all of this is incredibly reductive, but it is a response—specious as it is—to the sense that the sole purpose of higher education is to prepare students for higher-earning jobs.
- Additionally, ROI looks different depending on the student. A contingent of students and families still want the flexibility and intellectual freedom that Hampshire promised. In fact, some believe that this approach to learning is the surest bulwark against an increasingly mechanized labor force. Others want the close relationships with faculty, peers and staff—they want to be themselves and to be seen as individuals. Most of all, they want a life of fulfillment, decency and purpose. Perhaps more than anything, that is what Hampshire promised: the chance to find and explore your passion while situated in a pluralistic community, to learn through curiosity and inquiry, and to apply personal knowledge toward the needs of the world. What else could an 18-year-old want? And as graduates from Hampshire will surely attest, isn’t that the greatest return on investment?
- Finally, Hampshire’s educational approach worked—and it’s needed now more than ever. The formerly stable foundations of our society, from higher education to democratic governance, are under threat. So too is our notion of what it means to be human, challenged by the advent of the technology purported to “think” for itself. Hampshire’s student-first model privileged the development of the whole person above all else; it imagined the liberal arts college as a place to cultivate a self, to learn to be human.
If there was a need for that in 1965, it’s only grown since. We are entering an era when the cornerstones of an undergraduate education—the essay, the research paper, the presentation—are now cheap, infinite and reproducible on demand by simulated mechanical intelligence. What remains scarce and is becoming even scarcer is the capacity to identify a question worth asking, to sit with a problem that has no correct answer, to form an identity that is more than the sum of its parts. That is precisely what Hampshire, at its best, tried to do and a mission that the colleges that share this legacy still strive to realize. A college organized around the formation of a person rather than the mere delivery of a credential is not an idea from a distant past. It is a proposition whose moment is now.
A new era for higher education began when Hampshire announced its closure on April 14. But whether this new era is organized around the premise that college is a place where students develop a sense of agency and self-determination, or instead that colleges are credential vendors operating on thinning margins, is not going to be decided by “market forces” alone. It is going to be decided by what the rest of us do next.
