Hampshire Faculty, a private college positioned in Amherst, Massachusetts, introduced on April 14, 2026, that it was joining the list of small, experimental liberal arts schools which have closed their doorways over the previous few years.
Hampshire will cease operations in December 2026 due to “declining enrollment, the burden of long-standing debt, and stalled progress on land growth,” Hampshire board chair Jose Fuentes said in a statement. Hampshire at present enrolls 625 college students, about half the number who attended within the early 2000s.
Just lately admitted Hampshire students will obtain a refund on their deposit. Hampshire’s present college students finishing their remaining capstone undertaking can nonetheless graduate from the college. Different enrolled college students can switch to a different college in Massachusetts that’s part of the Five College Consortium. Amherst Faculty, where I teach law, is a part of this consortium. This association permits college students from collaborating schools to take lessons on completely different campuses.
As somebody who has taught many Hampshire college students, I can attest that the faculty delivered an training that lived as much as its motto, “Non Satis Scire,” meaning “To Know Is Not Enough.”
I’ve additionally written about the financial dilemmas liberal arts colleges are going through, as enrollment drops, funds are strained and they’re pressured to undertake vocational programs.
Hampshire’s demise is one other signal of the consolidation occurring in larger training, during which rich faculties and people who ship a conventional and sometimes vocationally pushed curriculum have a bonus. In the meantime, dozens of small schools with small endowments, like Hampshire, can not sustain.
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A rising checklist of shuttered liberal arts faculties
Based in 1965, Hampshire billed itself as a faculty that “scrapped generic models of learning” and supplied a student-driven curriculum. It doesn’t have traditional core course requirements and encourages college students to undertake self-directed tasks.
Hampshire is the newest experimental New England faculty to seek out its strategy was not sustainable.
Three Vermont schools – Green Mountain College, Marlboro College and Goddard College – closed in 2019, 2020 and 2024, respectively.
These faculties had been hardly family names within the larger training world, however every was outstanding amongst aficionados of experimental training.
These colleges emphasized college students endeavor impartial research, didn’t have normal educational departments and de-emphasized school analysis. They attracted quirky, passionate college students, a lot of whom didn’t thrive in conventional highschool settings.
The dream of experimental training
The origins of experimental training in schools and universities can be traced to the flip of the twentieth century and the American philosopher John Dewey. Whereas Dewey targeted on elementary and secondary training, he additionally wrote a e book in 1899 known as “The School and Society: Being Three Lectures,” which turned a handbook for faculties like Hampshire Faculty.
Dewey “insisted that the outdated mannequin of education … was antiquated,” explained Peter Gibbon, an training scholar at Boston College.
Dewey believed that “college students ought to be lively, not passive,” wrote Gibbon. “Curiosity, not concern, ought to be used to encourage them. They need to cooperate, not compete.”
These rules impressed the primary stirrings of experimental training in the USA.
In 1917, Deep Springs Faculty, a university targeted on scholar self-government and guide labor, opened on a California cattle ranch. There are 24 to 30 undergraduate college students at a time at this two-year school. College students are chargeable for serving to to run the college, together with hiring school and admitting new college students.
In 1921, Antioch Faculty, a non-public faculty in Ohio that had opened 70 years earlier, reorganized itself to emphasize studying by doing. It became the first liberal arts college within the U.S. to create a co-op program, which mixed in-class instruction with studying by means of employment exterior the faculty.
Dewey’s affect additionally impressed Alexander Meiklejohn, who, after a tumultuous tenure as president of Amherst Faculty within the early 1900s, directed the Experimental Faculty on the College of Wisconsin from 1927 to 1932. Students at this independent college, operating within the broader University of Wisconsin, didn’t obtain standard grades. In addition they studied in six-week periods, quite than conventional semesters that final a number of months.
Meiklejohn wrote that this school had “one goal and that goal is intelligence.”
Some College of Wisconsin school, although, thought Meiklejohn’s strategy was not rigorous. In a preview of what was to return a century later, the Experimental Faculty closed 5 years after its inception.
Sarah Lawrence, a New York liberal arts faculty that opened in 1926, and Bennington College, a small faculty that opened in Vermont in 1932, had been quickly added to the checklist of the early adopters of experimental training.
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Experimental schools come into their very own
All through the late Fifties and ’60s, dozens of other experimental colleges had been based, together with Evergreen State College in Washington state.
These faculties weren’t developed to rework larger training, argues education scholar Reid Pitney Higginson. They had been designed so as to add selection to the menu of current faculties.
In a way, experimental schools captured the spirit of the Sixties. They needed to free their college students from the standard academic paths and empower them to have a say in how their schools function. That typically precipitated issue, when college students pushed for greater control over their faculties.
But even of their halcyon days, experimental schools by no means turned as financially properly off nor as prestigious as their mainstream opponents. At its founding, Hampshire appeared to have a definite benefit: its membership within the 5 Faculty Consortium, connecting it with Amherst, Smith Faculty, Mount Holyoke Faculty and the College of Massachusetts.
An exception to the rule
However even that was not sufficient to save lots of Hampshire. One problem for it and different larger training establishments is {that a} rising variety of college students are questioning the value of a faculty diploma, particularly if it doesn’t end in abilities or a certification they will rapidly use as graduates to make a residing.
Tuition and housing for students attending Hampshire within the 2025-26 college 12 months prices greater than US$72,000.
Hampshire’s closing alerts the total flowering of a better training period that favors well-resourced schools, which profit from federal funding and huge non-public donations. These faculties typically ship a extra standard, safer academic product and can attract students from wealthy families.
As a result of Hampshire remained steadfastly unconventional, its failure could encourage faculties to double down on choices they know will attract a job-anxious generation of students.
What documentary filmmaker and Hampshire graduate Ken Burns told The New York Times about his alma mater’s closing helps clarify why it and different experimental schools couldn’t survive because the exception to the rule in as we speak’s larger training panorama.
“(Hampshire) was devoted to a transformational training, in an period when larger training has been hijacked by the transactional,” Burns stated. “A university training is, to some, like a Louis Vuitton purse. And that’s not Hampshire.”