‘An incalculable loss’: Hampshire College to close doors after fall semester

A Massachusetts liberal arts college is set to close permanently due to low enrollment and financial problems.

The board of trustees of Hampshire College, a small liberal arts school in Amherst founded in 1965, pointed to “financial pressures” that have been “compounded by shifting external factors”.

In a statement on the university’s website, the board said it had “worked aggressively to increase enrollment, refinance existing debt, and realize new revenue via the sale of a portion of our land”.

It added: “We have long known that addressing these issues is essential to establishing a stable financial foundation, supporting long-term operations, and meeting regulatory requirements. We are faced with the clear, heartbreaking reality that progress on each of these three key factors has fallen far short of what we had hoped.”

The board explained that the lack of enrollment means the school faced “extraordinary cuts to our operating budgets to educate the student body”.

The college is set to close after the fall semester this year.

Final-year students, or division III students, will be allowed to complete their degrees at Hampshire College. The college said those finishing their degrees will have access to campus housing and student support for the fall semester.

Meanwhile, first- through third-year students – divisions I and II – will be able to transfer through agreements Hampshire College has established with partner institutions including Amherst College, Bennington College, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Massachusetts College of the Liberal Arts, Mount Holyoke College, Prescott College, Smith College, and UMass Amherst.

Commencement ceremonies will still be held in May for graduating students, and a streamlined ceremony will take place next winter for those completing their degrees in December, the university said.

The college also said it would refund deposits for all accepted students.

For Joan Priester, a sophomore at the college, the announcement reflects broader trends across the United States, where nearly 300 higher education institutions closed between 2008 and 2023, according to the Hechinger Report.

“I think really the death of Hampshire College is kind of a reflection of the current conditions of the times, the material conditions of the economy faltering and of the social fabric of America deteriorating and, to that effect, it’s a poignant touchstone for the death of the liberal arts college and the liberal arts model,” Priester told Western Mass News.

Hampshire College alum and film-maker Ken Burns expressed sadness at the news, saying: “Hampshire College is woven into the very fabric of who I am. It’s where I learned that there is freedom in searching, and even in failure … This is an incalculable loss, the reverberations of which will be felt in ways none of us can imagine, but at the same time I know that Hampshire’s ethos and probing way of seeing the world doesn’t disappear when a campus goes quiet.”