The parking lots are mostly vacant. Locked and dark, many of the buildings are lifeless but for dying plants in dusty pots. One of the few people visible is a white-bearded man on a riding mower, tending to an empty lawn as if by habit.
This is not a factory or office park abandoned by its tenants. It’s Hampshire College, a once-celebrated liberal arts school that will shut down in December. That makes it the latest in a steady stream of colleges that are closing or merging, at a rate that last year reached the equivalent of nearly one every three weeks.
Empty or near-empty campuses like this evoke the idled auto plants and empty mills that characterized earlier downturns in the car and steel industries, which left employees out of work and surrounding communities in decline. And experts say the higher education industry has now unquestionably reached a similar period of crisis.
There will be wider-ranging collateral damage in this case, those experts warn, including less access to higher education — especially in rural areas — and a threat to the continued production of graduates with the skills employers need to replace retiring baby boomers.
“Everyone is shocked to hear that more than a quarter of our private colleges could be gone in the next decade,” said Peter Stokes, a managing director at Huron Consulting Group, which has projected that 442 of the nation’s 1,700 still-operating private, nonprofit universities and colleges are at risk of having to close or merge in the next 10 years. “We’re now talking about hundreds of other institutions being in a similar situation.”
This downward trend follows decades of almost uninterrupted expansion, when there seemed to be an unlimited supply of students, Stokes said.
“We had 60 years of significant growth,” he said. “And now we’re seeing 30 years of significant decline” in the number of college students, which Stokes said started around 2011 and is forecast to continue through at least 2041.
Nearly 150 private, nonprofit colleges and universities across the country have closed over the last 10 years, many leaving behind land and buildings creditors are struggling to sell or redevelop. Public university campuses and branch campuses have also closed in Wisconsin and will soon be shut down in Pennsylvania.
The principal cause was that fewer students enrolled at those colleges. Enrollment in college overall has declined by 2 million students since the 2011 high, with further drops predicted as the number of 18-year-olds falls, along with the proportion of high school graduates choosing to go to college — down from 70 percent in 2016 to 63 percent in 2024, the last year for which the figure is available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The number of international students is also falling in the face of deportations, detentions and visa delays.
“Is it a crisis? Yes, probably,” said Kevin McElrath, visiting assistant professor of educational studies and director of the College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College in North Carolina. “It’s been brewing for quite some time. And this is magnified by recent policy changes.”
That’s a particular problem for college towns, McElrath said.
“It’s going to dramatically impact local economies,” he said. “Colleges are major local employers. You lose the students coming, who spend their money at the restaurants and stores. And you lose the young people who graduate and stay.”
But there are significant effects on the broader national economy, too — and on students.
Fewer than half of students at colleges that close continue their educations by enrolling elsewhere, according to the most recent study of this, produced in 2022 by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Of those who do continue, fewer than half earn degrees.
Not all higher education institutions are in trouble. Many public flagship universities are seeing increased enrollment, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. But the center reports that the number of students at private colleges in general continues to be flat or down.
“We’re in a sink-or-swim environment,” McElrath said. “The top schools — the highly selective privates, the big public flagships — they’re going to be fine. They have the demand and the prestigious reputations and the endowments.”
Colleges that have closed or merged have typically been small, little known outside their home states and without endowments big enough to keep them going. Many are in rural places. Most were straining under the weight of debt they took on to build new facilities or to just continue operating. They were also giving unsustainably deep discounts to attract students.
(CJ Gunther for The Hechinger Report)
Enrollment challenges are worst in the Northeast and Midwest, which have not only too few students but also more colleges than they appear to need.
Historically, “every group founding a town — before they had clean water, before they had public schools — they would seem to build a college,” said John Thelin, an emeritus professor at the University of Kentucky and author of “A History of American Higher Education.” “It gave a legitimacy, a stature, a sense of purpose.”
The collapse of these schools, said Thelin, means “you’re going to have some regions with a shortage of colleges and others where the campuses begin to look like ghost towns.”
That was a good description of Hampshire in its last-ever semester.
“It feels like we’re still waiting for the student body to arrive,” said Chloe De Lisle, one of the fewer than 170 remaining students, looking out at the deserted-seeming 800-acre campus. That’s down from a peak enrollment of more than 1,500 in 2010. There are nine faculty left, mostly to advise those last few students on their senior projects, but the dining hall and student-run cafe are closed, as are most of the dorms and many of the other buildings.
(CJ Gunther for The Hechinger Report)
An alternative college planned during the 1960s, Hampshire — its students call it “Hamp” — follows a model of self-directed study instead of conventional majors and “narrative evaluations” instead of grades. A “patch of hippie paradise,” as one alumna put it.
It boasts an impressive list of alumni, especially considering that the first students weren’t admitted until 1970. These include documentarian Ken Burns, director Barry Sonnenfeld, Academy Award-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o, Tony Award-winning actor Liev Schreiber, author Jon Krakauer, Duolingo co-founder Jose Fuentes, Herrell’s Ice Cream co-founder Judith Herrell, Stonyfield Farm president Gary Hirshberg, Seventh Generation CEO Jeffrey Hollender and TV producer Rod Roddenberry.
“When it opened, it was the hot place,” said Jim Wald, who taught European history here.
Like other small colleges now under threat, Hampshire — with its personal support and less rigid approach — attracted students reluctant to go to bigger, more bureaucratic universities with enrollments in the tens of thousands.
“I didn’t want to be another number in a huge sea of people in a lecture hall,” De Lisle said. Neither did many of her classmates. “There are a lot of people who’ve come here who didn’t plan on going to college otherwise,” she said. With the demise of places such as Hampshire, “I think there will be some students who will end up not going to college.”
Hampshire is the kind of place where “people who have struggled feel more hopeful,” said Mars Richman, who attended the college until it announced in April that it was closing after hemorrhaging enrollment and piling up $21 million in institutional debt it was unable to refinance.
Richman has since transferred across town to the University of Massachusetts — enrollment: more than 31,000.
“That’s not an environment I’m comfortable in,” said Richman, speaking on that campus as a parade of UMass students marched past on their way to classes and activities. “At Hampshire, everything was underfunded, but we all knew who to go to for what.”
Consumers, however, have grown skeptical of that model and how much it costs, said Musbah Shaheen, an assistant professor and program coordinator for higher education in the College of Education at UMass. “It comes down to this lack of public faith, of public trust, in higher education — that a liberal arts college is not going to take you where you want to go,” Shaheen said.
The proportion of adults who say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education overall has fallen from 57 percent in 2015 to 38 percent now, Gallup surveys show.
Universities and colleges “are in crisis mode as institutions. We’re trying to dig ourselves out,” Shaheen said. But as they struggle to simply attract enough students and balance the books, “it’s very difficult to think, ‘How am I going to transform higher education?’ ”
Behind the scenes, more colleges and universities are seeking merger partners, said Brian Weinblatt, founder and principal of HCS Strategy, an advisory firm that helps them do that.
“At conferences and in conversations with institutional leaders, I keep hearing versions of the same story: Another college or university quietly approached them about a possible merger or acquisition,” Weinblatt said. “The more troubled institutions are going to the relatively stable institutions saying, ‘Would you consider taking us in?’ ”
For many, he said, it’s too late.
That was Hampshire’s story, said Jen Chrisler, the college’s last president: It ran out of time.
“What is happening here at Hampshire is something I think other institutions are likely to be facing,” she said. “And that’s going to be bad for us as a country.”
Chrisler gestured at the largely empty campus, which protects woodlands and wetlands and is open to neighbors to stroll or use the tennis courts and fields.
“There’s a lot that gets lost when a campus closes,” she said. And while those things include amenities and buildings, “mostly it’s the promise of the people who were on it.”
The few remaining maintenance workers haven’t gotten around yet to erasing the wistful graffiti left by some of the college’s last students — “Goodbye, Hamp,” for instance, on the locked humanities and cultural studies building, Emily Dickinson Hall, and “Hampshire will live forever” on a no-longer-used redbrick classroom building.
Madeline Keating is among the small number of students still here, working on their senior projects.
She knows that, after December, there will no longer be a college to come back to for reunions. So even though she hasn’t graduated yet, said Keating, she’s joined social media groups for alumni and plans to gather with friends she made.
“And we’ll throw a Frisbee or something,” she said — “whatever Hampshire people do.”
This story first appeared in The Hechinger Report. Read the original here.