This is news to make a professor shudder: a university closing its doors.
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”.
Universities have been under attack for decades, thanks to our ‘friends’ in the Republican party. Authoritarians and conservatives hate new ideas and helping people rise up out of poverty, and they’ve been whittling away at support for universities, throwing so much debt onto the shoulders of our students. The pandemic hit many colleges hard, too.
Hampshire College hits a little bit close to home. It was a little smaller in enrollment than UMM, my school, and was founded a bit more recently. It was also a liberal arts college, like mine. It differed in some significant ways. According to Wikipedia:
The college utilizes an alternative curriculum, with an emphasis on progressive pedagogy and self-directed academic concentrations, a focus on portfolios rather than distribution requirements, and a reliance on narrative evaluations instead of grades and GPAs.
That’s interesting and I appreciate innovative education, but it does make the work of that university harder. UMM has a more traditional curriculum, but we’ve also struggled over the past few years. Our enrollment bottomed out about two years ago — which is why my senior level genetics course has only 8 students this year, rather than the 30-40 I used to see. (We’re working ourselves out of this hole right now — my fall courses are fully enrolled already, and we may have to pack more students into the class.)
The situation of Hampshire College is a reminder that the situation of all universities in this country is precarious.
Enrollment in West Coast public Universities is going up. (So is the cost per year.)
Enrollment in California public Universities is increasing.
Same overall for the state of Oregon.
The state of Washington is more mixed, with enrollment up at the U. of Washington and down at Washington State.
Washington State is in the interior on the Idaho border.
Being from the coast, I always thought of that area as sort of remote and rural.
That might explain why they are having a hard time with enrollment.
that description of their methods sounds a lot like what cornish college of the arts on seattle was doing as they mismanaged themselves into losing accreditation and slid into the abyss. it’s a desperation move that feels like capitulation to the willful laziness of spoiled kids, at least in the context of a fine arts school, which doubles as a dumping ground for rich kids too indolent for proper education. not sure what happened to that one, but the curriculum makes me side eye.
Sweden introduced several smaller centers of higher learning in the 1980s. Those who chose to go deep into a speciality survived. Others were not so successful, and were closed down.
.
I am privileged in living next door to Umeå University (created in the sixties) which has produced a Nobel laureate for the CRIPR-Cas discovery.
BTW we also have a lot of students from every corner of the world, alongside many refugees that have established themselves here and started new lives.
Here in Vermont colleges have been dropping like flies. Marlboro, Goddard, Green Mountain, Southern Vermont, St. Joseph’s, and so on, and even the State system is strapped and shrinking. A cousin of mine went to Hampshire in Massachusetts.
I went briefly to the Torrington branch of UConn, in the 1960’s and my mother taught there some years later. It closed ten years ago. So far, though, it seems the New School, where I then went and graduated, is still kicking, though the short-lived college program I was in did not survive.
Hampshire College was located not far from where I went to grad school. I’m sorry to hear that it is closing.
My alma maters are all doing fairly well, I’m glad to know. My undergraduate school has actually expanded quite a bit and rebranded itself from a college to a university.
My old school is doing OK. I assume. In any case they have been swallowing up parts of the surrounding city (Stillwater, OK) to build more stuff. I guess they ran out of student parking lots.