Hampshire College to Admit Pared-Down Freshman Class Next Year

The Board of Trustees of Hampshire College announced on Friday that it would admit a much-reduced freshman class this fall, a sign of the increasingly perilous operating environment for small liberal-arts colleges in demographically challenging regions like the Northeast.

Next year’s admittees at the Massachusetts college will be limited to two groups of students: those who applied via early decision and those who had accepted the college’s offer to enroll last year but opted to take a gap year and start in the fall of 2019.

A total of 60 to 77 students fall into the two categories, according to local news reports, including the Daily Hampshire Gazette. About 320 students enrolled as freshmen at Hampshire in the fall of 2017, according to federal data.

Friday’s decision reflected the college’s “moral and ethical obligation to the students whom we had already accepted as well as to our current students,” the board said in a statement. Staff members are also working with current and prospective students to help them plan their next steps.

Significant questions for the college remain. Last month Miriam E. Nelson, Hampshire’s president, announced its intent to find a “long-term partner” to ensure its viability. The college’s membership in a five-college consortium, a group that also includes Amherst, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has been inadequate to mitigate risk. Hampshire’s endowment was about $53 million in 2018.

Since Nelson’s announcement, Hampshire students and alumni have been advocating the preservation of the iconoclastic college, which admitted its first class in 1970 and boasts a curriculum that allows students to design their own course of study. As trustees weighed the college’s future on Thursday, several hundred students marched across the campus carrying signs, according to The Boston Globe.

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Other alumni have lauded the college’s distinctive approach in other forums. “Failing spectacularly in pursuit of an ambitious goal was thought to be salutary, and the shellacking instilled some humility,” the author Jon Krakauer wrote in The New York Times. “Whatever success I’ve had is rooted in those lessons.”

Other small colleges in New England have recently faced economic pressures, especially the effects of a stagnant pool of potential students as the cost of recruiting them through financial aid or tuition discounts is increasing.

The long-predicted shake-out of small, highly tuition-dependent private institutions has lately claimed other institutions in the region. Mount Ida College announced last spring that it would shut its doors and sell its campus to UMass-Amherst. Newbury College, outside Boston, said students should prepare for its closing at the end of this academic year. And Green Mountain College, in Vermont, announced last month that it would close at the end of the semester.

Dan Berrett writes about teaching, learning, the curriculum, and educational quality. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.