Miriam E. Nelson remembers the phone call that changed everything.
It was last May, not long after she had accepted a job as the seventh president of Hampshire College. Sitting at her kitchen table at home in Conway, N.H., Nelson absorbed the news from Jonathan Lash, her predecessor. Only 320 students had turned in deposits by the deadline on the previous day. And Hampshire had projected that it needed 397 students to meet its budget.
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Hampshire College
Miriam E. Nelson remembers the phone call that changed everything.
It was last May, not long after she had accepted a job as the seventh president of Hampshire College. Sitting at her kitchen table at home in Conway, N.H., Nelson absorbed the news from Jonathan Lash, her predecessor. Only 320 students had turned in deposits by the deadline on the previous day. And Hampshire had projected that it needed 397 students to meet its budget.
For Hampshire, the falloff threatened to be catastrophic. The institution is deeply dependent on tuition revenue, with nearly 90 percent of the college’s operating budget coming from tuition and fees for housing and dining services. As at many small, private liberal-arts colleges, tuition at Hampshire is also deeply discounted, with a rate that soared to 63 percent in 2017. Hampshire also had few resources to call on. Its endowment, $54 million, was modest, and almost all of it was restricted by donors for specific uses. In such cases, said a former board member of nearby Amherst College, “you don’t have a cushion, you don’t have a safety net.”
The college is seeking a merger partner and will not enroll a full new class this fall.
Like many of its peers, Hampshire had been facing increasingly intense competition for a dwindling number of top students. Hampshire isn’t just any college, however. In an era when institutions scramble to define their distinctiveness, Hampshire is truly atypical, with students following self-designed and self-driven educational paths with no majors or grades. But Hampshire’s distinctiveness isn’t saving it from the forces roiling higher education today. In fact, it may be making the college more vulnerable.
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In the past month the college announced that it is seeking a merger partner and began the first in a series of layoffs — staff members for now, faculty members to come. The faculty held a vote of no confidence in Nelson and the board leadership, although the measure was invalidated for technical reasons by the faculty’s executive committee.
As unorthodox as Hampshire is, its fate probably will rise and fall with the answers to questions many colleges struggle with: How selective should the college be in admitting students? How much should it be willing to discount tuition? Whom should it partner with to preserve its bottom line?
Lash’s call to Nelson put her in a situation unlike what she’d seen as an administrator and professor at the University of New Hampshire and at Tufts University. “I knew at that moment,” she said, “that my job likely was going to be different than what I thought.”
Hampshire has long been a magnet for iconoclasts. That’s what drew Salman Hameed.
Hameed, an associate professor of integrated science and humanities, epitomizes the Hampshire faculty member: He traded any chance at a decent salary — the pay for a professor here is notoriously low — for the advantages that come with teaching at a college that marches to its own beat. Many liberal-arts colleges pay lip service to multidisciplinary ventures, but Hampshire is a true believer. Its model actually encourages such pursuits.
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Hameed earned his Ph.D. in astronomy at New Mexico State University, but his intellectual focus doesn’t fit into a box. Take, for example, one of his courses, “Aliens: Close Encounters of a Multidisciplinary Kind.” The course surveys the latest search for extraterrestrial planets, drawing upon his conventional astronomical training, but it also explores the psychological factors behind claims of alien abduction. Or, as Hameed puts it in the course catalog: “everything you wanted to know about aliens but were afraid to ask (a scientist).”
At other colleges, Hameed had run into the usual walls of academe. At Hampshire, he found a community that didn’t just venture out of silos. It obliterated them.
“Until I came here I really didn’t have a clue what liberal-arts education was,” Hameed said. “I absolutely loved interacting with philosophers, historians, political scientists, all in one setting. That didn’t happen before. When I was in the astronomy department at New Mexico, we didn’t even talk to the physicists. We all wanted to talk to people in our own discipline.”
Hampshire College students leave a meeting with administrators in January, after college leaders announced that they were looking for a “long-term partner” for the college and that they might not enroll a fall class.Jonathan Wiggs, The Boston Globe, Getty Images
Out-of-the-box thinking is also baked into the student experience, making Hampshire a destination for independent-minded applicants who perhaps wouldn’t thrive at a conventional college. If students wanted to pair poetry with astronomy, as one of Hameed’s students did — and had a thoughtful approach about how to do so — why stop them?
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On a recent Thursday, Hameed cut an interview short to meet with a student. This was Advising Day, held twice every semester, when students meet with their advisers to talk about the independent projects that form the backbone of their scholarly work. Many describe Hampshire as a graduate education at the undergraduate level. The college has a stellar track record of sending its alums into graduate programs.
“If a student comes to us and says, I want to do architecture and be a novelist, Hampshire’s mode is ‘Great, let’s do it,’” Hameed said. “If a really smart student who hasn’t taken the prerequisites for a physics class says, ‘I can actually do these things,’ and feels comfortable with the material, they can take it. We don’t want to put barriers on your talent and the way you think about yourself.”
“Not every student is great at Hampshire, but the great students are unbelievably great,” Hameed said.
“If there was no Hampshire,” he said, invoking a famous alumnus, “there probably is no Ken Burns.”
The founding dream of Hampshire was idealistic, but it was also clear-eyed. In the preface to The Making of a College, written in 1966, just a year after the college’s birth, Hampshire’s first president described the social, curricular, and financial pressures that his college, and others like it, would face.
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“The fiscal base and academic viability of the private liberal-arts college are everywhere precarious,” Franklin K. Patterson wrote. “Except for a few institutions whose endowments and achievements still insulate them, the independent colleges and many of the university undergraduate colleges are as much in curricular disarray as they are in chronically difficult financial shape.”
Distinctiveness was built into not just Hampshire’s mission but also its business model. Hampshire was “a financial experiment — to try to build a college based strictly on tuition, room, and board,” said David Dinerman, a Hampshire alumnus, former member of its Board of Trustees, and chief financial officer of Hapara, an education-software company.
The college started in the hole. Funded by a $6-million seed gift from a philanthropist and a matching grant from the Ford Foundation, it began operations with only half of the $29 million that its founding documents estimated would be necessary to build it. As a result, Hampshire has often struggled financially, said A. Kim Saal, an alumnus and the incoming board chair. As early as the late 1970s, the college cut pay for faculty and staff members, froze hiring, and dipped into its still-growing endowment to cover budget deficits. The peril was never far away, even though Hampshire is part of a five-college consortium — with Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst — designed to defray members’ operating costs.
A Modest Safety Net
The size of Hampshire College’s endowment lags behind nearly all of its peer institutions.
Institution
Endowment, 2016-17 year end
Smith College
$1,767,465,922
Oberlin College
$879,535,245
Mount Holyoke College
$729,438,097
Reed College
$542,928,693
Skidmore College
$363,024,000
Ithaca College
$300,710,330
Lewis & Clark College
$221,922,307
Goucher College
$209,577,000
Emerson College
$161,080,021
Bard College
$148,777,189
Sarah Lawrence College
$105,236,499
Hampshire College
$53,457,479
Bennington College
$33,798,841
Source: Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (provisional data)
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In recent years, heightened competition for a limited number of top students only made Hampshire’s finances more difficult to manage. The college laid off staff members to close deficits in excess of $1 million in 2016 and 2017. It filled a $2.3-million budget gap in the last year with more cuts and help from a few donors.
Until relatively recently, the college did little to encourage alumni to give back. Hampshire’s roll of distinguished alums is rich in actors (Lupita Nyong’o), musicians (hip-hop MC Mike Ladd), and other creative types (Burns), but features relatively few business moguls and financiers. Alumni boast that the college’s do-it-yourself educational mission fosters an entrepreneurial spirit in its graduates, “but they’re social entrepreneurs, not the entrepreneurs who end up on Wall Street,” Saal said.
Hampshire’s recent struggles are also the result of a question that many colleges routinely ask themselves: How selective should we be in our admissions? But, because of its size and mission, the answer to that question has been unusually complex for Hampshire.
When it enrolled its first freshman class, in 1970, Hampshire was one of the most selective institutions in the country, with more than 2,000 applicants for fewer than 300 seats. Students were drawn to its novelty and its experimental nature. For example, Dinerman, who came to Hampshire in 1972, in the midst of the Vietnam War, set out to answer one question: “Why are we in Vietnam?” He ended up studying history, politics, and culture, among other topics.
But for many years, the college’s admissions strategy relied on “the Field of Dreams approach,” Dinerman said. “If you build it, they will come.”
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Hampshire has gone through several periods in which it lowered its selectivity to get more students in the door. In the early 2010s, fall enrollment climbed to around 1,500 students for several years, which was good for the bottom line, but carried hidden costs. Some members of the new classes needed more support than did the typical Hampshire student, and the college was so short of beds that “students were doubling up in the lounges in the dorms,” Saal said. “Faculty weren’t happy. Staff were unhappy.”
The lesson the leadership learned was that Hampshire wasn’t for everybody. “It only really works well for a very select few people who really can be self-directed,” Saal said. “We said, We want to change the strategy to really look at who thrives in the school, and recruit to that.” The college had never required SAT or ACT scores for admission, but in 2014 it went “test blind,” declining to weigh any test scores submitted by applicants. The college moved away from the use of merit-based financial aid and toward need-based aid, using institutional resources.
Miriam Nelson’s tenure as president of Hampshire has been marked by hard choices, like whether to admit a fall class this year. “We were facing layoffs in faculty and staff regardless of whether we took in a class or not,” she says.Hampshire College
Saal said the change in admissions policy was part of a larger strategy for financial sustainability. Higher selectivity was supposed to improve retention, with classes full of Hampshire-suited “thrivers.” Other tactics included cutting expenses through staff retirements. The college’s financial report for 2015 discussed the new admissions tack and noted that the leadership “fully expected that this would result in a smaller, more selective class.”
But there was a downside to that approach, said Dean O. Smith, a former vice president for research at Texas Tech University and an expert on higher-education finance. Colleges that raise admissions standards run the risk of handicapping themselves in the elastic market for top students, Smith said, and “you’ll get the opposite result and students will go somewhere else.”
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Hampshire soon found itself outgunned by rivals who were willing to give generous merit aid. “They were able,” said Saal, “to buy our students that we wanted to keep.”
Saal also blames some of Hampshire’s enrollment woes on publicity about campus protests in recent years, like one involving the removal of an American flag from its central flagpole after the 2016 election. (The flag was subsequently restored.)
Enrollment, which had already begun sliding by that time, has since dropped another 10 percent, according to institutional data. The protests, said Saal, “changed the trajectory for our admissions from going up to continuing to go down.”
Not long after she received the bad news from the previous president about the size of the incoming class, Nelson got another unwelcome update: The college would face a budget gap of $3.4 million.
Hampshire got a reprieve in the form of a good endowment-investment performance, which allowed the college to withdraw an extra $3.6 million to cover the gap. But it was clear to Nelson and the board that things could not continue to go on as they were.
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In August, during a retreat of the board’s executive committee, Nelson presented a vision of how the college could turn around its fortunes. But the plan would have changed the college’s academic model and would have relied heavily on philanthropic support, Saal said. And there was little indication that donors wanted to sink more money into operating funds.
College leaders considered, and rejected, some of the strategies that other liberal-arts colleges have tried to reverse faltering fortunes. Recruiting more international students was not a realistic option, as students from other countries are generally “looking for a much more traditional educational model than we have,” Saal said.
Offering expanded online education was deemed too expensive. Reversing course and trying to recruit more students, regardless of how well they fit the Hampshire model, would have been “a temporary Band-Aid in financing, but it eats apart the campus,” he said.
But doing nothing was not an option. As the fall wore on, Saal said, “we all collectively recognized that that would be really a stretch and that we would look for a strategic partner.”
We had to be transparent with those students so that they would know, if they were coming to Hampshire, what that would mean.
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As the fall semester ticked by, Nelson and members of the board quietly talked to presidents who had gone through mergers, to leaders of other local colleges, and to potential partners about what might happen and how.
Hampshire’s leaders had many examples to learn from, as merging has grown increasingly common. They had watched Mount Ida College, near Boston, announce a merger with another institution in early 2018, only to see the deal fall through and the college be absorbed by UMass-Amherst, leaving students, faculty, and staff bewildered. Hampshire’s leaders also watched Wheelock College finalize its merger with Boston University in August 2018, having carefully handled the transition of students, faculty, and staff over the course of a year.
As the December 15 deadline approached for notifying applicants who had won early admission, Nelson and the board were still weighing what, if anything, needed to happen. “We just didn’t have all of the information that we needed,” she said. The acceptance letters went out as planned.
During the final weeks of the year, however, the gravity of the situation started to come into focus. Nelson spoke with the New England Commission of Higher Education, the college’s accreditor, and with Massachusetts’ attorney general and its department of higher education.
Nelson and the board went through “a financial reality check” at a December 20 meeting, she said. They believed that finding a partner was the only way forward.
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As the new year began, Hampshire’s leaders knew they would have to decide what to say about the college’s plight and how to say it before February 2, when the college was scheduled to send out letters offering admission to the rest of its fall class. On January 15, Hampshire announced that, among other things, it was looking to merge. Hampshire hopes the college can publicly identify a partner this spring.
An even more agonizing question also confronted them: Should Hampshire even admit a new fall class? The decision threatened to have long-lasting effects on Hampshire’s viability.
On the one hand, not admitting a full class of freshmen would further reduce tuition revenues, and for years to come. On the other, Nelson and the board had watched Mount Ida, Newbury, and Green Mountain Colleges enroll new classes despite tenuous finances and without clear transition plans for students, faculty, and staff.
In addition, the New England Commission of Higher Education stipulates that a college must have the “financial capacity to graduate its entering class.” The leadership at Hampshire was no longer certain that was the case.
Curtailing the size of the incoming class also made a certain amount of counterintuitive sense. Freshmen cost much more than second-, third-, and fourth-year students, Saal said. By forgoing a full-size fall class, Hampshire saved on the expenses of orientation, support programs, and dining services, which are primarily used by first-year students. Data modeling showed that not admitting a first-year class did not make much difference in terms of the college’s financial resources.
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“We were facing layoffs in faculty and staff regardless of whether we took in a class or not,” Nelson said.
Salman Hameed, an associate professor of integrated science and humanities, loves Hampshire’s interdisciplinary nature and worries about being able to fit in somewhere else.M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle
Hampshire had not, all of a sudden, fallen off a cliff, Saal said. Instead, it was “a gradual decline, and finally we crossed a critical line.”
Ultimately, he said, “we came to the recognition that we could not guarantee our students a four-year Hampshire education and guarantee them to get a degree from Hampshire College.”
At a meeting on January 31 and February 1, the board voted not to admit a full class of freshmen in the fall. “It’s not just like all of a sudden there was an epiphany,” Nelson said. But Newbury College had announced it was closing in late December, and Green Mountain College followed in late January, both having just enrolled new freshman classes. “The gravity of the situation as a consumer-protection issue became much more acute,” she added.
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“We thought we had to be transparent with those students so that they would know, if they were coming to Hampshire, what that would mean,” Saal said. Only those students who had been granted early admission or who had deferred admission from the previous year would be admitted in the fall of 2019. Instead of admitting more than 300 students in a full class, only about 60 or 70 would be able to enroll.
Colin S. Diver, president emeritus of Reed College and a former board member at Amherst College, understands the decision. “There was enormous hoopla and criticism about the way that Mount Ida College closed, and a lot of it was about the lack of transparency and the suddenness,” he said. Hampshire “did what I think is the honorable thing to do.”
Still, the announcement about not enrolling a full freshman class in 2019 has damaged the perception that Hampshire has a viable future. As Smith, the expert in higher-education finance, said, “It’s the standard first step if you want to close something.”
The decision to radically pare down the freshman class is the one Hameed, and many other faculty members, don’t understand. They recognize the need to search for a strategic partnership or a full-on merger. But turning away students? To many, that feels as if Hampshire is placing itself in a death spiral.
The worst-case scenario, in their minds, looks something like this: Reduced enrollment leads to faculty and staff cuts. Those cuts drastically alter the experience of current students, who rely on intensive mentoring from faculty members to complete their degrees. That deals a mortal blow to the desire of new students to enroll at Hampshire, leading in turn to even steeper faculty and staff cuts.
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The first part of that vision is already coming to pass. The college announced last week that it would lay off nine employees in its admissions and advancement offices. The admissions office was among the first to face cuts, Nelson explained in a letter to the campus, because the college now has no applications to review, no recruitment plans to discuss. More cutbacks to the faculty and staff are planned for April.
The specter of cuts would be frightening to faculty members anywhere; they’re especially so to professors at Hampshire. Hameed’s idiosyncratic career has moved in step with the idiosyncratic college. He just doesn’t know if he fits anywhere else. He led a National Science Foundation study about the reception of biological evolution in the Muslim world, but he hasn’t had the research program that would make him competitive in a traditional astronomy department. He doesn’t have the academic training to fit into a sociology department.
That makes the timing of Hampshire’s impending layoffs especially “cruel,” he said. Most colleges have already made their academic-hiring decisions for the coming year by November or December.
Hampshire has always been locked in a pitched battle for its own existence, professors point out. Why give up the fight now? Their frustration boiled over this week in a vote on a resolution expressing no confidence in Nelson, the chief financial officer, and the Board of Trustees. Due to technical and procedural problems, the vote was declared invalid at the last minute by the faculty’s executive committee. But Nelson said before the declaration that she expected the balloting would go against her and the other leaders.
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The prospect of a no-confidence vote was concerning, she said. If uncertainty over changing leadership were to scuttle or delay a deal, “it could be very catastrophic for us.”
Can a reduced version of Hampshire still offer the Hampshire experience? That question is far from theoretical for the 77 students who had been invited to attend in the fall. Rowan Lasky is one of them.
Lasky sought an early decision from Hampshire; she did not apply to any other college. She did not even take the SAT because Hampshire doesn’t use it. Hampshire was the place for her, and she knew it well: Her mother, Molly Maloney, went there, along with her father and stepfather. She knew exactly which classes she wanted to take, the product of countless hours of research.
Leaders hope souped-up advising, international and research programs, and other ambitious offerings will keep them afloat. But can the institutions afford them, and will they work? It’s too soon to tell.
Her approach paid off. She was sitting in her environmental-history class in December 2017 when she got the email from Hampshire, complete with digital confetti. “I started crying,” she said. “The teacher asked if I was OK. I said I’d be right back. I ran around the school and told the news to each of the teachers who wrote me recommendation letters.”
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Lasky, who lives in Seattle, deferred admission for a year. Everything was set, she thought — until the beginning of February, when she got another message from the college. This time the tone was different.
“We offer you this opportunity to join the Hampshire community,” it read, “while assuring you that you’re no longer under any obligation to attend Hampshire.” Amid statements of optimism about the college’s future, it listed the many things that Hampshire could no longer guarantee to incoming students. Students’ work opportunities would be limited. Dining options too, probably. The college couldn’t say which professors would be teaching at the college in the fall. It couldn’t even guarantee anyone’s enrollment past the fall semester.
Reading the letter, Lasky got the sense that Hampshire felt a duty to extend an offer to her, but didn’t really want her or the other incoming students to attend.
“It reminded me,” Lasky said, “of when my friends want to come over and I say, ‘Sure, you can come over. But I’m doing laundry, and the TV isn’t working, and there isn’t food in the house.’”
It put these kids in a really precarious position because they had already made their decision.
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Maloney, a business lawyer who graduated with a concentration in women’s health and medical anthropology in 1991, still believes that Hampshire will come out stronger at the other end of the crisis. The administration is caught in a tough spot, she said, and the college acted ethically in keeping students apprised of its struggle.
But she couldn’t help but be upset by the timing of the college’s enrollment pullback, which forced the families of admitted students into what she considers an unnecessary scramble. February 1 was past the application deadline for some colleges.
“It put these kids in a really precarious position because they had already made their decision, and now they had to go back and rethink and research colleges again,” Maloney said. “They had two weeks to do what other kids have months to do. That’s just not fair.”
Lasky had to make a call quickly, and neither of the options before her were appealing. Should she take a chance on a college with bare-bones operations and an uncertain future? Or abandon her dream of charting her own path at her parents’ alma mater?
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Her father nudged her to accept the Hampshire offer, despite the risk. Her mother wasn’t so sure about that.
They left the decision up to Lasky. “I was already worried about the amount of money it would cost to go to Hampshire,” she said. “I didn’t want to pay that much for a question mark.”
But it was the February message from Hampshire, and how college administrators handled the crisis, that sealed her decision. It made her rethink whether this was an institution she wanted to be a part of. She made plans to take the SAT in March. She reached out to the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, an interdisciplinary liberal-arts college at Western Washington University that intrigued her.
And she told Hampshire: No, I won’t be attending. The college’s incoming class, already tiny, will be at least one student smaller.
Vimal Patel, a reporter at The New York Times, previously covered student life, social mobility, and other topics for The Chronicle of Higher Education.