Hampshire College, a small liberal arts school in Western Massachusetts, has succumbed to years of financial struggle and will close permanently after the fall semester.
A multiyear effort to refinance debt, raise funds, pursue land development and increase enrollment failed to produce a viable path to save the 56-year-old college. On Sunday, its board of trustees voted to shut down, according to the school’s president.
Hampshire is the alma mater of the filmmaker Ken Burns, who made his first documentary movie as a student there.
“This is an extraordinary loss for those of us who went there,” Mr. Burns, who graduated from Hampshire in 1975, said in an interview on Tuesday. The school, known for experimentation in classes and methods, offered “sort of medieval guild-like tutors and apprenticeships,” he said.
Hampshire, in Amherst, Mass., joins an epidemic of college closures over the past two decades. More than 300 U.S. colleges and universities closed from 2008 to 2024, according to an analysis by The Hechinger Report.
“I think the reality is that tuition-dependent schools are being buffeted at many levels around a whole bunch of different headwinds,” Hampshire’s president, Jennifer Chrisler, said in an interview.
Many small schools have struggled to enroll students in places facing population declines, a factor in Hampshire’s demise. Hampshire College has about 625 students, Ms. Chrisler said, about half the school’s enrollment in the early 2000s.
Part of the death of Hampshire College may also relate to “public discussion in this country about the value of a liberal arts education,” Ms. Chrisler said. “Some of it is a persistent and ill informed, I think, belief at the federal level that the only value of an education is what you earn four years after your graduation.”
Jeffrey Selingo, an author of several books on higher education, says many small schools in the Northeast and Midwest are facing enrollment problems, as shrinking states produce fewer young people. And since most people go to college within 50 miles of home, schools in shrinking communities often lack a big pool of possible students to draw from, or have to share the pool with other colleges.
“There is a migration away from the small liberal arts schools toward the big public or private research institutions” with more student activities and academic offerings, particularly in business and technology, Mr. Selingo said.
As students become harder to enroll, he said, troubled schools compete by discounting tuition through increased aid. That reduces overall revenue while costs continue to rise, creating a “doom loop” of financial pressures. At the same time, universities with reputations as elite, and prominent public schools, receive way more applications than they could ever accept.
“It’s a bifurcated market between the haves and have-nots,” Mr. Selingo said. “The question is, how many of the have-nots will follow Hampshire?”
From its opening, Hampshire required students to assume responsibility for setting their own academic path. Students focused on individual projects and field work, according to a New York Times article published in 1974, as Hampshire’s first full class was graduating. The school’s philosophy was that it was more important for students to learn to solve intellectual problems than to memorize facts.
Hampshire will not admit a new class for this fall, the college said in a statement. Students in their final year will be eligible to complete their degrees at Hampshire through the end of the fall semester. Other students will receive individualized advice and guidance on transferring to other schools.
Mr. Burns said he decided to attend Hampshire College after a friend showed him a magazine story about the school, which opened in 1970. Mr. Burns arrived in 1971, and said he was an entirely different person by the time he graduated.
“It was just transforming,” he said. “I literally learned everything there — everything.”
He has maintained a connection to the school for more than 50 years, as a donor, a past board member and a famous face in the campaign to try to save the college from financial distress.
Mr. Burns said Hampshire’s demise was because of a shift in American culture, not just demographics.
“I think there’s an inability for those people who have wealth in the country to understand and value something like Hampshire,” he said. “It was dedicated to a transformational education, in an era when higher education has been hijacked by the transactional: A college education is, to some, like a Louis Vuitton handbag. And that’s not Hampshire.”
Hampshire employs about 250 people. Layoffs will proceed in waves, the school has said. Most employees will end their jobs on June 15. Some staff will remain to complete the fall semester.
Mark Arsenault covers higher education for The Times.
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