In 2016, Hampshire enrolled 1,333 students. In November, it must submit a report on its financial sustainability to the New England Commission of Higher Education. This is more intuition than fact, but I think that the experience of the pandemic for many students made them more attracted to the idea that their undergraduate education should immediately connect to the questions and challenges that they care about., They see all these problems that are out there in the world like climate change and white supremacy and community traumas and the uneven impact of the pandemic and think, "These are the kinds of things that we should be working on. If were going to have this rush to vanilla, that would be terrible. The line I get all the time [from admissions] is, Our pool of African American low-income first-generation students is deep. . A former college president asks what institutions will do to prevent women's gains in higher ed from evaporating. Admissions professionals call the tension between giving grants to entice affluent students and using the money to increase diversity with need-based aid the iron triangle. And the pressure is a factor for the whole sector: A survey of 405 private nonprofit four-year colleges by the National Association of College and University Business Officers found that though the average tuition rate was $38,301, the average amount that first-time freshmen paid was just $18,424. Because the most reliable way to attract students is to get them to visit your campus, and people are reluctant to travel, there were some challenges there. Two days later, she resigned. I don't want to have to wait four years and then go to graduate school and then wait three years before I can start doing that work. And how do we understand truth in a post-truth era? We knew when we adopted that strategy that we would be pruning the applicant pool to some degree, says Matheson. Let's do this rigorously and sort through our options but agree on what that's going to be. He considered the less expensive Holyoke Community College, but he didnt want to give up on his dream. The four questions that we generated were: How do we act on our responsibilities in the face of a changing climate? (Sarah Crosby for The Washington Post), Carleton College economist Nathan Grawe predicts that the four-year-college applicant pool is likely to shrink by almost 280,000 per class, over four years, starting in 2026, a year known in higher ed as the Apocalypse.. Despite its strapped budget, Hampshire offered him better financial aid than the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In 2013, Hampshires net revenue from tuition, room, board and fees was 3.3 percent higher than in the previous year. (A Hampshire spokesman says the leak has been fixed.). But asking parents to spend a lot of money on an education is easier when you have the facilities those parents expect. Frustration bubbled over when the administration failed to replace the director of Hampshires cultural center, a resource for international students and students of color. Our faculty and students and staff worked together to say what are the four questions we want to really build our curriculum both academic and co-curricular around over the next couple of years?. Depending on the state, needier students will usually pay less at a liberal arts college than they would at a state flagship. With narrative evaluations instead of grades, no defined departments, no faculty tenure and a flexible curriculum, Hampshire offers its students unusual control over their education. Kern Center on the Amherst, Mass. But students say the administration did a poor job of communicating that. A motley mix of plaids, khakis and combat boots, the group lined up to shake hands with the college president and receive small bells symbols of the large brass bell theyll ring upon completing their Division III, the epic independent project required to graduate. We were bringing in too many students for whom Hampshire was too hard a school, says David Matheson, who leads the boards finance committee. Handwritten notes on The Belonging Map, an interactive art installation inside the R.W. Enrollment experts say that difference has a lot to do with high rank. Think about everything that's facing our world right now and our society and the things our students care about. But thanks to a slow recovery from the 2008 recession, rising student debt and class anxiety, parents and students are looking at college less as an intellectual experience and more as an insurance policy and that calls for colleges that offer proven outcomes, measurable skills or exceptional prestige. The course requirements the college has aded over the years for first-year students are inherently un-Hampshire and can be taxing for faculty, but the students admitted theyre necessary. The share of low-income students receiving federal grants at the most competitive colleges stayed essentially flat between 2000 and 2014, going from 15 to 16 percent, while it grew from 46 to 59 percent at noncompetitive institutions, according to the Washington-based consulting firm EAB. Wingenbach hopes it will allow Hampshire to market itself to new students and donors and keep a lean faculty. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity., ED WINGENBACH: Our eventual goal is to exceed that number. Students occupied the presidents office. Amid the turmoil, Hampshire opened the Kern Center, a sustainable wood-and-glass building that runs on solar energy. What does that mean in terms of what people can actually do? Higher Ed Dive spoke with Ed Wingenbach, who was named Hampshire's president in August 2019, about the college's rebuilding efforts and what other institutions can learn from its experience. For more than 200 years, theyve made American higher education an exceptional laboratory for fostering empathy, creativity and innovation. First-generation students the first in their families to attend college and students of color needed more resources. I asked him why he had left a stable job and uprooted his family to take a less certain job across the country. That decision not to take a full class has taken that slow-moving challenge and turned [it] into a genuine crisis, he told the crowd. But asking parents to spend a lot of money is easier when you have the facilities those parents expect. Lack of structure is part of what has made the college less expensive, but its also become less palatable to todays students. Hampshire isnt the only college trying to solve this problem. It may also mean the retreat of the only part of higher education that is uniquely American. TTY Users: 7-1-1 or 800-735-2964 (Relay NH), UNH Set To Welcome Largest Class Since 2018, Celebrating UNHs Largest Group Of Gilman Scholars. Second-year student Rhiannon Larsen, 18, hammers sheet metal while creating a sculpture in the Center for Design. The gravity was not lost on the community. The cautionary tale of Hampshire College and the broken business model of American higher education, Hampshire College fourth-year student Destinee Wilson, 21, works on creative writing homework Sept. 23, 2019 in the school's R.W. Copyright 2022 It now has about 750 enrolled students, down from about 1,100 last spring, and it will take applications for new students in spring 2020. ". Theres always something to do, seeand learn on campus. Fox Newss Tucker Carlson covered the story, provoking such intense anger from outside campus, DuPont recalls, the admissions office had to remove interns from the phones. Hampshire College third-year student Elas Alejo, 20, left, talks with fourth-year student Emery Powell during a student government meeting. Also in the spring, the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts quietly ended its (increasingly rare) need-blind admissions policy, citing unsustainable spending on financial aid. The radio station is in a yurt. <p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p> UNH Main Campus A discussion formed around the question of how much structure Hampshire needs. The buildings are severe 1970s concrete. Colleges have long counted on wealthy students to subsidize the cost of education for those who cant afford it. This is an inflection point in higher ed, says Twillie Ambar of Oberlin. In my last hour at Hampshire, I sat with Devin Forgue in the student center above the gym as he drank a protein shake for lunch that hed brought from home, where hes living to save money. We are at a place where fundamentally our business model does not support our core values around equity, diversity, inclusion, around having the supports for students to realize their full potential, she said. The entering fall 2019 class was 13 first-year students. New abortion laws cause confusion on college campuses, HBCU students disproportionately affected by Roe's reversal, Supporting Gen Z Students and Increasing Your School's Revenue on a Tight Budget, U of Michigan won't give new president Santa Ono a faculty job if fired, breaking precedent, U of Michigan picks Santa Ono as new president, months after ouster of Mark Schlissel, Faculty focus on belonging can improve student experiences and grades, report finds. In 2013, the colleges average first-year student was paying 56 percent of the listed tuition price. Local veterans protested. This video series shines the spotlight on our students because they inspire us and we think theyll inspire you too. Two days before classes started at Hampshire College in September, the schools incoming first-year students all 13 of them attended a welcome reception in the campuss new R.W. Weve gotten so used to them, we may not notice what weve lost until its gone. I feel like [that] no matter where I go. Despite the vitriol shed received from students, Nelson didnt blame them. Standardized test scores. 88 Commercial Street Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. Residential liberal arts colleges are rare in other parts of the world. As college prices exceed now easily $70,000 a year, parents are scratching their heads going, I dont think its going to be worth it unless my kid is going to go to a school that everyone is bragging about, says Bob Massa, a former enrollment manager at Johns Hopkins University and Dickinson College who teaches at the University of Southern Californias graduate school of education. To do that, he explained, Hampshire would have to show the world that it is possible to provide a liberal arts education with faculty mentorship, accessible to anyone who wants it regardless of income without a massive endowment. And this month, Hampshire announced that 255 students made deposits as of its May 1 deadline, outpacing a goal of 240. We talked about his desire to study in Japan and his crazy goal to broker a global deal on space research. Hampshire ultimately did admit students in 2019, but its fall class was just 13 students down from 273 first-year students the year before. To survive for another hundred years, experts agree, colleges will have to embrace more transformational change. By the end of September, Hampshire had raised more than $9 million, cut the budgets of most of its divisions, and reduced the faculty from 145 to 86. Policy experts see major flaws in the system that combines the roles of investigator and decision-maker in sexual misconduct cases. Forgue has an unusually specific life ambition: to broker a global compromise to increase funding for space research. In terms of diversifying places where we haven't normally seen students, I think a lot of that emerges from the kind of focus on modernizing our use of data and targeting and understanding student demographics so that we were able to find places outside of our traditional markets that looked like the kind of places that would have students who might be interested in Hampshire. (Sarah Crosby for The Washington Post), LEFT: Handwritten notes on The Belonging Map, an interactive art installation inside the R.W. Poll most top educators about their ideal kind of learning for the 21st century, and theyll probably sound a lot like a Hampshire student.