Hampshire School’s long-running turnaround efforts got here to an finish this week.
Following “years of sustained effort to safe the faculty’s monetary future,” the Massachusetts establishment introduced Tuesday that it’ll shut down completely in December, when its fall 2026 semester ends.
The non-public liberal arts faculty won’t herald any new college students this fall and can refund deposits for individuals who had been already admitted. However it can educate programs and supply providers for present college students by way of the autumn time period.
Hampshire is working with its accreditor and the Massachusetts Division of Greater Schooling on a teach-out plan for college students who can’t full their levels earlier than the closure. Associate establishments embody Amherst School, Mount Holyoke School and the College of Massachusetts Amherst.
“Hampshire’s board made this choice solely after exploring each attainable different,” mentioned board Chair Jose Fuentes in a press release Tuesday. “The monetary realities we face: declining enrollment, the load of long-standing debt, and stalled progress on land improvement left us no different accountable path.”
The closure announcement comes slightly over a month after Hampshire’s accreditor, the New England Fee of Greater Schooling, warned that the institution was vulnerable to being placed on probation or shedding accreditation totally over issues that it lacked ample assets.
In a group message on Tuesday, Hampshire President Jenn Chrisler confirmed the establishment “not has the assets to maintain full operations and meet our regulatory obligations.”
With current efforts to spice up enrollment falling brief, the faculty would have wanted to make “extraordinary cuts to our working budgets” to remain afloat, she added.
In its March discover to the faculty, NECHE highlighted Hampshire’s $21 billion in bond debt and the faculty’s failed efforts to date to refinance it. The accrediting physique famous on the time that Hampshire confronted a looming September tender date, when it will be on the hook for purchasing its bonds again. The faculty additionally breached the phrases on a gaggle of bonds final June, in response to its fiscal 2025 audit.
Moreover, NECHE pointed to Hampshire’s lack of ability thus far to monetize a bit of land as deliberate by way of business and housing improvement.
Chrisler alluded to that as nicely, noting that “the diploma of short-term debt tied to our land property signifies that even a positive sale wouldn’t change our long-term monetary trajectory given present enrollment.”
In response to NECHE, fall enrollment in 2025 dropped 11.3% yr over yr to 747 college students, indicating Hampshire was not “efficiently sustaining its enrollment progress momentum.”
Honoring a legacy
Closing now means officers “can leverage the establishment’s restricted monetary assets to facilitate a transition” for college kids, whereas respecting the faculty’s college and workers, and honoring its legacy, Chrisler mentioned.
Hampshire was based in 1965 as — in Chrisler’s phrases — a house for “deeply curious, creative individuals who have radically reimagined the liberal arts.”
The faculty has graduated some outstanding alumni, together with nonfiction author Jon Krakauer and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.
In a press release following Hampshire’s announcement, Burns mentioned “Hampshire School is woven into the very cloth of who I’m.”
“It is the place I discovered that there’s freedom in looking, and even in failure,” he added. “I discovered to make use of that freedom to query all the things, and in the end to seek out my voice as a storyteller in a method that will have been inconceivable at a standard establishment.”
Hampshire had a brush with closure lower than a decade in the past — however survived by taking what had been thought of extraordinary steps.
In fall 2019, the faculty admitted solely a partial incoming class. Then, a curriculum revamp and fundraising push helped it rebound from its enrollment lows and mark it as the next schooling turnaround success story.
Nonetheless, Hampshire’s enrollment by no means totally recovered to pre-2019 ranges, when headcounts hovered round 1,200 and above, and it wasn’t in a position to totally stability its finances. In 2024, the faculty cut 9% of its employees after lower-than-expected enrollment and because it continued working towards a balanced finances.
