Hampshire College announced plans on Tuesday to close after the fall 2026 semester.
“Hampshire’s board made this decision only after exploring every possible alternative,” said Jose Fuentes, Chair of the Hampshire College Board of Trustees in a statement issued Tuesday morning. “The financial realities we face: declining enrollment, the weight of long-standing debt, and stalled progress on land development left us no other responsible path.”
Hampshire is working with the state Department of Higher Education and the New England Commission of Higher Education to assist students who will not complete their degrees prior to the college’s closure at the end of the year. The school says students will receive “individualized advising and transfer pathways” to partner institutions, including Amherst, Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges and UMass Amherst.
Some faculty and staff members will remain on board through the end of the fall semester. It is anticipated that layoffs will begin June 15, with workforce reductions taking place in waves. Employees will begin to be notified of their status starting next week.
The western Massachusetts school opened to students in 1970 and became known for its alternative approach to higher education. State Commissioner of Higher Education Noe Ortega acknowledged that history in a statement about the closure.
“The news that Hampshire College will close at the end of this calendar year comes after more than five decades of the College providing students with a unique, interdisciplinary, self-directed liberal arts education that will undoubtedly have a lasting impact,” he wrote.
The decision to close follows years of declining enrollment and money struggles. Last month, the college’s accreditor, the New England Commission of Higher Education, put Hampshire on notice over concerns about the school’s enrollment and finances.
Hampshire has dealt with the threat of closure in the past. In 2019, notable alumni including filmmaker Ken Burns helped spearhead a major fundraising effort meant to keep the college afloat.
“Hampshire College is woven into the very fabric of who I am,” the filmmaker said in a statement Tuesday. “It’s where I learned that there is freedom in searching, and even in failure. I learned to use that freedom to question everything, and ultimately to find my voice as a storyteller in a way that would have been inconceivable at a conventional institution.”
Amherst Town Manager Paul Bockelman, who attended Hampshire College, said the economic impacts of losing the school will be significant. He said it starts with the loss of about 200 jobs in the town and goes beyond that.
“All of the things the college does — [from] buying food at Atkins Market to being downtown and supporting our local businesses — that will all have significant impacts for the town,” he said.
There’s also the question as to what will become of the Hampshire campus — which Bockelman said sits at about 600 acres in South Amherst. He said the town will work with the college on that front and will chime in when appropriate.
Bockelman also said he expects a community driven conversation, but speculated the other colleges in the area, UMass Amherst, Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley and Smith College in Northampton may have an interest. Those four schools along with Hampshire are part of a consortium known as the Five Colleges.
Michael Horn, cofounder of the research organization Clayton Christensen Institute, said Hampshire’s closure is a sign of the times. The institute predicts many more colleges will close in the coming years. Horn said the other four colleges in Amherst should have found a way to support or bail out Hampshire.
“I’m surprised that they were not more aggressively looking at merger,” Horn said.
“Demographics are what they are,” he said. “You can’t beat gravity. It is hard as a small college to make it at this moment in particular. While they had a unique value proposition, the market was pretty clearly telling them it was a unique value proposition that was not valued.”
