Hampshire College said Tuesday that it will close after nearly six decades of offering an unconventional liberal arts education, ending a long fight to keep the Amherst school open. The college said it will not enroll new students this fall and will refund admitted students.
Jennifer Chrisler told the Hampshire community in an email that the financial pressures on the college’s operations had become increasingly complex. She wrote that the school had fallen short on the three key fixes it had been pursuing: enrollment growth, fundraising and asset sales.
The college had been following a financial sustainability plan that began in 2019, after it almost closed. The five-year plan called for Hampshire to raise $60 million, increase enrollment and leverage its land and other assets. It raised $55 million toward that goal, but the balance sheet never recovered enough to give the school lasting room to breathe.
The warning signs sharpened last month, when the New England Commission of Higher Education said Hampshire would have to show cause in June for why it should not be placed on probation or lose its accreditation. The commission pointed to enrollment dropping from 842 in Fall 2024 to 747 in Fall 2025, a land sale that fell through, the college’s inability to refinance $21 million in bond debt by next September and a shrinking unrestricted endowment for operations.
Hampshire, which sits on approximately 800 acres in Amherst, enrolled 168 new students this fall instead of its 300-student target. It will now stop taking new students entirely and plans a final commencement ceremony at the end of the year. Students who have not finished their degrees will be able to transfer to partner institutions including Amherst College, Bennington College, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Massachusetts College of the Liberal Arts, Mount Holyoke College, Prescott College, Smith College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The closure closes the book on one of the most distinctive members of the Five College Consortium, alongside Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Founded in 1965 as an experimenting college, Hampshire has lived for years with a level of financial fragility that came with its small size and limited resources, even as alumni repeatedly rallied to keep it going. This time, the school says the effort was not enough. The closing is no longer a possibility; it is the outcome.
