Can small liberal arts colleges survive the next decade?

The very first lesson Jessamyn West learned upon graduating from Hampshire College in 1986 was one that would foretell the school’s precarious financial position some three decades later.

“When I graduated and grabbed my diploma,” says Ms. West, now a noted librarian, author, and technologist, “the then-president of Hampshire told me how he talked to my dad last week, literally as I’m walking across the stage.”

To West, the president’s message was clear: “Your value is your parents, who paid your tuition,” she says.

West was one of the school’s handful of students who paid full tuition, which at a school that depends on tuition for its operating costs meant “weird perks,” such as getting invited to the president’s house “for some special let’s-drink-champagne-before-noon thing that felt completely inappropriate and awful,” she says. 

And yet her experience at Hampshire was unlike one she could get anywhere else.

“I was not really an outcast in high school, but I didn’t fit in the way I felt like fitting-in people fit in,” says West.

At Hampshire, an experimental school sitting on about 650 acres of rolling farmland and orchards in Amherst, Mass., known for eschewing majors and offering detailed written evaluations instead of grades, West found the intellectual and social nourishment she was

A demographic cliff‘That’s our identity’‘I’m not going to close’‘We all missed the window’