Why Hampshire Closed and Why Higher Education Still Refuses to Admit It

A recent Inside Higher Ed column on the closure of Hampshire College is more thoughtful than the genre usually allows. The author, a senior administrator writing from Bennington College, concedes much of what previous Hampshire elegies refused to admit: tuition has outpaced inflation for decades, families have reason to ask what the degree will deliver, and small liberal arts institutions without a clear niche face real peril. I want to be clear about where I sit. I have taught at Sarah Lawrence College for nearly 20 years, and I love what we do—the donning/advisory system, the seminar table, the wager that students can drive their own learning. I love what Bennington does. I loved what Hampshire was. But love is not analysis. We are not serving our students well, and the world has noticed. The experimental model has narrowed: course catalogs at institutions built on intellectual freedom now show striking ideological uniformity, and families read that signal too. Three claims in the column deserve direct pushback, from the inside. The first is that the critiques Hampshire’s founders made of traditional education are “as valid today as they were in the time of Hampshire’s founding.” This is the historical error on which much of the column rests. American higher education in 1965 was a different world from today: rigid disciplinary walls, regular examinations, narrow assignments and canon, heavy writing and grading. American higher education in 2026 is notably different: Interdisciplinary programs proliferate. Distribution requirements and rigid academic cores have eroded. Narrative evaluation, flexible majors, and project-based assessment are now standard marketing copy at the very institutions Hampshire defined itself against. The Hampshire critique did not age out; it won and was absorbed by higher education. The second is that what is scarce now is the capacity to sit with a hard question and form a self rather than acquire a credential. That is what Hampshire tried to do. It is also what hundreds of other institutions now claim, often credibly, to do. Williams, Amherst, Reed, Bowdoin, and Kenyon all sell the seminar table, close mentorship, and the formation of the whole person. So do honors colleges, St. John’s, and the great-books revivals at Ursinus and the University of Austin. Hampshire-style formation is no longer the road less traveled. It is the standard pitch of a crowded market. The column argues that AI makes this formation more valuable. Perhaps. But scarcity is a market term, and the market is no longer thin. The third claim is the most revealing. The column treats Hampshire’s closing as the dawn of a new era. That overstates the case; progressive colleges still exist, including the author’s. The column continues by claiming that the future will be defined either by colleges that build student “agency and self-determination” or by those serving as “credential vendors operating on thinning margins.” This is a false binary. Most of American higher education is neither. Public flagships, religious colleges, honors programs, and traditional liberal arts campuses from Williams to Hillsdale to Spelman to Berea form students and place them. Dartmouth, under President Beilock, built the Center for Career Design and reports that 71.7 percent of the Class of 2025 took full-time jobs while another 21.9 percent went on to further education. That is not credentialism. It is formation made legible. The institutions implicitly looked down on in the column are doing both jobs—often better than the ones being defended. The outcome data at Sarah Lawrence and Bennington is sobering and illustrative. Bennington’s endowment sits around $52 million—Williams’s is roughly seventy times larger. Bennington laid off fifteen staff earlier this year and the sticker price runs over $85,000. According to US News , the median salary of a Bennington graduate six years out is $24,711. At Sarah Lawrence , the all-in cost approaches $87,000 a year; and the median salary six years out is $34,251; the four-year graduation rate is 59 percent. Roughly a third of Bennington’s student body is Pell-eligible. These are not children of trust funds being asked to underwrite intangibles. They are families taking on real debt against real wage data. These are not hidden numbers either. They are published federal data —the same data the column itself points to. What does Sarah Lawrence, or Bennington, offer a family that they cannot already get—more reliably, with stronger outcomes, at lower risk—at Vassar, Reed, an honors college, or a flagship with a coherent core? “It depends on the student” is not an answer many families can act on. Hampshire closed when that question no longer had a confident answer—a point I argued in an earlier AEI piece on the marketplace of outcomes. Those colleges still flying their flags—including my own—have a narrow window to give one. The post Why Hampshire Closed and Why Higher Education Still Refuses to Admit It appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .