Obviously, with the decline in birth rates and a decline in the college premium, there was bound to be an eventual decline in the student population and a culling of institutions. But I’m still surprised at how quickly Hampshire College, a very progressive liberal arts school in Amherst, Mass., fell.
I have some affinity for the school because friends lived near the area. And the college gave the town a more eclectic and young feel. It was also very much a peer of the progressive liberal arts school that I attended, Bard College.
There’s been a marked shift in the college market. Vanderbilt recently announced that they had their largest ever pool of applicants, which led to an absurdly selective acceptance rate. The plunging price of travel and the influence of social media have made Southern football schools far more attractive to Northeastern students. At the same time, the romance of the leafy liberal arts school — a romance that was indoctrinated into me from before I took my first vocabulary quiz in elementary school — has suffered, relatively speaking.
Overall, enrollment is going up at public, non-rarified schools. Below-Ivy tier, expensive private liberal arts schools seem particularly hard hit by this phenomenon. Now, women constitute 8.3 million of the undergraduate population, compared to just 6.1 million men. When I was an undergraduate at the turn of the millennium, it was nearly 8.7 million women and 6.5 million men. As the demographics and interests of our university population change, and as enrollment capacities and endowments continue expanding at our nation’s top private and public universities, it seems inevitable that more schools like Hampshire College will be forced to shut their doors.