Private institutions are especially vulnerable to changes in attitudes about higher education, drops in enrollment, and rising costs associated with higher education. On today’s program, we’ll explore strategies to get young people interested in pursuing a degree, and what challenges lie ahead.
Read the full transcript below:
Lucas Willard: This is WAMC’s Northeast Notebook. I’m Lucas Willard. Small colleges are in trouble. Private institutions are especially vulnerable to changes in attitudes about higher education, drops in enrollment, and rising costs associated with higher education. On today’s program, we’ll explore strategies colleges and universities are using to get people interested in pursuing a degree, and what challenges lie ahead.
For many colleges and universities across the country, things just ain’t like they used to be. By the end of this calendar year, Hampshire College, a non-traditional private school in Amherst, Massachusetts, will close its doors.
James Paleologopoulos: Hampshire had been trending downward in terms of student numbers, and the cost of actually keeping this 800-acre campus afloat was also pretty hefty.
Lucas Willard: James Paleologopoulos has been following Hampshire’s closure for WAMC. As James explains, the college that describes itself as “revolutionizing education” since its founding in 1970, has faced rising costs and lower enrollment.
James Paleologopoulos: Ultimately, Hampshire called it quits earlier this year while also dealing with mounting debt. The debt was also a considerable factor, though they have lucked out over the last few months when they received a loan in the size of about $30 million to deal with creditors, and that gives them a little bit more space to figure out what to do with their campus.
Lucas Willard: There have been efforts to save the campus from closure. As James explains, one strategy was to sell-off some plots, or maybe turn something into a housing development. That all fell through. And there’s even one group that is seeking to rally community support to purchase the Hampshire campus. A non-profit called Hampshire Next has raised more than $2 million as the college Board of Trustees considers what to do next. But the headwinds facing Hampshire are howling nationwide. A significant challenge is a decline in graduating high-schoolers. Tatiana Sataua is a news fellow at Fortune. She calls it the “enrollment cliff.”
Tatiana Sataua: Which is the expectation that due to demographic trends, by 2041, the country is projected to produce about 3.4 million high school graduates, a 13% drop in things.
Lucas Willard: Tatiana cites figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia which estimated 80 colleges across the country could close between 2025 and 2029. And she says small colleges, especially ones in more remote areas, have the hardest time winning over high-school graduates.
Tatiana Sataua: Several reasons: one, locations, especially in smaller towns are harder to recruit. And again, with these small populations, as well, fewer students…that means that there's going to be fewer students from these colleges to recruit and draw from as well. So, essentially, the pool of students is shrinking farther and also faster than these colleges can shrink themselves…
Lucas Willard: So, what Tatiana is saying, is that colleges facing declining enrollment are trying to cut costs. And, those with small enrollments – and smaller endowments – are hit with a double whammy. And, of course, the cost of education is a huge hurdle. As things like labor, insurance rates, energy, and everything else increases, so too does tuition. And, in a time of belt-tightening for millions of Americans, a four-year college degree program is seeming less attractive to many young people.
Tatiana Sataua: People are already struggling with the cost of living, the cost of groceries, even right now finding a job too. So, I've spoken to a lot of younger people in my reporting that are opening laundromats and starting businesses and moving services.
Lucas Willard: Private liberal arts colleges seem like they are a dying breed. Just some other examples of recent closures in the Northeast: The College of Saint Rose in Albany, closed in 2024; Cazenovia College in Cazenovia, closed in 2023; and Sterling College, closed earlier this year. Jon Marcus, a reporter for the Hechinger Report, spoke with WAMC weeks before Sterling College’s closure in May. Aside from cost and enrollment and changes in attitudes, he says many colleges face a more persistent problem: a low graduation rate.
Jon Marcus: Many individual colleges do an amazing job and they have very high graduation rates and their students do well, but on average in America, fewer than half of students that go to four-year universities actually graduate within four years. A third of them never graduate, a quarter of freshmen don’t come back for the second year. I mean, there are a lot of big problems that colleges and universities have not solved. Now that they’re in an existential crisis, they’re looking for ways to solve this.
Lucas Willard: To boost enrollment, public colleges backed by state money have slashed tuition costs – New York’s Excelsior Scholarship, for example, provides free tuition for thousands at SUNY and CUNY Colleges. Larger colleges and universities might make a push to attract international students – though the Trump administration has sought to limit student visas. So, as Jon reports, many are trying another tack: rethinking the four-year degree. Some, he says, are shifting to three-year degree programs.
Jon Marcus: Essentially, colleges, many of them with enrollment challenges, have invented an entirely new degree.
Lucas Willard: In Massachusetts, for example, Merrimack College and Suffolk University, will be the first in the Bay State to pilot so-called applied baccalaureate degree programs.
Jon Marcus: That's the first time that we've seen essentially a new kind of a post-secondary degree since the advent of community colleges about 60 years ago.
Lucas Willard: It remains to be seen, once launched, how popular these accelerated programs will be. But Jon is also not all doom-and-gloom on higher ed.
Jon Marcus: Somebody's got to go to college. Not everybody, but somebody, just for the sake of the economy. We have an aging population. More people are going to retire, and we have fewer workers who are going to be still in the labor force supporting retirees.
Lucas Willard: As for Fortune reporter Tatiana Sataua, she wonders if state policy could hamper college enrollment – or, on the flipside, changes attitudes among young people in shifting to the trades. She cites New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s executive order to place a moratorium on data center development. The construction of these computing centers, she explains, rely on skilled tradespeople.
Tatiana Sataua: So, if we have a pause in data centers, but then more people and young people going into these different trade school specialties, it's definitely going to be really interesting to see in this upcoming year, and it's only going to get hotter and hotter within the next five to ten years, especially, again, with this decrease of students. And yeah, I think that's something that I was looking at especially too.
Lucas to Tatiana: So, because New York is sort of slowing the roll on data center development, then there's less demand for workers in the trades, and you're interested to see on how that could impact trends in college enrollment?
Tatiana Sataua: Yeah, exactly.
Lucas Willard: And, back in western Massachusetts, WAMC’s James Paleologopoulos sees another case of a small college navigating a challenging time and steep competition.
James Paleologopoulos: We are seeing American International College in Springfield trying to navigate this landscape as well. There have been reports of it having to dip into its unrestricted endowment, and actually getting attention from accreditation officials voicing some concerns over how things are going over there. So, we're definitely keeping an eye on that. But yeah, the higher-ed field is a substantial part of the economy out here in western Massachusetts, and it's got the attention of a lot of folks.
Lucas Willard: Northeast Notebook is edited by Diane DeVore. Music by Eduardo Rivera. You can subscribe to this show as a podcast on your favorite platform. I’m Lucas Willard, I produced this episode. Thanks for listening.
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