Geoff Bennett:

After years of financial decline, Hampshire College, a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts, has announced it will close its doors at the end of the year. But the college is hardly alone.

A new estimate projects that nearly 450 of the nation's 1,700 private nonprofit four-year colleges and universities are at risk of closing or having to merge within the next decade.

Jon Marcus tracks this closely as the senior higher education reporter at The Hechinger Report, and joins us now.

Thanks for being with us.

Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report:

Thank you for having me.

Geoff Bennett:

So, Hampshire College faced a serious threat of closure some six years ago and managed to survive. What happened this time?

Jon Marcus:

I mean, it's kind of surprising that it lasted this long. It had very supportive alumni that were financially backing it.

But it finally just ran out of -- ran out of rope. The accrediting agency that accredits the institution was going to pull its accreditation. That takes a lot. It's a long time before an accrediting agency will do that. And that was, I guess, the beginning of the end.

Geoff Bennett:

When you say it ran out of rope, last year, the school, as I understand it, they wanted to enroll 300 students, brought in roughly half of that. How much of this crisis comes down to enrollment?

Jon Marcus:

A lot of it.

You mentioned the number of colleges that are at risk now. Largely, that's the result of the fact that enrollment has already been declining significantly since 2011. We have about two million, more than two million fewer students in college, and too many colleges to serve the students that are left.

Since the pandemic, colleges like Hampshire have run out of federal support that was provided during the pandemic to help them get through it. And now we're facing another decline of 18-year-olds that begins in the coming fall.

Hampshire was unusually dependent on revenue from tuition, which meant it was dependent on an on enrollment. And that was a big problem for them as well. And that's the problem for the other colleges at risk. They tend to be small, regional, meaning that they're not well-known outside of their home states, and heavily-tuition dependent.

Like, Hampshire, for example, had a very small endowment, very little investment income. And those are the institutions that we're going to see in trouble.

Geoff Bennett:

And you found that many of these students who are enrolled at these colleges and universities that end up closing, they do not go on to graduate elsewhere? Why?

Jon Marcus:

About half of them don't transfer. They don't continue on in college at all. Of the half that do, only half of them manage to earn degrees. There's a lot of reasons for that.

Often, their credits won't transfer. So they have to take courses again. They run out of money. Not surprisingly, a lot of them are just demoralized. Many of these students -- and I have met many students who have been at colleges that closed -- transfer to another college, and then that college closed.

There's just only so long you can expect a student to persist in an environment like that.

Geoff Bennett:

So, according to The Hechinger Report, nearly 300 colleges and universities closed between 2008 and 2023. Is this crisis spreading beyond private institutions?

Jon Marcus:

Yes.

Well, it's spreading beyond private nonprofit institutions. Private nonprofit institutions are the ones at risk right now. A lot of private for-profit colleges and universities -- think cosmetology schools, those kinds of institutions -- they went through a period in the 2010s where they closed at high rates.

Even large universities and colleges are struggling a little bit financially. I don't expect they will close, but public universities and colleges tend not to close. Some of them, though, will merge. Many of them are canceling programs and majors. So this is a fairly widespread problem.

Geoff Bennett:

Are there any takeaways here for small liberal arts colleges?

Jon Marcus:

Small liberal arts colleges are -- or at least small liberal arts endowment-dependent, tuition-dependent colleges that are regional and not nationally known are the ones that tend to be at risk.

They also -- many of them are also facing another unhappy trend that's happening right now, which is that they're losing international students. Fewer international students are coming here. The one thing that they tend to be protected from are some of the broader changes that have happened under the current presidential administration because they're not particularly dependent on things like federal, research funding.

So they have that going for them, but they're losing students. They're losing international students, who tend to pay more. And they're in particular trouble if they're in the Northeast or the Midwest, where the demographics are worse.

And we have found in our reporting that religiously-affiliated institutions are also at particular risk. More than half of the colleges that have closed since COVID were religiously affiliated.

Geoff Bennett:

Jon Marcus, senior higher education reporter at The Hechinger Report, thank you for sharing your reporting with us.

Jon Marcus:

Thank you very much for asking.