Thank you for such a thoughtful analysis of what made Hampshire what it is. The “grad school for undergrads” is what attracted me to the school in the mid 80s. And it is still a rare and much needed educational paradigm.
after what happened with goddard, (& less dramatic changes in other alternaschools across the country) i really hope someone comes in & makes your vision possible.
Ethan’s writing shows a familiar blend of enthusiasm for the topic and a well-structured, rational argument. He has clearly learned how to balance passion with professionalism. I am particularly gratified to see that he did indeed pursue further studies in the field (congrats on the PhD!). And also can write without sounding like a professor with a stick up his butt reaching desperately for something critical to add to a narrative evaluation. You should’ve seen the ones I wrote for the students who sucked! <edit: “whose talents lay in other arenas.”>
I enjoyed that job quite a lot, but I was only ever on a visiting appointment. Would’ve loved to see your Div III! They renewed me as long as they could, but there were rules about not allowing visiting profs to stay for more than 4 years because they didn’t go through the regular hiring process. They (quite reasonably) didn’t want anyone circumventing that with perpetual visitors. Ironically the same thing happened to me in ‘96-‘97 when a visiting prof couldn’t stay in my last year so I can honestly say I’ve been there.
Without having any connection to this college, or education in the US for that matter, what you have written has given me a hopeful reminder of what education can be at its best. For this, I thank you. I hope that the vision sparked in me will be realised.
We think alike. I'm not your 10m friend alas, but I've been fantasizing about how to buy one of these colleges that close along similar lines. I'm a graduate of New College so i know of the promise of which you speak. And i was at Mills when they sold it off to Northeastern when we could have found a benefactor like the one you seek. I will keep tabs on your efforts.
Tremendous article. I particularly liked the Eugene Mirman speech.
I first read about Hampshire College in the Loren Pope book, Colleges That Change Lives, and it was on the short list of weird-ass schools that really spoke to me. Another was St John's and its 100 Great Books curriculum. But the school I eventually went to was Antioch College. Antioch's appeal was similar to that of Hampshire -- self-directed education, no grades, and an emphasis on practical work experience with their co-op program.
Antioch closed in 2008, when I was in my final year of studies there. Enrollment had been falling for ages, and the Antioch University system of profitable satellite campuses refused to bail out its progenitor. Part of the downfall of Antioch, in my opinion, was its continued identity as "bootcamp for the revolution," still clinging the 60s era counterculture from when Antioch was at its peak, which promised to turn students into what would eventually be widely referred to derisively as social justice warriors. For me, it was the co-op program that was the real juice.
Antioch eventually reopened in 2011, and is still going today -- limping along might be more accurate -- the student body is a fraction of the size it was even at its nadir in 2008. Whether this is a success story or not is perhaps a matter of one's perspective.
So much of this article, both the highs and lows, resonated with me. Thank you for it, and I wish you the very best of luck with your efforts to keep the dream of Hampshire alive.
Thank you! The Eugene Mirman speech is an all-time favorite.
I really appreciate this analysis. At Hampshire it also felt like many of the faculty and some of the administration were clinging to their identity as a "bootcamp for the revolution" as you say.
The striking thing is that in my experience, students mostly didn't want this! They wanted serious courses in topics like negotiation and statistics. Even in artsy topics, they were like, I wish there were more practical film courses where we learned about how to light a scene, instead of so much film theory and analysis.
So I think this is part of the failure of the college. Students DO really want the academic model and its radical freedom. They mostly DON'T want outdated '60s counterculture that no longer makes sense in the 21st century. I think it would be easy to get high enrollment if you offered Hampshire's model with courses and topics that students are actually interested in.
(When first-year students asked me for advice, it was often about — getting a job! I told them that when I was a college student, no one thought about what classes would make them employable four years in the future. But this generation does. They want classes that teach skills that will make them powerful and employable. Hampshire would be winning if it offered that.)
To be clear, "bootcamp for the revolution" was an actual slogan that made it onto buttons, tshirts, and into conversations. At the campus bookstore, you could buy an official shirt that said "Antioch College: No football team since 1954" which had a picture of that team. It is interesting what becomes a cultural point of pride. (This is also during a period when "fatphobia" was become widely used in activist discourse. But now I am really digressing.)
I remember a student who showed up to the college dorms for her first year, and her parents were horrified to learn she wouldn't have Internet access in the very outdated freshman dorms. She took it in stride, though -- she wanted to connect with her fellow students. She carved out a niche for herself teaching a Hindi language class. Later, it came out that she had voted for Bush (she protested that she was basically just voting the same way as her parents, and didn't know any better.) But she became an instant pariah. Wrongthink was self policed by the student body. She transferred out shortly thereafter. That small-tent lefty thinking has been prevalent long before that, and continues now, of course...
Actually, my point for telling the story is (at least today) about that student's parents. Schools don't just have to pitch the students, they have to pitch the parents, too. I mean, my parents are still making payments on the student loans they took out for me, and I'm in my 40s now, and they're in their 70s. Schools like Hampshire and Antioch offer such a lousy value proposition for most parents. High risk, expensive, no guarantees. "It sounds nice dear, but even if you do achieve Maslovian self-actualization, are you sure you will you be able to move out and afford rent?"
For Antioch at least, the pitch is that when you graduate you already have 3-4 co-op jobs on your resume. Jobs you had to call up the place and interview for, figure out where to live, move to a different city, and do all the logistics that come with being an independent working adult. The co-op office had a wealth of relationships with employers who "got it" and kept regular positions open for Antiochians, and you could find your way into some really cool shit. Made for great interview material.
Honestly I don't know how to keep an institution to keep from turning into a caricature of itself. It certainly seems like a prescient problem these days, particularly beyond the walled garden of higher education..
An actual slogan! I'm almost afraid to ask if there are pictures of these buttons and t-shirts.
I agree that the value proposition is a central question here. I think my response would take a few angles: 1) if you decide not to go to college at all that makes sense, but if you choose to go to college, Hampshire is better in many ways than the competition, 2) if you choose to go to college, Hampshire is a better fit for many people, if for example you think tests and grades are a hindrance, 3) co-op jobs and internships are great for landing certain kinds of jobs when you graduate, but if you want to do other kinds of things when you graduate (start your own business or initiative, get a PhD, do something else very original or unorthodox) Hampshire is a much better bet, 4) in my experience, Hampshire was great in my era for getting people paying their own rent, the student IT department was basically a pipeline right into Zipcar IT, lots of people graduated into good jobs in their area(s).
Unlike you, I chose medical school rather than a PhD and it served me well - as did Hampshire.
Your essay is great.
In The Making of a College - the authors predicted that Hampshire College “will seek to be an agent of change” and “an undergraduate institution of excellence" and that the college intends “to equip students as well as possible to handle their own education and their own realization as people.”
Yet ..
Hampshire’s current official mission statement is: “to foster a lifelong passion for learning, inquiry, and ethical citizenship that inspires students to contribute to knowledge, justice, and positive change in the world and, by doing so, to transform higher education”.
Excellence is replaced, it seems, with ethics and justice - and the goal of transforming education writ large is added.
And while I have no argument with ethics and justice, I worry that the absence of excellence in Hampshire's explicit vision is telling.
In this context, I wonder ... did you skip one challenge that I heard from faculty and administration over the last ~ 5-10 years ... ?
The high performing students who could go elsewhere but historically thrived at Hampshire stopped choosing Hampshire - leaving some significant percentage of incoming students to be the ones who "couldn't make it" elsewhere.
Predictably, many of these students couldn't make it even at Hampshire and left - and those who remained had (much) higher life-skills needs than their predecessors - which made professors into life-coaches and stressed the support systems at Hampshire quite a bit.
And the high performers - as you and others have expressed - found the limited resources to be so limiting that they chose to go elsewhere.
One theory is that this was a factor in the drop-off in enrollment as much as the demographic cliff and / or the reduction in admissions personnel.
I agree that I'm pretty concerned about the school abandoning excellence as a virtue. As if excellence is somehow a liability in the pursuit of ethics, justice, and transforming education.
That said, I have a very encouraging answer to your question. I taught large intro courses so I saw a good portion of the first-year class in both academic years 22-23 and 23-23. My experience was that they were just as smart, committed, and passionate as the first-years when I was a student, maybe more so! I don't think the majority of them "couldn't make it" elsewhere, I think most of them had other options and chose Hampshire because they wanted what the model offers.
I don't think high performing students stopped coming to Hampshire. The problem was that the school mostly stopped serving the challenging curriculum these students wanted. Some of them did transfer to get a better deal, but an amazing number of them stayed.
That said, I think we could attract even more high performing students is that were our focus and our messaging.
fascinating essay! Here's a additional revenue stream: many 55-65 old professionals would love to settle down in a college town, teach a class or seminar they have passion for. Rent/condo faculty housing to them. Make the faculty club what it looks like in the movies. It's a retirement village!
Found your essay very thoughtful and cogent. Thanks for writing it. I arrived at HC in Fall '73 and studied neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis, history of psychology, and philosophy of mind. My goal was to learn about different approaches to understanding the brain and the mind so my concentration was v. cross disciplinary. I then became and science and tech journalist, author, and documentary producer. My docs were about tech and society. pls see www.karenafrenkel.com) and more recently I produced a doc about my family and wrote a tie-memoir (www.familytreasuresmemoir.com and familytreasuresfilm.com).
I like your idea about seeking a billionaire to champion HC so I googled liberal-minded tycoons and philathropists. Laurene Powell Jobs popped up and was described as a "major proponent of school reform and supporting underserved students." I was one of the few journalists to interview Steve Jobs, but that was long ago and my contacts have thinned out. I'll try to contact some HC entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, who might be able to help. But if you agree, pls LMK what you think and perhaps we can brainstorm about how to approach her and others. I have more ideas about that. I hope to hear from you.
Thanks for this. I’m going to re-read later, but wanted to add…I am also one of the Hampshire grads who earned a PhD (and now, am a professor). I try, in my limited way, to invite my students to embrace what I think Hamp was good at: independence, inquiry, self-directed movement, uncertainties, intellectual growth, agency, (personal) failure.
So it's a college that gives you a degree that doesn't come with a GPA, and a degree without a major, at that. Yeah, man, no wonder 1/4th of the alumni start their own companies or non-profits: no one else would hire them, and it would be extremely difficult to convince a grad school to let you in.
The point of getting a college degree is that you can then use that credential to prove to people that you did in fact learn all the things you say that you know, and have the wherewithal to complete a course, and so on. This is *literally* a degree in *nothing in particular*, without an easily evaluable number attached, from a college that I've never heard of.
You're treating the lack of credentialism as a selling point but it *really isn't*. Yes, maybe we *should* live in the non-credentialist America, that sounds like a better America, etc. - BUT WE DO NOT LIVE IN THE NON-CREDENTIALIST AMERICA.
If you had read more closely, you would have seen that Hampshire also has an amazingly good graduate admissions rate. Hampshire students go to Harvard PhD programs and also work on Wall Street. They get hired.
Hampshire college is a vote for the non-credentialist America, which is part of why I want to preserve it. You decide how that fits with your values.
I have more personal familiarity with Hampshire's problems than you, and this is incorrect.
> Between Fall 2022 and Fall 2024, enrollment grew 68%. Students were finding Hampshire, choosing Hampshire, and staying at Hampshire.
The rate of accepted students choosing Hampshire has dropped off a cliff. The number of accepted students has *just started* to drop off a cliff, because the 'echo boom' is ending and the number of potential undergraduates *everywhere* is tanking. The students to get Hampshire up to 1000 by 2035 **simply do not exist** no matter how well you succeed.
Hampshire is not the first of the dozens of small colleges in Massachusetts alone which will collapse this decade, and it will not be the last. This is the worst possible time to try an ambitious (re)founding, while colleges across the spectrum from weird to boring are fighting for their lives even with ideal management and strong endowments. And the board has been very strong these last few years and led by an expert in this type of situation; they shut down because a nonprofit finance expert who was in the first ten graduating classes, someone who both cared more than just about anyone and had the skills to achieve it if anyone could, saw no path forward that she or anyone else could chart.
Also, you forget that the choice not to have an endowment was deliberate and part of the founding philosophy of Hampshire.
I'd love to hear about your personal familiarity with Hampshire's problems.
I am aware of the admissions problems. I think it's pretty clearly the result of cutting 1/3 of the admissions staff and hugely diluting the academic program. Students were happy to come to Hampshire, but many of them left when they did not get anything like what they were promised, though it's amazing how many held on even with how bad things were getting.
I think that the current trends in higher ed do not apply to Hampshire because it is offering something so different from other schools. As long as there are 10,000 college-aged kids out there, I think there will be 350 kids a year who want to do original research at 18. As long as other schools don't offer that, there will be a place for Hampshire, or at least, a Hampshire that delivers on the promises of its model.
As I believe I once told you at a dinner party in Oakland, my mother's on the board. They give her most of the credit for Hampshire not collapsing in 2019. They have been desperately looking for anything that could save the school pretty much constantly since 2023, and making questionable long-term decisions like mortgaging the buildings to anchor loans because it was needed for short-term survival.
It does not make sense to say that cutting admissions staff should cause a drop in the fraction of students who are given an acceptance letter and turn it down. What causal path could connect those? If anything, it should lead the other way; if you can be less selective and let students do the selecting, you can cut admissions staff. (And put the money into retaining professors, hopefully.)
You'll need a lot more than "offering something different" to be exempt from *the raw number of 18-year-olds dropping by 10% by 2030.* Especially as the secular trend has been toward distrust in colleges that don't offer an immediate ROI. (Private school application rate dropping 2% per year.) Hampshire, like all other liberal art schools, is a luxury good, whose ROI may be real and large, even larger than others, but which is definitely not legible or short-term.
Also, 35 per thousand is extremely high. Optimistically, assuming you will reach half or more of people who'd be a good fit (generous, the weirder you are the harder this is), 3.5 per 1000 is more realistic. At current cohort sizes (1.47 million and falling 1%/year) that would be 5000 in the US. And I'd guess it's more like 0.35 per thousand *if everything goes right.* Which, of course, it won't, because there is no model to work from and you'll be making it up as you go along. You're not restoring how it worked 20 years ago; that led to this.
Then I'm in her debt for saving the college in 2019. What exactly are you trying to accomplish in this comment, convince me that it's impossible? I don't really like that attitude, I'd rather fight for the future of higher education I believe in as long as there is a fraction of a chance.
Written transcripts are supposed to solve reward hacking and Goodharting? Whatever reward hacking and Goodharting mitigation can be achieved by those written transcripts can also be achieved by some numerical 'grade' and another numerical 'reward hacking score'/'sticks to the spirit of the grading criteria' score. This latter score ofc needs to be completely subjective/discretionary. This reduces to letting professors give completely discretionary numerical grades.
Or you can discover ways in which students reward hack and iteratively patch those errors in later instances of the courses.
Is the issue that any number becomes an optimisation target but the written transcript is harder to optimise against? As long as the transcripts are supposed to convey any signal of ability, you can try to quantify what it conveys and then optimise for this final number. Presumably any grad school admissions committee/employer still collapses that transcript into something quantitative while making the decision.
The only way to avoid students optimising for their "transcript score" is to sneak the ability signal though this transcript in a way that final evaluators can decode but students cannot.
What Hampshire College currently does is not necessary OR sufficient to prevent grade-munchkinry.
Thank you for such a thoughtful analysis of what made Hampshire what it is. The “grad school for undergrads” is what attracted me to the school in the mid 80s. And it is still a rare and much needed educational paradigm.
after what happened with goddard, (& less dramatic changes in other alternaschools across the country) i really hope someone comes in & makes your vision possible.
I hope so too! Share it with anyone who might be interested, maybe it will reach the right person.
Ethan’s writing shows a familiar blend of enthusiasm for the topic and a well-structured, rational argument. He has clearly learned how to balance passion with professionalism. I am particularly gratified to see that he did indeed pursue further studies in the field (congrats on the PhD!). And also can write without sounding like a professor with a stick up his butt reaching desperately for something critical to add to a narrative evaluation. You should’ve seen the ones I wrote for the students who sucked! <edit: “whose talents lay in other arenas.”>
You’re killing me here man. ;-)
Jay! I hoped that this piece would find its way to you.
It was very unfortunate, for me and for the college, that you left the school when you did. I had hoped that you would be on my Div III committee!
I enjoyed that job quite a lot, but I was only ever on a visiting appointment. Would’ve loved to see your Div III! They renewed me as long as they could, but there were rules about not allowing visiting profs to stay for more than 4 years because they didn’t go through the regular hiring process. They (quite reasonably) didn’t want anyone circumventing that with perpetual visitors. Ironically the same thing happened to me in ‘96-‘97 when a visiting prof couldn’t stay in my last year so I can honestly say I’ve been there.
As someone currently wrapping up a visiting appointment, I am familiar with this evil.
Without having any connection to this college, or education in the US for that matter, what you have written has given me a hopeful reminder of what education can be at its best. For this, I thank you. I hope that the vision sparked in me will be realised.
Very interesting article! The Deep Springs link is actually to your draft doc, consider replacing with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Springs_College
Nice catch, thanks! I've fixed it.
We think alike. I'm not your 10m friend alas, but I've been fantasizing about how to buy one of these colleges that close along similar lines. I'm a graduate of New College so i know of the promise of which you speak. And i was at Mills when they sold it off to Northeastern when we could have found a benefactor like the one you seek. I will keep tabs on your efforts.
Dan Ryan
Johns Hopkins
Tremendous article. I particularly liked the Eugene Mirman speech.
I first read about Hampshire College in the Loren Pope book, Colleges That Change Lives, and it was on the short list of weird-ass schools that really spoke to me. Another was St John's and its 100 Great Books curriculum. But the school I eventually went to was Antioch College. Antioch's appeal was similar to that of Hampshire -- self-directed education, no grades, and an emphasis on practical work experience with their co-op program.
Antioch closed in 2008, when I was in my final year of studies there. Enrollment had been falling for ages, and the Antioch University system of profitable satellite campuses refused to bail out its progenitor. Part of the downfall of Antioch, in my opinion, was its continued identity as "bootcamp for the revolution," still clinging the 60s era counterculture from when Antioch was at its peak, which promised to turn students into what would eventually be widely referred to derisively as social justice warriors. For me, it was the co-op program that was the real juice.
Antioch eventually reopened in 2011, and is still going today -- limping along might be more accurate -- the student body is a fraction of the size it was even at its nadir in 2008. Whether this is a success story or not is perhaps a matter of one's perspective.
So much of this article, both the highs and lows, resonated with me. Thank you for it, and I wish you the very best of luck with your efforts to keep the dream of Hampshire alive.
Thank you! The Eugene Mirman speech is an all-time favorite.
I really appreciate this analysis. At Hampshire it also felt like many of the faculty and some of the administration were clinging to their identity as a "bootcamp for the revolution" as you say.
The striking thing is that in my experience, students mostly didn't want this! They wanted serious courses in topics like negotiation and statistics. Even in artsy topics, they were like, I wish there were more practical film courses where we learned about how to light a scene, instead of so much film theory and analysis.
So I think this is part of the failure of the college. Students DO really want the academic model and its radical freedom. They mostly DON'T want outdated '60s counterculture that no longer makes sense in the 21st century. I think it would be easy to get high enrollment if you offered Hampshire's model with courses and topics that students are actually interested in.
(When first-year students asked me for advice, it was often about — getting a job! I told them that when I was a college student, no one thought about what classes would make them employable four years in the future. But this generation does. They want classes that teach skills that will make them powerful and employable. Hampshire would be winning if it offered that.)
Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
To be clear, "bootcamp for the revolution" was an actual slogan that made it onto buttons, tshirts, and into conversations. At the campus bookstore, you could buy an official shirt that said "Antioch College: No football team since 1954" which had a picture of that team. It is interesting what becomes a cultural point of pride. (This is also during a period when "fatphobia" was become widely used in activist discourse. But now I am really digressing.)
I remember a student who showed up to the college dorms for her first year, and her parents were horrified to learn she wouldn't have Internet access in the very outdated freshman dorms. She took it in stride, though -- she wanted to connect with her fellow students. She carved out a niche for herself teaching a Hindi language class. Later, it came out that she had voted for Bush (she protested that she was basically just voting the same way as her parents, and didn't know any better.) But she became an instant pariah. Wrongthink was self policed by the student body. She transferred out shortly thereafter. That small-tent lefty thinking has been prevalent long before that, and continues now, of course...
Actually, my point for telling the story is (at least today) about that student's parents. Schools don't just have to pitch the students, they have to pitch the parents, too. I mean, my parents are still making payments on the student loans they took out for me, and I'm in my 40s now, and they're in their 70s. Schools like Hampshire and Antioch offer such a lousy value proposition for most parents. High risk, expensive, no guarantees. "It sounds nice dear, but even if you do achieve Maslovian self-actualization, are you sure you will you be able to move out and afford rent?"
For Antioch at least, the pitch is that when you graduate you already have 3-4 co-op jobs on your resume. Jobs you had to call up the place and interview for, figure out where to live, move to a different city, and do all the logistics that come with being an independent working adult. The co-op office had a wealth of relationships with employers who "got it" and kept regular positions open for Antiochians, and you could find your way into some really cool shit. Made for great interview material.
Honestly I don't know how to keep an institution to keep from turning into a caricature of itself. It certainly seems like a prescient problem these days, particularly beyond the walled garden of higher education..
An actual slogan! I'm almost afraid to ask if there are pictures of these buttons and t-shirts.
I agree that the value proposition is a central question here. I think my response would take a few angles: 1) if you decide not to go to college at all that makes sense, but if you choose to go to college, Hampshire is better in many ways than the competition, 2) if you choose to go to college, Hampshire is a better fit for many people, if for example you think tests and grades are a hindrance, 3) co-op jobs and internships are great for landing certain kinds of jobs when you graduate, but if you want to do other kinds of things when you graduate (start your own business or initiative, get a PhD, do something else very original or unorthodox) Hampshire is a much better bet, 4) in my experience, Hampshire was great in my era for getting people paying their own rent, the student IT department was basically a pipeline right into Zipcar IT, lots of people graduated into good jobs in their area(s).
I am F83 and did my Div III in cognitive science.
Unlike you, I chose medical school rather than a PhD and it served me well - as did Hampshire.
Your essay is great.
In The Making of a College - the authors predicted that Hampshire College “will seek to be an agent of change” and “an undergraduate institution of excellence" and that the college intends “to equip students as well as possible to handle their own education and their own realization as people.”
Yet ..
Hampshire’s current official mission statement is: “to foster a lifelong passion for learning, inquiry, and ethical citizenship that inspires students to contribute to knowledge, justice, and positive change in the world and, by doing so, to transform higher education”.
Excellence is replaced, it seems, with ethics and justice - and the goal of transforming education writ large is added.
And while I have no argument with ethics and justice, I worry that the absence of excellence in Hampshire's explicit vision is telling.
In this context, I wonder ... did you skip one challenge that I heard from faculty and administration over the last ~ 5-10 years ... ?
The high performing students who could go elsewhere but historically thrived at Hampshire stopped choosing Hampshire - leaving some significant percentage of incoming students to be the ones who "couldn't make it" elsewhere.
Predictably, many of these students couldn't make it even at Hampshire and left - and those who remained had (much) higher life-skills needs than their predecessors - which made professors into life-coaches and stressed the support systems at Hampshire quite a bit.
And the high performers - as you and others have expressed - found the limited resources to be so limiting that they chose to go elsewhere.
One theory is that this was a factor in the drop-off in enrollment as much as the demographic cliff and / or the reduction in admissions personnel.
(Though my position remains that the pivot never really happened: https://docnotes.net/2026/04/14/no-margin-no-mission/)
Perhaps this is monday-morning quarterbacking and therefore irrelevant.
A joke I heard from an ex-Hampster:
"Why did the Hampshire student cross the road?"
"To get a better deal"
Thank you!
I agree that I'm pretty concerned about the school abandoning excellence as a virtue. As if excellence is somehow a liability in the pursuit of ethics, justice, and transforming education.
That said, I have a very encouraging answer to your question. I taught large intro courses so I saw a good portion of the first-year class in both academic years 22-23 and 23-23. My experience was that they were just as smart, committed, and passionate as the first-years when I was a student, maybe more so! I don't think the majority of them "couldn't make it" elsewhere, I think most of them had other options and chose Hampshire because they wanted what the model offers.
I don't think high performing students stopped coming to Hampshire. The problem was that the school mostly stopped serving the challenging curriculum these students wanted. Some of them did transfer to get a better deal, but an amazing number of them stayed.
That said, I think we could attract even more high performing students is that were our focus and our messaging.
As a University of Puget Sound graduate, I have nothing but good things to say about Hampshire kids
fascinating essay! Here's a additional revenue stream: many 55-65 old professionals would love to settle down in a college town, teach a class or seminar they have passion for. Rent/condo faculty housing to them. Make the faculty club what it looks like in the movies. It's a retirement village!
Thank you! Would love to have more retired professional adjuncts, I think this is a great idea.
Hi Ethan,
Found your essay very thoughtful and cogent. Thanks for writing it. I arrived at HC in Fall '73 and studied neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis, history of psychology, and philosophy of mind. My goal was to learn about different approaches to understanding the brain and the mind so my concentration was v. cross disciplinary. I then became and science and tech journalist, author, and documentary producer. My docs were about tech and society. pls see www.karenafrenkel.com) and more recently I produced a doc about my family and wrote a tie-memoir (www.familytreasuresmemoir.com and familytreasuresfilm.com).
I like your idea about seeking a billionaire to champion HC so I googled liberal-minded tycoons and philathropists. Laurene Powell Jobs popped up and was described as a "major proponent of school reform and supporting underserved students." I was one of the few journalists to interview Steve Jobs, but that was long ago and my contacts have thinned out. I'll try to contact some HC entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, who might be able to help. But if you agree, pls LMK what you think and perhaps we can brainstorm about how to approach her and others. I have more ideas about that. I hope to hear from you.
Karen A. Frenkel
Author & Producer
Family Treasures Lost and Found
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http://familytreasuresmemoir.com
http://familytreasuresfilm.com
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/karen-a-frenkel/
http://www.karenafrenkel.com
TikTok: karenftiki
X: @KarenAFrenkel
Thanks for this. I’m going to re-read later, but wanted to add…I am also one of the Hampshire grads who earned a PhD (and now, am a professor). I try, in my limited way, to invite my students to embrace what I think Hamp was good at: independence, inquiry, self-directed movement, uncertainties, intellectual growth, agency, (personal) failure.
So it's a college that gives you a degree that doesn't come with a GPA, and a degree without a major, at that. Yeah, man, no wonder 1/4th of the alumni start their own companies or non-profits: no one else would hire them, and it would be extremely difficult to convince a grad school to let you in.
The point of getting a college degree is that you can then use that credential to prove to people that you did in fact learn all the things you say that you know, and have the wherewithal to complete a course, and so on. This is *literally* a degree in *nothing in particular*, without an easily evaluable number attached, from a college that I've never heard of.
You're treating the lack of credentialism as a selling point but it *really isn't*. Yes, maybe we *should* live in the non-credentialist America, that sounds like a better America, etc. - BUT WE DO NOT LIVE IN THE NON-CREDENTIALIST AMERICA.
If you had read more closely, you would have seen that Hampshire also has an amazingly good graduate admissions rate. Hampshire students go to Harvard PhD programs and also work on Wall Street. They get hired.
Hampshire college is a vote for the non-credentialist America, which is part of why I want to preserve it. You decide how that fits with your values.
Lots of grad schools would admit Hampshire students, there’s not much of a problem there.
Probably true for many competitive industry jobs that value GPA though.
Also, Hampshire students who wanted some letter grades on their transcript could take classes at the other 4 colleges.
I have more personal familiarity with Hampshire's problems than you, and this is incorrect.
> Between Fall 2022 and Fall 2024, enrollment grew 68%. Students were finding Hampshire, choosing Hampshire, and staying at Hampshire.
The rate of accepted students choosing Hampshire has dropped off a cliff. The number of accepted students has *just started* to drop off a cliff, because the 'echo boom' is ending and the number of potential undergraduates *everywhere* is tanking. The students to get Hampshire up to 1000 by 2035 **simply do not exist** no matter how well you succeed.
Hampshire is not the first of the dozens of small colleges in Massachusetts alone which will collapse this decade, and it will not be the last. This is the worst possible time to try an ambitious (re)founding, while colleges across the spectrum from weird to boring are fighting for their lives even with ideal management and strong endowments. And the board has been very strong these last few years and led by an expert in this type of situation; they shut down because a nonprofit finance expert who was in the first ten graduating classes, someone who both cared more than just about anyone and had the skills to achieve it if anyone could, saw no path forward that she or anyone else could chart.
Also, you forget that the choice not to have an endowment was deliberate and part of the founding philosophy of Hampshire.
I'd love to hear about your personal familiarity with Hampshire's problems.
I am aware of the admissions problems. I think it's pretty clearly the result of cutting 1/3 of the admissions staff and hugely diluting the academic program. Students were happy to come to Hampshire, but many of them left when they did not get anything like what they were promised, though it's amazing how many held on even with how bad things were getting.
I think that the current trends in higher ed do not apply to Hampshire because it is offering something so different from other schools. As long as there are 10,000 college-aged kids out there, I think there will be 350 kids a year who want to do original research at 18. As long as other schools don't offer that, there will be a place for Hampshire, or at least, a Hampshire that delivers on the promises of its model.
As I believe I once told you at a dinner party in Oakland, my mother's on the board. They give her most of the credit for Hampshire not collapsing in 2019. They have been desperately looking for anything that could save the school pretty much constantly since 2023, and making questionable long-term decisions like mortgaging the buildings to anchor loans because it was needed for short-term survival.
It does not make sense to say that cutting admissions staff should cause a drop in the fraction of students who are given an acceptance letter and turn it down. What causal path could connect those? If anything, it should lead the other way; if you can be less selective and let students do the selecting, you can cut admissions staff. (And put the money into retaining professors, hopefully.)
You'll need a lot more than "offering something different" to be exempt from *the raw number of 18-year-olds dropping by 10% by 2030.* Especially as the secular trend has been toward distrust in colleges that don't offer an immediate ROI. (Private school application rate dropping 2% per year.) Hampshire, like all other liberal art schools, is a luxury good, whose ROI may be real and large, even larger than others, but which is definitely not legible or short-term.
Also, 35 per thousand is extremely high. Optimistically, assuming you will reach half or more of people who'd be a good fit (generous, the weirder you are the harder this is), 3.5 per 1000 is more realistic. At current cohort sizes (1.47 million and falling 1%/year) that would be 5000 in the US. And I'd guess it's more like 0.35 per thousand *if everything goes right.* Which, of course, it won't, because there is no model to work from and you'll be making it up as you go along. You're not restoring how it worked 20 years ago; that led to this.
Then I'm in her debt for saving the college in 2019. What exactly are you trying to accomplish in this comment, convince me that it's impossible? I don't really like that attitude, I'd rather fight for the future of higher education I believe in as long as there is a fraction of a chance.
Yes. It’s impossible and you’re trying to throw good money after bad. You will harm your allies by trying.
Written transcripts are supposed to solve reward hacking and Goodharting? Whatever reward hacking and Goodharting mitigation can be achieved by those written transcripts can also be achieved by some numerical 'grade' and another numerical 'reward hacking score'/'sticks to the spirit of the grading criteria' score. This latter score ofc needs to be completely subjective/discretionary. This reduces to letting professors give completely discretionary numerical grades.
Or you can discover ways in which students reward hack and iteratively patch those errors in later instances of the courses.
Is the issue that any number becomes an optimisation target but the written transcript is harder to optimise against? As long as the transcripts are supposed to convey any signal of ability, you can try to quantify what it conveys and then optimise for this final number. Presumably any grad school admissions committee/employer still collapses that transcript into something quantitative while making the decision.
The only way to avoid students optimising for their "transcript score" is to sneak the ability signal though this transcript in a way that final evaluators can decode but students cannot.
What Hampshire College currently does is not necessary OR sufficient to prevent grade-munchkinry.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101212230425/http://www.nationalgreatbooks.com/cirriculum/structure.asp