Are liberal arts colleges doomed? [View all]
Two days before classes started at Hampshire College in September, the school’s incoming first-year students – all 13 of them – attended a welcome reception in the campus’ new R.W. Kern Center. A motley mix of plaids, khakis and combat boots, the group lined up to shake hands with the college president and receive small bells – symbols of the large brass bell they’ll ring upon completing their “Division III,” the epic independent project required to graduate. If, that is, Hampshire survives long enough for them to graduate.
Nine months earlier, the Massachusetts college – mired in financial trouble – had launched a search for a partner to merge with and announced that it might not admit a new freshman class in the fall. Coming after a series of mergers and closures of New England schools, the announcement provoked alarm in the world of higher ed. Eventually, Hampshire offered a place to 70-odd students it had accepted early or who had taken a gap year before enrolling – but warned that there was no guarantee it would stay open.
Among the baker’s dozen who decided to take the risk was Devin Forgue. Despite its strapped budget, Hampshire offered him better financial aid than the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He considered the less expensive Holyoke Community College, but he didn’t want to give up on his dream. Forgue has an unusually specific life ambition: to broker a global compromise to increase funding for space research. He plans to study a combination of political science, anthropology, international relations and astrophysics. And he thought that Hampshire, an experimental college that asks students to design their own course of study, was the best place to do that.
After four days of orientation with “the 13,” as his class was known (one student has since dropped out), Forgue felt he’d made the right decision. A slight 19-year-old with longish brown hair, he’d already experienced the kind of bull sessions about politics and philosophy that make college so special. “Every single one of the 13 is the type of person … I was hoping to meet,” he told me.
Read more: https://www.boston.com/news/education/2019/10/23/are-liberal-arts-colleges-doomed
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