Small-college implosion

Hampshire College viewed from Bare Mountain in October 2017. Amherst College (top right) and The University of Massachusetts Amherst (top left) are both visible.

— Photo by MonsieurNapoléon

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary, in GoLocal24.com

Hampshire College, founded in Amherst, Mass., in 1965 during the heyday of the creation of such “experimental’’ institutions,  and as the college-bound hordes of the Baby Boom were coming on, is closing.  Small private liberal-arts colleges in New England and elsewhere in America have been shutting their doors at an accelerating clip, amidst a shrinking pool of applicants and the sense that a college has become less economically worth it.

That it is culturally, psychologically and emotionally worth it is another matter; teaching critical thinking would seem to me pretty valuable. And AI will never abolish the value of in-person social skills, some of which can be developed by being at a physical college.

In any event, the closing of all these college campuses may well substantially expand New England’s housing stock. Consider all those dorms….

Hampshire is in the Connecticut River Valley, one of America’s great collegiate corridors, as a reminder that New England has always been America’s most literate region.