I could see how this could appeal to students both interested in UMass and also those who would normally be drawn to Hampshire but may be hesitant to choose them now.
I wonder if they could do something like Salem College in NC has done–still exist as a college but also offer a boarding/day high school. You could market it as offering a dual-enrollment track that allows them to enroll in college classes (and have transfer agreements with Hampshire and other area schools that guarantees specific classes/hours transfer in, etc).
The article says they are recruiting new students, but I wonder at what cost (I can’t open the whole article). As I see things, the school’s financial issues can lead to enrollment moving in the wrong direction. I for one would hesitate to send a child to a college that is in such a precarious financial position. Hopefully Hampshire can survive this.
I imagine you have to find folks that don’t know or think to look but when i saw they missed enrollment by 50% - right there was a death knell. They need a white knight / another school or really rich alumnus.
I believe they have already mined the rich-alum vein pretty heavily. They have tried to keep their current model afloat, and it hasn’t worked. They’re going to need to re-imagine the path forward, or there won’t be one.
Too bad but saw it coming. Can’t imagine many (or any) incoming freshmen will commit to Hampshire with this so sadly it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s a death spiral for sure. It’s sad, I was hopeful when some alum raised so much money a few years ago, but that well seems to have dried up. And I understand why.
Lourdes was the primary subject of a Chronicle of Higher Education article about 11 months ago on the pitfalls of small colleges trying to improve enrollment by recruiting athletes (paywalled). The title of the article, quoting one of the administrators interviewed for it, pretty much describes the problem: we have more athletes than we have fans. The numbers, per the article, are striking: “athletes increased from a median of 21 percent of undergraduates in 2012 to nearly a third in 2022.” They had success in terms of raw enrollment numbers, and their teams were pretty successful too, but there was a lot of tuition discounting to get there (“…coaches had been adding the discount of the athletic scholarship on top of the university’s normal merit aid to attract the highest-performing athletes…[T]he tuition discount for athletes averaged 74 percent…”), and so it didn’t actually help the fiscal situation, and it didn’t attract more non-athletes (for whom the average tuition discount was only 34%), and so they had the dubious distinction of being “among just 27 colleges where expenses outpaced revenues in at least eight of the years between 2014 and 2023” according to Robert Kelchen’s database.
Anyway, it’s “just” one college, but it is a strategy that a number of colleges are trying, so Lourdes may be a canary in the coal mine for some of them.
This seems a clear fit, and while sad for all the Laboure alums, of course. The duplication of admin, etc., seems unsustainable when Curry has a nursing program, too. I hope transition is all easy for current students, which always seems hard, and for clinicals and such seems especially tricky for nursing and medical degrees.
It costs money to run these sports programs. I think a better option would be to cut all sports programs and use that money to offer more financial aid or lower tuition across the board.