Much of the discussion surrounding financially troubled colleges focuses on enrollment, endowments, and balance sheets. Those issues matter. But they obscure a larger concern: many of these institutions are educationally distinctive, and once they disappear, the models they represent often do as well.
Already Lost
Hampshire College (Massachusetts)
Founded by the presidents of the Five College Consortium, Hampshire challenged nearly every convention of higher education. It replaced letter grades with narrative evaluations, encouraged students to design individualized concentrations instead of traditional majors, and emphasized portfolios over standardized measures of achievement. Its closure represents the loss of one of America’s most influential educational experiments.
Wells College (New York)
For more than 150 years, Wells (all women until 2004) offered an intimate liberal arts education built around close faculty mentorship, writing, and interdisciplinary learning on a historic Finger Lakes campus. When it closed in 2024, students lost far more than they would have at another small college—they lost an educational culture that had taken generations to develop.
Under Financial Pressure
These colleges have a financial rating of D or C- in Forbes College Financial Grades.
Drew University (New Jersey)
Drew remains one of New Jersey's few selective residential liberal arts colleges, emphasizing broad intellectual inquiry at a time when many institutions are shifting toward career-focused programs. Those challenges illustrate the broader difficulty of sustaining the traditional liberal arts model in today's higher education marketplace.
Champlain College (Vermont)
Few colleges have adapted to workforce needs as aggressively as Champlain. It has introduced programs in cybersecurity, business analytics, forensic accounting, game design, and digital technologies while creating innovative dual-enrollment opportunities for high school students. Even institutions willing to reinvent themselves face powerful demographic and monetary headwinds.
Prescott College (Arizona)
Prescott has built one of the nation's most experiential curricula. Students may earn academic credit through outdoor leadership, wilderness medicine, whitewater rafting, marine ecology, and climate justice, demonstrating an approach to higher education that few institutions attempt.
University of Hartford (Connecticut)
Hartford combines a comprehensive university with the nationally respected Hartt School of Music, Dance, and Theatre, permitting artists, musicians, engineers, business students, and liberal arts majors to learn together on one campus. Institutions with this combination of professional education and the arts are becoming increasingly uncommon.
The Diversity Worth Protecting
Not every distinctive college is in imminent financial danger. But these institutions illustrate the extraordinary variety that has long made American higher education unique.
Deep Springs College (California)
With fewer than 30 students, Deep Springs combines rigorous academics with mandatory labor on a working cattle ranch and student self-governance. There is simply no other college in America quite like it.
College of the Atlantic (Maine)
The college offers just one degree—Human Ecology—allowing students to integrate environmental science, policy, economics, conservation, and the arts into individualized programs. It remains one of the country's purest examples of interdisciplinary education.
St. John's College (Maryland and New Mexico)
Students follow a common Great Books curriculum rather than choosing majors, studying original texts from Homer and Plato to Einstein. Its discussion-based approach deliberately rejects many conventions of modern higher education.
Berea College (Kentucky)
Berea charges no tuition, requires every student to work, and focuses on serving academically talented students with limited financial resources. Its mission demonstrates that some of America's most distinctive colleges are defined not by prestige, but by purpose.
None of these institutions educates hundreds of thousands of students. None dominates national rankings. Yet each represents a fundamentally different answer to a deceptively simple question: What should a college be?
That diversity—not just of students, but of teaching philosophies—has long been one of American higher education's greatest strengths. As financial stresses mount, the greatest danger may not simply be the disappearance of colleges. It may be that the colleges which survive become increasingly alike, leaving future generations with fewer genuinely different ways to learn.