April 19, 2026

Hey, it’s been a tough week for colleges, especially small ones.

Steve Drummond here, editor on the Education Desk. The long-running trend of consolidation and closures in colleges – especially small, private ones – topped our news this week.

Izzy Johnson, left, and Jack Beatson are first-year students at Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vt. The college has announced that it will close at the end of this semester.

Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report

As our friends at WBUR reported, Hampshire College in Massachusetts announced it’s closing at the end of the year, and it’s not the only small private college in trouble.

Our partners at the nonprofit education news organization The Hechinger Report brought us news this past week that 442 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities – with a combined 670,000 students – are at risk of closing or having to merge within the next 10 years.

More than 120 institutions are at the very highest risk, according to the forecast by Huron Consulting Group, which helps clients in industries including higher education formulate business strategies. For its assessment, the company analyzed enrollment trends, tuition revenue, assets, debt, cash on hand and other measures.

It’s a crisis whose magnitude has been overshadowed by political and culture-war attacks on higher education, and is propelled by the simple law of supply and demand, after a long decline in the number of Americans who are going to college.

“We have too many seats. We have too many classrooms,” Peter Stokes, a managing director at Huron, said of U.S. colleges and universities. “So over the coming five to 10 years, this shakeout is going to take place.”

The story focused on tiny Sterling College, which uses a 130-acre farm to teach agriculture and other disciplines in a part of northeastern Vermont so isolated there’s no cell service and it’s rare to see a passing car.

The college will close in May, at the end of this semester.

Started in 1958 as a prep school for boys, the remote rural college was never very large. Its enrollment peaked at 120 and fell to about 40 students this year.

Those numbers weren’t sustainable, even at one of the nation’s nine so-called “work colleges,” whose undergraduates combine work and learning. At Sterling, they do this by pitching in on the farm and in the dorms and kitchen, said the college’s president, Scott Thomas. Though financial documents show Sterling had been breaking even, margins were thin.

Students like LillyAnne Keeley, a senior, have decided “that we’re just going to have a really good last semester and go out on a really positive note.” Like several of her classmates, she is cramming to earn the credits needed to graduate this spring. “And I feel like we’ve been really able to do that so far, but it’s still really sad.”

— Steve Drummond, Executive Producer, NPR Ed

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In other news...

1. Hampshire College in Amherst will permanently close in the fall.
Founded in 1965, and opening its doors to students five years later as a campus determined to "radically reimagine liberal arts education," the small liberal arts college started facing significant financial headwinds seven years ago. Read the story here.

— Suevon Lee, Education Editor, WBUR

2. LAUSD averts a strike and teachers win parental leave.
Los Angeles Unified support staff reached a labor deal with the district early Tuesday morning, hours before a strike was set to begin. LA teachers also reached a tentative agreement with the district this week that includes paid parental leave for the first time. Read those stories here and here.

— Elly Yu and Mariana Dale, Education Reporters, LAist

3. Harvard takes on the issue of grade inflation.
Harvard faculty are debating a plan to overhaul the school’s grading system. In 2024-2025, more than half of all grades awarded to undergraduates were “A”s, according to a university report. The proposed limit on “A”s would amount to 20% of a course’s enrolled students plus four. A separate proposal would allow instructors an option to opt out of letter grades and instead mark students’ work as “unsatisfactory,” “satisfactory” or “satisfactory-plus” for exceptional performance. If approved by faculty, the changes would be implemented in fall 2027.

— Kirk Carapezza, GBH Managing Editor, Higher Education

And something to make you smile (Well, at least it did for us!):

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— David Folkenflik, NPR Media Correspondent

As always, thank you for reading and listening!

— The NPR Education Team

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