John Marcus

So by New England standards, it's in Western Massachusetts.

By New England standards, it was reasonably young, but it was never very big.

Its endowment was very small.

Its enrollment continued to decline.

It had fewer than 800 students left at the end.

It had $21 million in debt.

Debt is a really important and largely misunderstood component of this.

When people think of debt and college, they think of student loan debt.

but there's also institutional debt, and it is really piling up.

Colleges and universities have borrowed significant amounts of money, and so servicing that debt becomes a big drain on their operating budgets.

To attract students, colleges do something else that isn't widely known.

They discount the tuition.

Almost no one pays the list price you see on the website.

At Hampshire specifically or everywhere?

At colleges in general.

The discount rate at colleges and universities is more than 50%.

So if you were a private business and you gave back 50% of your revenue, you'd be out of business.

And that's what's happening to a lot of these small colleges.

At Hampshire, I looked up the numbers.

They were giving back more than 75% of their revenue in the form of discounts just to continue to get people to come there and fill seats there.