Sean Rameswaram

But picture this, all of the chaos happened at the same time.

An event meant to provide a safe space for young people was underway.

Do you think there's an issue here where like if you're a kid scrolling Instagram and seeing, you know, a flyer for a teen takeover or and it's next to a flyer for some city organized, I don't know, dance event, whatever it might be, that the teen takeover just looks more fun?

Like the kinds of events and alternatives provided by a city are never going to look as good as...

the opportunity to get wild with your friends in a park?

Thaddeus Johnson is a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice.

Earlier in the show, you heard from Jenny Gathright from WAPO.

Hadi Mawagdi is a producer at Today Explained.

He made today's show along with Amina Alsadi, Gabriel Donatov, and David Tadishore.

Thanks for listening.

Last week, Hampshire College, a private liberal arts school in Amherst, Massachusetts, that I had never previously heard of, announced it was shutting down.

And I thought, bummer for Hampshire College.

But then I read, this is much bigger than Hampshire.

The United States currently has 4,000 colleges, and more and more of them are closing every year.

In an article at The Atlantic titled The Looming College Enrollment Death Spiral, the writer Jeffrey Selingo says that your Harvard's and Yale's and universities of Michigan and Alabama are going to be just fine, but that smaller regional schools that you maybe haven't heard of won't be.

And that means that students who can afford to go to out-of-state schools for their education will continue to do so.

But more importantly, those who can afford it might not go to college at all.

We are at risk, Salingo explains, of turning a four-year education back into a luxury good in this country.

When your college closes, coming up on Today Explained.

OK, so, John, last week it was announced that the private liberal arts college, Hampshire College, would close after its fall semester.