AMHERST — After projected enrollment at Hampshire College fell short this semester, 15 vacant faculty and staff positions will remain unfilled in an effort to plug the resulting $2.6 million budget gap.
The deficit comes after 62 fewer students than anticipated enrolled for the coming year at the school of about 1,400. A balanced budget came after the board of trustees made a one-time gift of $1.3 million, while officials made up the rest by not filling vacant faculty and staff positions and trimming excess spending in each department, according to college spokesman John Courtmanche.
Despite the belt-tightening, faculty and staff will still receive a budgeted 1 percent pay raise.
Courtmanche on Wednesday said he did not immediately have details about which positions will remain unfilled.
It’s unclear what impact the cuts may have on students, the majority of whom arrive on campus next week, though officials are confident Hampshire will be able to recover from the financial setback.
In fact, some decline in enrollment was expected after college officials implemented a new admission strategy meant to make the school more selective and retain more students.
“We were expecting a decline in enrollment, but we didn’t expect such a dramatic decline in enrollment,” Courtmanche said.
In addition, Courtmanche said, protests over racism and other issues on campus — including on the day when admitted students visited — might have prompted some considering Hampshire to look elsewhere and the unrest could have encouraged some enrolled students to transfer. Also, college President Jonathan Lash was unexpectedly on medical leave for the duration of the spring semester.
As college officials began a strategic planning process three years ago, they noticed that even while the number of applications to the school was growing, it did not seem that the college was connecting with students for whom Hampshire was the best match, according to Meredith Twombly, dean of enrollment and retention.
While Hampshire, a bastion of alternative education, did not require SAT or ACT scores for admission, many applicants believed that the college valued these metrics. More than 70 percent of applicants at that time submitted their standardized test scores, Twombly said.
And many of those students were coming from traditional educational backgrounds in which test-driven memorization might be valued more highly than Hampshire-style independent projects, she said.
So, as part of an effort to attract students who would excel at Hampshire, beginning with the class admitted in 2015, the college stopped considering test scores in its admissions process.
“We were hoping to grow more selective,” Twombly said. “We thought if we could connect with the right students and be very clear what Hampshire’s mission is, what our values are, it would increase the number of students who are a good fit. Then we won’t have to admit 70 percent of the applicant pool in order to get a class of 375.”
It worked. For the class matriculated in 2014, 19 percent of accepted applicants enrolled. Among applicants for the 2015 school year, for whom test scores were not considered, 27 percent of those admitted enrolled, according to Twombly.
For the class beginning school this fall, that dropped to 24 percent, she said.
For comparison, at Amherst College, where 14 percent of applicants to the class of 2019 were admitted, 39 percent enrolled at the school, according to college data.
Despite the dip in enrollment at Hampshire, which opened in 1970, Twombly said officials are sticking with the plan. “We see it working,” she said. “I think we can get it up to 25 percent with a few tweaks.”
Compared to other small liberal arts schools, Hampshire’s budget relies heavily on tuition dollars. The $2.6 million shortfall represents over 4 percent of the college’s $56 million operating budget. And Hampshire’s comparatively modest endowment — $40 million versus Amherst’s $2.19 billion — means its operations are particularly sensitive to enrollment changes, Courtmanche said.
“At highly endowed colleges this could be a blip, this could be not a big deal at all,” Twombly said. “We’re a young college still building its endowment. We don’t really operate with a margin of error, so if we’re off a percent or two, we really feel it.”
Students will have a chance to ask questions about college finances at a budget briefing hosted by Mary McEneany, vice president for finance and administration, and Lash, Courtmanche said.
Chris Lindahl can be reached at clindahl@gazettenet.com.