What Makes Hampshire Students Unique
Hampshire’s pedagogy develops each student’s ability to question, research, analyze, write, negotiate, and undertake substantial independent projects, competencies that graduate schools and employers seek in their ideal candidates. Hampshire's interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to education produces remarkable results.
100% of students completed at least two community-engaged learning activities (CEL-1 and CEL-2) which involve combining formal classroom study of a particular issue with direct real-world exposure to that issue in a community setting.
93% of students completed at least one internship, research assistantship, or similar activity. 70% of students completed two or more before their graduation.
65% of our alumni earn advanced degrees within ten years of graduating.
89% of Hampshire alumni report receiving a job offer within one year of graduation.
Hampshire is among the top 3% of the nation’s colleges whose graduates go on to earn a PhD.
1 in 4 of our graduates have started their own business or organization.
What Makes Hampshire Different
1. Hampshire offers no traditional majors; instead, students design their own program of study, commonly examining questions through the lenses of several disciplines. Hampshire is often described as a graduate school model for undergraduates. Students do not progress through a freshman-through-senior cycle; instead, the College’s Divisional System guides the student year-by-year as they develop their own academic concentration, negotiate their studies with faculty advisers in a rigorous environment, and complete a year-long advanced study project in their final year that is the capstone of their undergraduate experience.
2. Faculty advise students more intensively than at other colleges, as our professors give them choices in pursuing significant questions of interest and then challenge them to justify those choices.
3. Courses are not the only sites of learning for Hampshire students, who engage in a variety of learning activities and environments including independent study, internships, community engagement, social action, lab work, and teaching assistantships. Students often act as a TA in their fourth year or earlier.
4. Hampshire professors do not give grades but instead assess each student’s performance by writing narrative evaluations. The College has found that a written report on progress is exponentially more informative for learning, giving students meaningful, constructive feedback they can learn from and act on, with a long-term benefit of a more thorough and insightful transcript after graduation.
5. Since it was founded in 1970, Hampshire has given applicants the option of not submitting SAT or ACT scores. In 2014, the College's research revealed the scores did not predict success at Hampshire, so the College stopped accepting standardized test scores for admissions altogether.
6. The College is committed to education as a vehicle for social impact, and each student incorporates multiple cultural perspectives and performs community-engaged work like internships and research assistantships.
In 1958, a committee representing the presidents of four distinguished institutions - Amherst, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts -wrote “The New College Plan,” the basis for Hampshire’s philosophy and pedagogy. Hampshire remains partnered with its four founding institutions as the Five Colleges, one of the oldest and most successful educational consortia, which enables students at each institution a breadth of shared academic and extracurricular resources.
In Hampshire’s Divisional System, students complete three divisions of progressively more self-directed study: Division I (year 1), exploration; Division II (years 2 and 3), concentration; and Division III (year 4), creation and advanced study. Mentored each year by faculty advisers, the student develops competence in their concentration as well as in four key College-wide learning goals: analytical writing and research, quantitative analysis and reasoning, independent project-based work, and multiple cultural perspectives.
Hampshire’s results extend to other notable outcomes:
- A quarter of its alums have started their own businesses or organizations, placing the College at #6 on Forbes’ short list of most entrepreneurial colleges in the nation. Hampshire alums are creating platforms for putting their ideas into action through social ventures, investment firms, advocacy organizations, film companies, art galleries, or creative mashups of those and more
- One in five students who complete a Division III project in science present their work at a peer-reviewed conference. Five percent are lead authors on peer-reviewed journal articles, a remarkable accomplishment for undergraduates
- Two-thirds of graduates earn an advanced degree within ten years of commencement
- Hampshire alums have won Pulitzer and Hillman Prizes and Emmy, Academy, Peabody, and Grammy Awards.