No margin, no mission. Whatever shape the successor takes — college,
co-op, school, land trust with programming, residency network — it has to
generate enough revenue to keep going. This thread opens that conversation.
A few prompts to get us started, in no particular order:
-
What does Hampshire teach us about the question? The college’s own
financial story is part of the input — what worked, what didn’t, what
the closure decision implies about the cost structure of the model. -
What businesses already exist in this space? Outward Bound,
Schumacher College, Black Mountain SoLA, Deep Springs, Quest University,
Marlboro before/after the merger, Goddard, Sterling, Warren Wilson,
Berea — each has a different revenue mix. What can we learn? -
What’s the smallest viable version? A 12-person residency for one
summer is a different question than accreditation. Both are interesting.
What’s the smallest unit of “Hampshire pedagogy in operation” that has
plausible economics? -
What’s our orientation toward earned vs. raised revenue? Some
programs run 80/20 endowed/earned, others the reverse. Where do we want
to be — and what does that imply about scale? -
What’s the one number we’d most like to know? If you had to pick a
single financial figure that would tell us whether the model can work,
what is it?
Reply with your own framing, your own numbers, your own examples. The
working group will pull threads from here into proposals; everyone is
welcome in the discussion.
Tag your post with #business-model so it shows up in the cross-cut.