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're 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, Explain.

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