If college is an investment, Hampshire is a commemorative pewter tankard from the Franklin Mint. Based on Radar's assessment of overall value—weighing tuition, admission standards, student evaluations, and general quality of academics—Hampshire just might be the biggest fleece job in post-secondary education.
For just $47,190 a year, you get not only a school ranked second-to-last on U.S. News' list of liberal arts institutions, but also the prestige associated with being the Princeton Review's number one choice for "Birkenstock-wearing, tree-hugging, clove-smoking vegetarians."
Since its founding in 1970, the experimental college with, as the New York Times once put it, "a silver spoon in its mouth and a frisbee in its hand," has been actively courting the nation's well-born sloths. And it has a pretty good pitch.
SATs are not required for admission, and once you're accepted there are no grades, percentages, or "quantitative measurements." Instead, at the end of each course students are asked to "reflect on their learning and experiences." Professors then offer something called "narrative feedback."
Even better, the students themselves actually design the curriculum, which results in such highbrow offerings as "Jews Without Money," "Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored," and "Real Kids," a psychology class focused on "the observation of real kids outside of class time."
Mom and Dad's $200,000 even earns Billy the right to make up his own major. Yet despite (actual) senior thesis projects devoted to topics like Flanders Red Ale and sundial construction, a mere 47 percent of Hampshire's scholars manage to graduate in four years. The figure is troubling even before you remember that the school doesn't have grades. (And far more alarming, we imagine, for the 53 percent of parents who can look forward to shelling out another $50,000 or more.)
So what, exactly, does the faculty at Hampshire get paid to do? It's anyone's guess. "Tens of thousands of dollars in debt and I doubt my professors read my Div III," writes one alum, referring to her senior thesis. "The evaluation, which was very positive, did not relate exactly to what my topic was."
Notable Alumni: Ken Burns (documentarian), Liev Schreiber.
A longtime trust-fund favorite, Bennington also eschews grades for ambiguous "critiques," and welcomes 63 percent of its applicants without so much as a glance at their SATs. "Fifteen hundred dollars a week for every week spent doing nothing," writes one Benningtonian, calculating the cost of his $49,155 education. "If you are a lazy student and pride yourself on getting away with doing as little work as possible, I encourage you to apply. You'll fit right in."
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