AMNA NAWAZ: Across the nation, scores of small private colleges and universities are either closing or under threat.

With each shuttering, students, faculty, and the surrounding community struggle to find a way forward.

Tonight, Paul Solman reports on one such school.

This story was reported in collaboration with The Hechinger Report and is part of our higher education series Rethinking College.

TOMMY LEE JONES, Actor: The answer you're looking for lies right here.

PAUL SOLMAN: Box office sensations.

LUPITA NYONG'O, Actress: I would make a great queen because I am so stubborn.

PAUL SOLMAN: Award-winning actors.

NARRATOR: We have shared the incommunicable experience of war.

PAUL SOLMAN: PBS' most celebrated documentarian.

The common thread, all grads of a little liberal arts school in Massachusetts, Hampshire College, founded in 1965 as an experiment, no grades, no required classes, students designing their own curriculum.

KEN BURNS, Documentary Filmmaker: I don't recognize the person who entered Hampshire College in the fall of 1971 and the person who graduated in the spring of 1975.

PAUL SOLMAN: Filmmaker Ken Burns.

KEN BURNS: It just rearranged all my molecules.

I don't think I would be talking to you as a documentary filmmaker and so many other things if Hampshire hadn't provided the kind of preparation that it had.

JIM WALD, Former Hampshire College Professor: We would teach people to be thinkers about profound issues of knowledge and society, and that way they would be adaptive learners who could carry on this process of individual thinking as they pursued careers and so forth.

PAUL SOLMAN: History professor Jim Wald taught at Hampshire for nearly 40 years.

JIM WALD: When it opened, it was the hot place, I'm told, more selective than Harvard or equally selective as Harvard.

Hampshire was always way up there in really making students do a lot of work, because the idea was to show people how to be scholars.

This is what it means to be a historian or a biologist.

PAUL SOLMAN: Or become a filmmaker like Barry Sonnenfeld or writer like Jon Krakauer.

JIM WALD: Our students were challenged much more than others in a lot of other schools.

The college has a Latin motto, non satis scire, to know is not enough, embodying this idea of wisdom and critical thinking.

PAUL SOLMAN: An ethos that persisted for actors like Lupita Nyong'o of the "Black Panther" and "The Odyssey" and Liev Schreiber.

LIEV SCHREIBER, Actor: Hampshire was interested in radical questions.

The faculty and the other kids were interested in things that were different.

Challenging the world in which you live in, in a positive and constructive way was certainly the ethos.

PAUL SOLMAN: And students like Chloe De Lisle today, finishing her thesis in ethnomusicology.

CHLOE DE LISLE, Hampshire College Student: I'm looking at the process of when sound in film becomes part of the music and how that represents a protagonist's trauma.

PAUL SOLMAN: What would be an example?

CHLOE DE LISLE: "Apocalypse Now" and how the signature helicopter sound that really permeates the film is part of the protagonist's experience and trauma, and then a collective cultural trauma.

PAUL SOLMAN: Ken Burns' final thesis 51 years ago?

KEN BURNS: My half-an-hour film called "Working in Rural New England" for Old Sturbridge Village, which is a living history museum.

PAUL SOLMAN: So you mean you literally began your career doing what you have been doing ever since at Hampshire?

KEN BURNS: It's even worse than that, Paul, which is the last shot of the film for Old Sturbridge Village was a pan across a painting from an agrarian to a kind of industrial or preindustrial sequence.

PAUL SOLMAN: Just like so many pans in his PBS films, and thus Hampshire's hallmark from then to now, focused exploration.

CHLOE DE LISLE: Here has allowed me to really do whatever I want and really create my own major, and that's meant everything.

And I have just gotten to pull all my interests together and create something really cool.

PAUL SOLMAN: A result of deep connection with the school.

MARS RICHMAN, Former Hampshire College Student: With the class structure, without those prerequisites, able to do what you want, chart your own course, I feel that I was able to be focused faster than most people would at a traditional college.

PAUL SOLMAN: First year student Jupiter Brady-McCullough feels the same.

JUPITER BRADY-MCCULLOUGH, Former Hampshire College Student: I made some great friends.

I had some really amazing classes with some really amazing professors, and I learned a lot about myself.

So I think I'm not alone in feeling kind of hopeless, in that we see a lot of these small schools closing right now.

PAUL SOLMAN: And this barren scene on Hampshire's campus could become a reality for scores of schools across the country.

One analysis finds that, in the next decade, of the nation's 1700 nonprofit private colleges and universities, more than 400 are on the brink, meaning the nearly 700,000 students projected to go to them are at risk.

In fact, when Hampshire announced last April that it would be closing at the end of this year... MARS RICHMAN: I cried all day.

Everyone cried all day.

We were... PAUL SOLMAN: Really?

Everybody?

MARS RICHMAN: Everybody cried all day long.

PAUL SOLMAN: But you knew that school had been in trouble?

MARS RICHMAN: We all -- I mean, we all knew, but it kept not dying.

Logically, we all knew someday it would, but it kept kind of escaping death.

MADELINE KEATING, Hampshire College Student: Hampshire means everything to me.

PAUL SOLMAN: Madeline Keating is finishing up her study in fiber arts.

MADELINE KEATING: I was pretty devastated like everybody else, but I also had an understanding that this was kind of coming.

PAUL SOLMAN: That's because the writing had been on the wall for years.

Hampshire almost went under in 2019, a young school, a meager endowment, reliant on student tuition in the era of the great college squeeze, says Hampshire President Jennifer Chrisler.

JENNIFER CHRISLER, President, Hampshire College: Hampshire, like many institutions of a higher education today, faced a real firestorm between enrollment, cost of college, the changing demographics across this country, the pressure on the value of a liberal arts degree.

PAUL SOLMAN: Fewer high school seniors, fewer going to college, dizzying costs, and a scary job market.

No wonder Hampshire teetered.

Finally, last April: JENNIFER CHRISLER: When it became clear that we couldn't deliver the kind of education that we knew was the most consequential for our students, we decided to do the responsible thing and teach out in a way that allowed those students who wanted to graduate with us to be able to do so, and those who needed to pursue transferring to another college or university the time to be able to do so.

PAUL SOLMAN: Down from a height of more than 1,200, 170 mostly seniors are sticking it out until graduation.

But on the 820-acre campus, that's almost five acres per student.

What's happened to those who've left?

Some have transferred.

MARS RICHMAN: I didn't plan on going to college after high school.

PAUL SOLMAN: But Mars Richman did.

MARS RICHMAN: I heard about Hampshire, and I thought that it sounded like the school of my dreams.

I felt really lucky to be somewhere it felt like I was actually getting the support I needed to be able to learn.

PAUL SOLMAN: He finished two years at Hampshire in April.

After the school announced it would close, he'd become confident enough to transfer to the nearby University of Massachusetts at Amherst, student body 30,000.

You wouldn't have gone to UMass Amherst out of high school, right?

MARS RICHMAN: Absolutely not, no.

PAUL SOLMAN: But did Hampshire prepare you for this?

MARS RICHMAN: As far as being in a higher education institution, yes, absolutely.

PAUL SOLMAN: But when colleges like Hampshire close, many students leave higher ed altogether.

PETER STOKES, Huron Consulting Group: Research suggests that, when a student is at a college that closes, only about 50 percent of those students actually reenroll at another college.

PAUL SOLMAN: Peter Stokes is a higher education researcher.

PETER STOKES: And, of those, only about 50 percent complete.

So a college closure is exceptionally disruptive to the lives of students.

PAUL SOLMAN: Is Hampshire then the cliched canary in the coal mine?

JUPITER BRADY-MCCULLOUGH: I applied to three schools, Sterling College, Hampshire College, and College of the Atlantic, and two of them are now closed.

PAUL SOLMAN: As just this year are both Hampshire and Sterling, a fate now threatening to befall hundreds of colleges across higher ed, 500 of which have closed in just the last 10 years.

For the "PBS News Hour," Paul Solman in Amherst, Massachusetts.