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It’s Saturday night and I’m writing to you about abandoned college campuses. That should tell you something about me.
Sterling College closed. The campus is sitting there. Empty buildings, empty dorms, empty labs. The town is furious. The community lost its anchor, its identity, its economic engine. And nobody showed up with a better idea before it was too late.
Hampshire College is closing now. An 800-acre campus in Amherst, Massachusetts. Fifty-six years of history. If someone had walked in five years ago and said “let’s reimagine this place before we lose it,” that campus could have become something extraordinary. A workforce innovation center. A community hub. An outdoor education destination for every school district in western Mass. Instead, it’s winding down. Another obituary.
This keeps happening. And it’s going to keep happening faster. 442 colleges could close in the next decade. The demographic cliff starts next year. Three credit agencies issued unfavorable outlooks for 2026. NPR just reported that a quarter of all private colleges are at risk. BlackRock announced $100 million for workforce training and doesn’t have a place to put it. Marygrove Conservancy in Detroit took a closed college campus and turned it into a thriving community asset. It works. It’s been proven.
But almost nobody is doing this work.
Here’s what I’m obsessed with: the campus itself. Not the degree. Not the accreditation. The physical place. The buildings, the labs, the kitchens, the dorms, the green space, the auditoriums. These are community infrastructure. They were built to serve people. And when a college fails, they don’t have to die with it.
The four-year degree is not a priority for millions of people. But learning is. Growing is. Getting trained for a real job in eight weeks instead of four years is. Walking into a building in your town and learning to weld, getting a CNA certification, starting a small business, taking your kid to a STEM camp, joining a community fitness center, attending a concert in the old auditorium. That’s what these campuses can become.
Just-in-time. Nimble. Efficient. Effective. Integrating AI. But also deeply human. Communitarian. Built around people, connections, and community. Not credit hours and endowment returns.
This is a transformation of postsecondary education that is already underway. It will happen in some form whether we’re part of it or not. I want us to be the ones who shape it. I want this group to become the premier consultancy in campus transformation. Not one of several. The one people call first. The one that wrote the playbook.
Now, the honest part.
We are early. There is no salary yet. There is equity, there is mission, and there is the ground floor. What I need to know is whether you’re passionate enough about this to work on it while you have another job. To follow the news. To track the closures and the trends. To network, post, connect, and build relationships with the people who will eventually need us.
And then, when a client comes, to go all in. To research all night if that’s what it takes. To use AI and every tool available. To collaborate with this team and present a board of trustees with something they’ve never seen before: a vision for their campus that’s better than what they’re losing. Creative. Innovative. Future-thinking. Grounded in real numbers but animated by real imagination.
I need people who can sit with a college president who’s about to cry and hand her a financial model that gives her hope. People who can work a room, write a grant, and also stay up until 2 AM arguing about whether the old science building should become a maker space or a healthcare training lab. (The answer is both. It’s always both.)
Every Sterling College is a campus that could have been saved. Every Hampshire College is a community that didn’t have to lose its heart. The question is whether we show up before the obituary or after.
I’d like to show up before.
Here’s what I’m asking:
1. Are you in? Not “maybe interested.” In.
2. What can you contribute right now? Skills, time, connections, expertise.
3. Can you commit a few hours a week, with the understanding that when the work comes, we go all in?
4. Can you meet with me soon to talk about concrete roles, tasks, and goals?
New skills. Real teamwork. Genuine collaboration. None of us has done exactly this before. That’s the point.
The signs are everywhere. The need is real. The campuses are waiting.
check our website before applying – https://www.transformlearning.ai/campus-transformation
