AMHERST, Mass. — The office of the Hampshire College president, Miriam Nelson, looked as if she were hosting a big sleepover earlier this month, with sleeping bags everywhere and students sprawled in chairs using laptops, their towels hanging in the president’s private bathroom. But Dr. Nelson and her staff had long left the premises.

The students who had taken over her office were a conscious throwback to the activism of the 1960s, when Hampshire was conceived as an experiment in higher education. Now they were fighting for its survival in a different time, and it was not looking good. The college announced in January that it was facing “tough financial trends” and was looking for a partner to stay afloat.

“Hampshire’s next set of moves will set a precedent for the future of experimental education,” the students wrote in a manifesto demanding more participation in charting the college’s future. “We want to believe that you share our radical, communal ideas.”

Founded in 1965 and opened to students five years later, Hampshire, a liberal arts college in western Massachusetts, is an embodiment of the progressive education principles that arose from the spirit of individualism and self-expression of that era. There are no grades and no prescribed majors, and students design their own courses of study.

Hampshire and a few dozen other schools founded on similar principles were once the cutting edge of academia. But now, families facing sky-high tuitions are looking for a more direct link between college and career, college officials say. As a result, many of these small, experimental schools are being forced to re-examine their missions, merge with more traditional institutions or, in some cases, shut down.

“What I see happening under the aegis of ‘financial responsibility’ is a purging of colleges that serve unconventional students,” said Eva-Maria Swidler, a faculty member at Goddard College, an alternative college in Plainfield, Vt. “What this purge leaves behind is a system of higher education even more focused on either training only the elites in the liberal arts or training everyone else as obedient workers for a corporate work force.”

The problems alternative colleges face point to a larger crisis in higher education: a shrinking college-age population, especially in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, where many of these institutions are clustered. But they are also confronting a growing skepticism of the liberal arts, often a focus of nontraditional programs, and a desire for a higher return on investment.

[Rural colleges across the country are facing similar challenges.]

Tuition, room and board at Hampshire College is more than $63,000 a year, which is typical for elite private colleges. (Many of the 1,100 or so Hampshire students, down from 1,400 five years ago, receive significant financial aid.) In 1970, tuition, room and board at private four-year colleges and universities was about $3,000 a year — about $20,000, adjusted for inflation — according to federal statistics.

Dr. Nelson, who has been threatened with a vote of no-confidence from the faculty, said Hampshire was negotiating with potential partners, but declined to reveal details. Goddard is struggling to raise $1.4 million to keep going. Green Mountain College, an environmentally focused college in Poultney, Vt., has announced that it will close at the end of the spring semester, after failing to attract enough students to keep going.

The pace of shutdowns and mergers among small colleges in general — those with enrollments of about 1,500 full-time students — has edged up, according to Moody’s Investors Service, with one in five “under fundamental stress.”

The result is an almost Darwinian competition, as more resilient colleges snap up the castoffs from the struggling ones. Prescott College, founded in the 1960s, in central Arizona posted a prominent message on its website, “Welcome Green Mountain College Students,” urging them to transfer.

On Jan. 18, soon after the deadline for many college applications, Hampshire sent a letter to students who had already been admitted, inviting them to apply to at least 10 liberal arts colleges in the Northeast — including Bates, Bennington, Sarah Lawrence and Skidmore — that had extended deadlines and would give them special consideration.

Some alternative colleges have had to think in more practical terms, and evolve.

“A recurring question is, ‘How are you preparing our children for the world?’” said Melvin Jules Bukiet, a writing professor at Sarah Lawrence, in Yonkers, N.Y.

Professor Bukiet, who was an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence in the 1970s, said the college — perhaps best known for its arts and humanities offerings — had changed in concrete ways.

It has strengthened its math and science programs, Professor Bukiet said, and in 2015 became a full member of the N.C.A.A. “When I was there the only athletics was sitting on the swings and taking drugs,” he joked.

The school’s approach to grades has also changed. In the past, students received written evaluations from their professors, but letter grades did not appear on them, Professor Bukiet said. “The thinking was if you gave them a full page of coherent thought and a grade at the bottom, all eyes would immediately go to the grade, and they wouldn’t read their evaluations.”

Now, students still receive evaluations, but they can look up their grades online.

The very concept of nontraditional colleges has also evolved. Decades ago, they were places like Hampshire — small, bucolic campuses where grades were scarce and business majors were scarcer. Now they might be online, or serve older students. They often have clear vocational ends and use the mantra “lifelong learners,” arguing that people will have to retool their skills several times over their working lives to keep up with the changing demands of technology.

“There are online institutions spending 10 to 20 times the amount of money of some of us on digital marketing,” said Bernard Bull, the president of Goddard.

Goddard College has historically attracted students who “can’t stomach the grind of prescribed courses, a syllabus, textbooks,” Professor Swidler said. It is a low-residency college, meaning that students gather on campus periodically, but mainly do their work from home and send it to their professors. There is a notable contingent of home-schooling parents and children among them, Professor Swidler said.

“A lot of them, I would call them activists,” she added. “They’re people who have some pretty deep questions about the way things are set up, therefore questions about the way education is set up as well.”

That attitude is perhaps not the most conducive to fund-raising. Many alternative colleges depend mainly on tuition for their operating budgets. At Hampshire, only 22 percent of alumni give to the college, college officials said.

As the student sit-in at Hampshire enters its fifth full week, alumni are scrambling to raise cash to buy time until a permanent solution can be found. Layoffs have begun in the admissions and fund-raising departments, and are expected to reach the faculty after spring semester. The college decided not to admit a full class of 300 students this fall, only about 77 students who were admitted as early-decision applicants or had deferred admission. Many faculty fear that such measures put the college on a path toward closing that cannot be reversed.

Prospective students like Ben Smith are bailing out.

Mr. Smith, a high school senior from a suburb of Washington, D.C., was accepted early to Hampshire. He has decided to go to the University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, Wash., after Hampshire sent him a contract saying that traditional first-year housing would not be available, study abroad programs might not be offered, faculty members could be cut and — to top it all off — he was only guaranteed enrollment for one semester.

Before deciding on Puget Sound, Mr. Smith did one thing he never would have done before. He checked the size of its endowment.

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