Brian Rosenberg, the former president of Macalester College, is a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the author of “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education.”
Those who are old enough will surely remember the corner drugstore, the independent small-town newspaper, and the local record shop. Nearly all are gone.
The small residential liberal arts college may be destined for the same fate.
A tiny group of well-resourced, highly selective institutions will, at least in the medium term, be just fine. But for a much larger group of tuition-dependent, poorly resourced schools, mostly located in small or midsize towns and cities, the future is not bright. Dozens of these colleges have closed in just the past few years — 32 in New England alone in the past decade — and many economic analysts are predicting that the rate of closure will increase. The combined economic, demographic, technological, and cultural pressures facing these schools leave them with little time and few options. The decline in the number of high school graduates and the rise of artificial intelligence seem like the Scylla and Charybdis between which these colleges must somehow, impossibly, try to navigate.
Recently I’ve noticed that some critics are taking a sort of perverse pleasure in the plight of these colleges. Roland Fryer, writing from the secure confines of the economics department at Harvard, published a piece in The Wall Street Journal entitled “More Colleges Are Closing. It’s About Time.” Jay Caspian Kang observes in The New Yorker that he “does not feel much sympathy for expensive private schools; more than any type of school, they fail to provide value for their students, and most of them probably shouldn’t exist.”
On my own list of things that “probably shouldn’t exist,” small private colleges would be nowhere near the top.
It does seem fair to ask, however, why we should care about the fate of a group of colleges that collectively enroll less than 5 percent of the undergraduate students in the United States. Texas A&M alone enrolls more students than the top 25 liberal arts colleges in the US News rankings combined.
What springs to mind, for me, are a couple of lines from Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”: “Don’t it always seem to go / that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?” The loss of the residential liberal arts college, however inevitable, will mean the loss of a form of higher education that the philanthropist Eugene Lang called “distinctively American” and that is intimately tied to the history and preservation of democratic society.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816 that “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be,” he was advocating for what he termed the “illimitable freedom of the human mind” that one associates with the liberal arts.
Research universities can be found in many countries around the world, as can institutes of technology, trade schools, and various kinds of undergraduate institutions. Small residential liberal arts colleges can be found, with rare exceptions, only in the United States. They are the institutional embodiment of a particular set of beliefs about education: that it should be about more than vocational training and economic return; that it should incorporate breadth as well as depth; that it can contribute to the formation of more thoughtful and civically connected individuals; that a democracy, if it is to thrive, requires the presence and engagement of such individuals.
The declining interest in the liberal arts generally and liberal arts colleges in particular is probably not a cause of the declining health of American democracy, but it may well be a symptom.
Because the products of a college education are people, complex and unpredictable, it is difficult to prove the validity of any of these beliefs simply through the use of surveys and data. How does one reduce to a number the value of reading a challenging novel, of studying the US Constitution, or of performing a hands-on science experiment? To be sure, there is no guarantee that a more liberally educated populace will be more supportive of democracy, but the energy with which autocrats target education suggests that there is something to Jefferson’s argument.
Certain strengths of residential liberal arts colleges are easily provable. Unlike research universities, their primary focus is on undergraduate teaching; they make less use of adjunct instructors than do institutions with graduate programs; their size allows for relatively small classes and close interactions among students, faculty, and staff. Of the top 25 schools whose graduates go on to receive PhD degrees, on a per capita basis 19 are small liberal arts colleges (two, by contrast, are Ivy League universities). Unlike at Texas A&M, academic freedom is generally taken seriously. The Gallup Purdue Survey, which attempts to find connections between the college experience and subsequent satisfaction, identifies mentorship and encouragement from faculty members as a key driver of later happiness and success, and surely that is more likely to happen when class sizes are 20 and not 200.
These at-risk colleges are not nearly as expensive as many headlines would suggest. The pressure to enroll students has led them to discount the sticker price heavily, and at many of these schools no student pays full tuition. In a recent survey of 200 randomly selected institutions, the price paid by families with annual incomes of $45,000 or less was in 2025 lower at tuition-dependent private colleges ($14,400) than at public flagship universities ($15,400). Perhaps more important, low-income and first-generation students graduate at a higher rate at private liberal arts colleges than at public institutions.
Because they are so often located in small towns, liberal arts colleges also play a major role in an area’s economic and cultural vitality. Allegheny College, where I once taught, is the seventh-largest employer in Crawford County, Pa., trailing only the medical center, Walmart, and employers in the public sector. DePauw University is the third-largest employer in Putnam County, Ind., and Kenyon College is the largest employer in Gambier, Ohio. The economic activity generated by students and visitors is also vital to all of these areas, as is, in a different way, the cultural activity made possible by the presence of a college. It seems hard to imagine that anyone — even someone sitting in Boston or New York — would cheer the closing of a major employer in any of these places were that employer something other than a college.
It may be that these ties to their local communities are what save some of these colleges from extinction. Allegheny has established a branch campus to strengthen the regional workforce. Goucher College, in Maryland, has formed a partnership with a local retirement community. My hope is that the mutual benefits will lead more colleges and more communities to take similar steps.
I spent nearly four decades as a teacher and administrator at three liberal arts colleges in three states, and this I know to be true: The form of undergraduate education provided at these schools, where it is the top priority, is the form that research universities aspire to but rarely manage to provide. The kinds of close-knit, face-to-face communities they create have become increasingly rare in our age of social media and chatbots.
Many years ago, my father, a pharmacist, owned a corner drugstore. It has since been replaced by Walgreens and CVS, which in turn may be replaced by Amazon. Small liberal arts colleges may be replaced by enormous mega-universities, which may in turn be replaced by universities built around artificial intelligence. Inevitable perhaps, but is it progress? That is an entirely different question.