Ruin or Revival: What is the Next Chapter in the History of Small Colleges?

If you work at a small college, or you love one, these are dark days. Small colleges closed at a rate of one per week in 2024. The failures are driven by a decline in the number of high school graduates, a decline in college enrollments, an unbearable increase in cost, a preference toward large universities, and an increase in public skepticism about higher education.

You may wonder why the decline of small colleges matters. After all, the American economy goes through cycles, with one product—print newspapers, for example—being replaced by others—internet news, perhaps. And in every sector, businesses close all the time. Why, then, should anyone care if colleges close?

Small colleges matter because they have been at the core of American higher education since their foundation. They provide a distinctive educational experience for students, and more importantly, they do so particularly for students on the margins. They represent and support other communities—religious, ethnic, cultural, and geographic—whose well-being matters. They have a particular potential to help those communities flourish. They are engines of economic and cultural health. And—ultimately and most importantly—their loss impoverishes the places and people who once supported them.

Here is a brief economic history of small colleges: Once, nearly every college in the United States was small, both by structure and because few Americans went to college. Their purpose was not to grow the institution in terms of size and assets. Few of them were founded with the goal of maintaining a particular enrollment threshold. Rather, their specific purposes included educating young people with a particular affiliation—to a denomination, a place, or a particular field or profession. Many had what today we would call a liberal arts curriculum at their core. In certain locations, their scope, size, and aspirations were often limited. That is not to say that such institutions were opposed to growth, but enrollment growth would be the result of doing their work well rather than being the central measure of their success.

That was true for nearly two hundred years. Then in the second part of the twentieth century, some types of colleges grew rapidly, fueled by design, by state support, and by the rapid expansion of college-going in the US.

As larger institutions grew, small colleges adopted their tactics in hopes of expanding themselves. They began adding enticing programs and amenities, offering enrollment incentives (aka discounts to tuition), sprucing up their campuses, and building new infrastructure. Such tactics worked fine while the number of students increased. Many small colleges realized more revenue.

Then the economy weakened in 2008 and the number of high school graduates flattened. Large universities had grown to become more attractive and better endowed. Small colleges found themselves in a difficult position. They had spent the previous two decades creating an operating model that relied on growth. They had added new academic and cocurricular programs that expanded beyond their core missions. And they had borrowed millions of dollars to finance construction. But larger institutions had made similar investments during the 1990s and 2000s, small colleges were competing on the basis of amenities and breadth of opportunities at a competitive disadvantage against larger institutions. A downturn in economic and demographic trends threatened their existence.

Today, if you spend most of your time on a small college campus, then a visit to a large university is disorienting. You recognize the classrooms, labs, residence halls, and sports fields. The students look a bit like your students. But inside, you know that while you work in the same industry, you’re not in the same business as the people who work at that university.

That feeling is due in part to scale. The feeling is also due to style. A walk across the campus feels like a stroll through an exclusive neighborhood, or at least a neighborhood that aspires to exclusivity. The worldliness suggests the people who hang out there are on their way somewhere else—across the globe and up the social ladder.

Aspiring to scale and style is not bad by definition. But in mimicking larger institutions, most small colleges have adopted values and language that make them less distinctive and make it harder for them to compete. Universities will always have more programs, more choices, and more money than small colleges. Students who want those things nearly always will choose the bigger, richer place over the smaller, poorer one.

Small colleges are organizationally fragile. They don’t have the reserves they need to endure several years of financial difficulty. Their faculty and staff are worn out. And they lack a clear perspective from which to reform themselves.

The history of the decline of small colleges would be interesting but unimportant if their decline were inevitable. It isn’t.

Small colleges can return to health. But it requires the courage to reorient their focus away from growth and toward essential student outcomes, distinctive approaches to learning, community engagement, and a new style of leadership. These practices can create a renaissance of small colleges, one predicated not on growth but on authenticity and efficiency. Success depends much less on following best practices and much more on cultivating the particularities of the place, students, staff, and faculty at a school.

Small colleges think of themselves as particular places. They need to act that way.