From Ian Bogost in The Atlantic: In the waning heat of last summer, freshly back in my office at a major research university, I found myself considering the higher-education hellscape that had lately descended upon the nation. I’d spent months reporting on the Trump administration’s attacks on universities for The Atlantic, speaking with dozens of administrators, faculty, and students about the billions of dollars in cuts to public funding for research and the resulting collapse of “college life.”At the same time, I’d been chronicling the spread of AI-powered chatbots that have already changed undergraduates forever...
I texted, emailed, telephoned, and Zoomed with friends in higher-education leadership. Current and former heads of both research universities and liberal-arts colleges confirmed my intuition: Well-resourced and prestigious small colleges are less exposed in almost every way to the crises that higher ed faces...
I came to Amherst College too late in the autumn to observe peak foliage... At most universities, grad students play a crucial role within the research system: They perform the frontline work of science. Faculty members get federal grants, which are used to pay for doctoral students, who in turn serve as laboratory staff. Professors’ feeling of worth and productivity may be a function of how many doctoral students they advise—because that helps determine how many studies they can carry out, how many papers they can publish, and what sorts of new grants they can win to keep the process going...
A school like Amherst, though, which has no doctoral programs whatsoever, is free of the rat race of research productivity and expenditure. As these colleges like to point out, that’s good for undergrads, because faculty must focus on education. The lack of doctoral research programs also makes the schools more resilient to bullying from Washington. In 2025, the Trump administration made a point of suspending hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants to Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, and other schools... With so much funding endangered all at once, targeted universities had little choice but to negotiate—which is to say, to accede to some portion of the Trump administration’s demands.
At Amherst, this level of pressure simply couldn’t be applied. In 2024, the college took in around $3 million from all of its federal research grants put together... In truth, the most important scientific and medical discoveries aren’t likely to be made at a place like Amherst or Smith, the nearby women’s college, which tend to pay their own students to work on faculty research. But this need not be a limitation for undergraduates. The conditions that produce landmark discoveries are not necessarily the same ones that produce a serious education...
At a small liberal-arts college, where a cohort may number fewer than 500 people, admissions officers can also take a stronger hand in assembling a group of students who match the institution’s culture and its vibe while also having very different backgrounds. And the fact that almost everyone at a small liberal-arts college tends to live on campus, or very close to it, adds to the sense of intimacy. “It’s just much easier for me to get to know faculty here, much easier for me to get to know students, much easier for me to hear what’s on their minds,” Amherst’s president, Michael Elliott, told me.
One effect of this, he said, is that professors actually show up to faculty meetings to talk about the future of their institution. They participate in budgeting conversations, debate the creation of majors, and approve new courses. This is decidedly not the norm at many larger universities, where professors may not see these meetings as a core part of the job, and where administrators can ignore them altogether...
Perhaps no threat to higher ed is more acute than the recent, rapid spread of generative AI. Davidson prides itself on having an unusually deliberate honor code. (Students I spoke with said this code is taken so seriously that they can leave their belongings anywhere on campus without fear that they will be stolen.) But the seductions of ChatGPT are hard to resist, and... the college has seen an increase in code violations due to AI. That sounded like less of a problem here than elsewhere, though. If the students are availing themselves of the technology, then at least they appear to be doing so with some reservations...
There is the nagging question of practicality. Even if you believe that a liberal-arts college offers the best education, going to school to learn how to think might seem like a luxury today. In the end, you’ll still need to earn some kind of living. If the paths for getting there—which may include postgraduate study in a doctoral program or professional school—are diminishing, then college itself will follow suit.
Still, after spending several weeks on my tour of wealthy, liberal-arts colleges, I grew to think that the pitch they’re making to prospective students and their parents for the fall of 2026 was convincing. All things considered, the form of higher ed that they provide seems poised to be the most resilient in the years to come...
Full story at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/liberal-arts-college-war-higher-ed/685800/.
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