Why We Need Tiny Colleges

We are experiencing the rebirth of smallness. Farmers markets, tiny homes, and brew pubs all exemplify our love of smallness. So do charter schools, coffee shops, and local bookstores.

Smallness allows us to be more human.

Small is often (but not always) more affordable, healthier, and sustainable, but its finest characteristic, the one that turns charm into love, is that going small allows us to be more fully who we are. Smallness allows us to be more human.

In higher education the trend is mostly in the opposite direction: Universities with 20,000 or 30,000 students are considered “mid-sized”; a “small” college is one with a few thousand students. The nation’s largest university, Arizona State University, has 80,000 students on campus and aims to enroll another 100,000 students online.

At the other end of the spectrum is a handful of colleges that have fewer than a hundred students on campus and no online courses: colleges such as Sterling College; Thomas More College of Liberal Arts; and Deep Springs College. These colleges are so small that they can only be called “tiny.”

Tiny colleges focus not just on a young person’s intellect, but on the young person as a whole. Equally important, tiny colleges ask, “How can education contribute to human flourishing and the well-being of the world?” And they shape a college experience to address that question. They replace concerns about institutional growth with attention to the growth of students as fully developed, vibrant participants in their communities.

I have had the privilege of teaching at three different institutions of higher learning during my career—a small liberal arts college and two mid-sized public universities. I have had many excellent students and wonderful colleagues. I have also been profoundly disappointed in each of these institutions, and in many of my colleagues, especially when it comes to helping students and preparing them for the many responsibilities of adulthood. Administrators focus on the business of running a university, and most faculty focus on their scholarship and teaching their discipline. Little deliberate attention is given to how students mature as individuals and social beings.

Young people need an education that will provide them with meaning, hope, courage, and zest.

Having just retired from teaching at a public university, I am now returning to my hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona, to establish a tiny college—Flagstaff College. I am convinced that there is a need for another type of education, one devoted to helping students come into their own and into this beautiful and troubled world. Young people need an education that will provide them with meaning, hope, courage, and zest, as well as information and skills. Large institutions, I believe, are particularly ill-suited to this type of education.