The Accidental Winners of the War on Higher Ed

Ian Bogost
The Atlantic

Sitting in my office, I began searching for some cause for hope, some reason to believe that higher ed could stanch the damage for the next generation of students. It occurred to me that I’d been hearing less despair from colleagues at certain smaller schools that offer undergraduate study in the “liberal-arts tradition,” a broad and flexible approach to education that values developing the person over professional training. I wondered if these schools—especially the wealthy ones that cluster near the top of national rankings—might enjoy some natural insulation from the fires raging through the nation’s research universities.

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.

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