Small Catholic liberal arts colleges are doomed. Unless…

Since March 2020, over 70 public and private nonprofit colleges and universities have closed entirely, with nearly 50 more merging with other institutions. This development alone might come as relatively good news for the institutions that survive, reasoning that more students will now be in the market for them.

But trouble is brewing on several other fronts. A prolonged drop in fertility rates and a projected 15% decline in high school graduates between 2025 and 2037 mean a shrinking pool of traditional college-aged students. And there is increasing skepticism among parents and students about the value of a college degree, given the rising costs and increased underemployment rates for graduates.

These are pressures facing all institutions. So why would small liberal arts colleges be especially vulnerable?

The obvious answer is their tuition dependency, especially in the face of recent developments among many first-tier universities to cover full tuition, room, board, and fees for students from families making $100,000 or less, and full tuition for students from families earning up to $200,000. What institutions have established these or similar policies? Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Penn, MIT, the entire University of California System, and the University of Texas System, just to name a few. Pressure is building on every other major university (that wants to remain a “major university”) to raise enough money to do the same, and their development staffs are out beating the bushes to get the necessary resources.

Let’s do the math. A student can go to a small, relatively little-known liberal arts college and pay $30,000 or more in tuition, room, board, and other fees, accruing along the way a very large debt burden, or he or she can go to Harvard or Penn or the University of Texas for free. The market logic there is not especially auspicious for small, tuition-dependent colleges and universities. They will have increasing difficulty recruiting a sufficient number of college-ready students to meet their financial requirements.

And as they continue to admit students who are definitely not ready for college to meet their budget, their standards will drop, and so will their reputation for excellence, making it even less reasonable for someone to shoulder the tuition burden. In short, small liberal arts colleges and universities face a bleak future unless something changes.

What would need to change?

It should go without saying that institutions that do not wean themselves off tuition dependency sooner rather than later are in for a very rough ride. A few dollars here and a few dollars there to partially finance a new building (which, when opened, will be a drain on general operating expenses) will not cut it anymore. Tuition dependency is a looming death sentence.

So, instead of simply aping what major research universities are doing and doing it less well with fewer resources, as has often been the model, small colleges and universities will need to show donors, parents, and students that the education they offer is uniquely suited to meet the challenges we now face. This is especially true now with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). What kind of education would that be?

Some of the basics have been sketched out by Nils Gilman in a recent article titled “The University As We Know It Is Finished.” At the heart of Gilman’s argument is the claim that universities must focus on educating students on the things AI cannot do and that only human beings can. What would some of those things be?

One crucial thing that AI cannot do is “build the trust on which institutional cooperation depends, because trust is not a conclusion reached by processing information about another agent but instead is a relationship constituted over time between persons who have staked something on each other.” So too, AI “cannot constitute goals,” because constituting goals requires making judgments of relative value and the recognition of a hierarchy of goods to be pursued. AI “cannot give a person good taste or style, because taste and style are about personal distinctiveness within a community which shares an aesthetic.” Since most marketing and advertising decisions involve judgments of style or tone in relation to a certain targeted community, AI will not be able to make those final judgments.

If education is to remain valuable in the age of AI, it will need to focus on precisely these skills: the ability to build trust, based on a sense of what others need and desire. An education “after AI” will need to be more person-oriented rather than merely information-driven. An education after AI will need to train students to establish goals and to make the complex judgments required to reach them. An education “after AI” will need to focus more on prudential judgments rather than merely following stated rules. Algorithms can follow rules; human beings will be responsible for making prudent judgments when situations are complicated, and conditions are shifting so quickly that rule-following simply won’t be good enough.

What changes in education will be needed to achieve mastery in these new skills? Gilman suggests greater use of “live assessment and demonstration: real-time diagnosis of novel situations, design critique, structured adversarial debate, and Socratic examination.” Universities must employ formats that “test the ability to sense-make under pressure, defend a frame against live challenge, revise a model when evidence contradicts rather than confirms it, and recognize when uncertainty is too high to proceed.” Collaborative projects will require “demonstrated live reasoning” or “documented decision logs tracing reasoning behind commitments.”

Mapping how the journey unfolded and why will become as important as reaching the destination. Why use this form of calculus rather than another? Why analyze the compound using this method rather than another? Why did the premise of that argument seem to make sense? What sort of evidence would be needed to prove or disprove this conclusion? These are not questions that can be evaluated using a fill-in-the-bubble Scantron sheet scored by a computer.

As Gilman notes, “this is something closer to the Oxbridge tutorial system or the seminars of many small liberal arts colleges in the United States.” In the post-AI era, this sort of pedagogy will be essential for training students to master the cognitive capacities and skills that AI cannot replicate “because those capacities are developed only by being exercised, not described.” What this means concretely, however, is that these institutions will need more faculty, not fewer. Finances will need to be spent on smaller classes with faculty trained to give this special sort of instruction rather than on flashy new offices and classrooms.

The bright side is that this sort of education does not require vast expenditures on expensive equipment; it requires only a professor, several students, some books, and a room with a chalkboard. All other expenditures on things other than those that foster beauty and the healthy development of the community will need to be rigorously critiqued based on whether they foster these basic educational goals or not. If not, they will probably need to be delayed or suspended.

What about artificial intelligence (AI)? Its legitimate uses need not be ignored or avoided. Rather, training in its proper use should be encouraged. But its proper use will require all the skills mentioned above. A problem that faculty is increasingly facing is students who refuse to do a reading assignment and who turn to AI to provide a summary for them. Students could be asked to write an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the AI summary. What was in the book or article that the AI either didn’t catch or summarized in a way that was unfaithful to the original? Students need to be taught to be self-reflective about why they used AI and what they hoped to obtain from using it.

A key to effective AI use is creating a clearly defined prompt for the system and then refining subsequent prompts based on the results. Students should be taught to gauge the results of AI prompts against other ways of gathering information and data in order to get them acquainted with both the tremendous strengths and potential weaknesses of AI systems. It is not so much the use of AI that needs to be avoided; it is the uncritical, unanalyzed use that is a danger.

Handled in the right way, argues Gilman, AI “can serve as clarifying instruments in the pursuit of the classical objectives of enlightened education: the inculcation of critical thinking and logical reasoning, rhetorical and communicative competence, aesthetic appreciation, and the cultivation of taste, moral and ethical reasoning, and ultimately the ideal of self-knowledge.”

According to Gilman, if the goal of a college curriculum is (as it should be) “to inculcate oral reasoning and persuasion, ethical analysis and moral judgment, historical and comparative thinking, and the cultivation of taste and discrimination, then we are precisely in the domain of the classical curriculum of the liberal arts.”

If Catholic liberal arts colleges were faithful to their Catholic character and dedicated to a true liberal arts education, they would be well-positioned to provide the kind of education needed to face the coming challenges, even those created by AI. Those institutions that have lost the sense of what a liberal arts education can and should be, who have made themselves into institutions largely indistinguishable from their secular, non-liberal arts counterparts, will likely not be long for this world. In their constant pursuit of “relevance,” they have made themselves increasingly irrelevant.

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