Small Colleges as Machines for Being Known (opinion)

There is a moment in almost every fall board meeting at a small liberal arts college that tells you how the institution actually thinks about enrollment. The vice president announces the size of the incoming class. If the number is up, there is applause, and sometimes there is cake. If the number is down, there is a somber walk through the funnel metrics and a promise to visit more high schools. What never gets announced with comparable drama is the number of students who came back. Retention appears later in the deck, if it appears at all, presented as weather rather than strategy.

I want to name the pattern carefully, because the people who run admissions offices at small colleges are among the hardest-working professionals in higher education, and nothing here is a criticism of them. The pattern is institutional, not personal. Small liberal arts colleges have organized their money, their talent and their emotional energy around acquiring students, while treating the keeping of students as a virtue that will take care of itself. That arrangement made a rough kind of sense when the pool of 18-year-olds was growing and the competition was mostly other small colleges. Neither of those things is true anymore.

Start with the competition, because it has changed in character, not just intensity. The fall 2025 numbers from the National Student Clearinghouse tell the story in two lines: Undergraduate enrollment at public four-year institutions grew 1.4 percent while it declined at private nonprofit colleges by 1.6 percent. While small privates were shrinking, flagships and large publics were announcing record classes; the University of Connecticut, for example, welcomed its largest first-year class ever, 6,550 students, on the strength of aggressive out-of-state recruitment. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently documented the migration in miniature in Michigan, where the flagships keep pulling students away from the small privates and regionals, and where Albion College watched its enrollment slide from 1,700 to 1,200 in five years.

The 18-year-old a small college is courting is no longer choosing mainly among similar colleges 30 miles apart. She is weighing the college against a Division I Saturday with 40,000 people in the stands, an honors college that promises her the small-seminar experience inside the big brand, a recreation center with a lazy river and a sticker price that often undercuts the small college’s net price before the flagship offers her a dime of merit aid. And the states are pressing the advantage: Pennsylvania’s state system just pledged to cover full tuition for low-income in-state students after grants, starting in 2027. A tuition-dependent college in the Northeast is now recruiting against subsidized scale, and subsidized scale is very hard to outspend.

Yet outspending is exactly what we keep trying to do. The most recent RNL benchmarking, from 2022, puts the average cost of recruiting a single student at a private four-year institution at $2,795, up 32 percent from 2020, and that is before institutional discounting, which is the far larger sum we spend persuading admitted students to say yes. The demographics guarantee the bidding war gets worse. WICHE projects that 2025 was the peak year for American high school graduates, with steep declines coming in precisely the regions where small residential colleges are clustered: roughly 17 percent fewer graduates in the Northeast and 16 percent fewer in the Midwest.

Hundreds of small colleges are planning to grow their share of a shrinking pool against competitors with football, honors colleges and state subsidies. Some will win. Arithmetically, most cannot, and the attempt has its own casualties: Every dollar poured into the amenities and discounting arms race is a dollar taken from the things that made the college worth choosing in the first place.

Because here is what gets lost in the panic, and what I most want to say to the boards I sit with. A small liberal arts college cannot outbig the big schools, and it should stop trying, because it holds an asset the flagship cannot replicate at scale. The entire architecture of a small college is a machine for being known.

I say this as a graduate of Haverford College. The first-year seminar where the professor has your name by the second week. The adviser who notices in October that something is off, because she taught you, ate lunch near you and wrote your recommendation for the summer program. The 18-person class where you cannot hide, which means you also cannot disappear. Gallup’s research on college outcomes found that graduates who had a mentor who encouraged them, professors who cared about them as people and professors who made them excited about learning had more than double the odds of being engaged in their work and thriving in their well-being decades later, and that these experiences, not selectivity or size, were what predicted a great life. Gallup also found that depressingly few graduates nationally report getting all three. That is the small college’s home field. An honors college inside a 35,000-student university is an imitation of it; the real thing is what a good small college does by default.

We put mentorship in the viewbook and on the campus tour, which is to say we use being known as a recruitment pitch. Then we fund the recruitment and starve the knowing. In the budgets I have built and rebuilt, the open faculty line goes to an enrollment marketing contract, advising loads climb and the October conversation that would have caught a struggling first-year student never happens. Consider this: If the distinctive product of a small college is the relationship, then retention is not a student-services metric. Retention is the product working. Attrition at a small liberal arts college is not just lost revenue; it is the value proposition failing in public, one family at a time.

And the revenue is very much lost. Nationally, only 69.1 percent of students who started college in fall 2024 were retained at their starting institution a year later, and plenty of tuition-dependent small colleges lose 15 to 25 percent of every first-year class. The arithmetic ought to reorganize budgets. At a college netting $25,000 per student, improving first-year retention from 80 to 85 percent in a class of 400 keeps 20 students, roughly $1.5 million over the following three years, delivered without buying a single new search name. Replacing that revenue through recruitment means finding 20 additional strangers in a shrinking market, paying $2,795 or more to land each one, discounting them at whatever rate the arms race demands and then running the same leaky gauntlet with them again. Retention revenue compounds. Recruitment revenue must be repurchased every spring, at auction, against the flagship.

This is not a theoretical alternative. Lebanon Valley College, a small private college in Pennsylvania, posted its highest undergraduate enrollment ever in fall 2025 without enrolling its largest freshman class; it got there through retention, including dramatic persistence gains among Black and Latino students. Read that again: A record, achieved by keeping the students the college had already chosen. Nobody had to beat Penn State at Penn State’s game.

So why do most small colleges underinvest in the better business? The honest answer is organizational, and I say this as someone who builds these org charts for a living. Recruitment has an owner, a vice president with a staff, a customer relationship management software system and a number they are accountable for. Retention is famously everyone’s job, which in practice means it is no one’s budget. Its victories are invisible, because the sophomore who stays generates no press release. Its failures are diffuse, spread across advising, financial aid, gateway courses, mental health and belonging, so no single leader ever answers for the composite number. Boards reinforce this by celebrating the incoming class and merely noting the returning one. We did not explicitly decide to value acquisition over loyalty, but we built a structure that cannot help doing so.

The fix is not a task force, and heaven knows it is not another dashboard. The fix is to treat retention the way we treat recruitment: an owner with real authority, a budget bearing some proportional relationship to acquisition spending, and a number the board reviews with the same intensity it brings to enrollment deposits. Concretely, that means funding the unglamorous machinery of being known. Advising loads that permit an actual relationship rather than a registration transaction. Redesigned gateway courses in the departments where first-year students go to fail. Emergency aid that clears a $700 balance that’s preventing a student from registering quickly, before that balance turns into a student deferring enrollment for a semester or more.

And it means aiming the discounting weapon inward: A college that will spend $8,000 in extra aid to win a stranger should be at least as willing to spend some of that keeping a sophomore whose family circumstances changed, because the sophomore is a known quantity who has already chosen us once. And that student’s departure tells every other student in their hall that the promise on the brochure has an expiration date.

Let me concede what this argument is not. Retention is not infinite; an elite liberal arts college holding 92 percent of its first-years has little juice left to squeeze, and nobody should pretend persistence programs can fully offset a 17 percent regional decline in high school graduates. Nor should retention ever mean lowering academic standards so that no one can leave, which is a betrayal of student outcomes dressed up as concern for them. And recruitment still matters; the front door cannot be neglected, only rightsized. The argument is narrower and, I think, harder to escape: For the median tuition-dependent liberal arts college, competing against subsidized scale, the marginal dollar now buys more enrollment when spent on keeping students than on finding them, and our budgets are allocated as if the opposite were true.

There is also a mission argument hiding inside the financial one, and it may matter more. The student who leaves after freshman year is not a lost sale. She is a person the college recruited with a promise of being known, and her departure usually means the promise went unkept. A small college that pours its ingenuity into the front door while the side door swings open has confused growth with health, and in the decade ahead, with at least 16 nonprofit colleges having closed in 2025 alone, those two things will part ways decisively.

Health for a small liberal arts college will not look like a bigger freshman class wrestled away from the flagship. It will look like a flat enrollment line, held steady by students who stayed because staying was worth it, at an institution that finally funded the thing it was built to do. Albion’s president, Wayne Webster, gave that unfamiliar kind of health a name: “Flat is the new growth.”

He is right, and the phrase deserves to be more than a survival slogan. Flat is what winning looks like when the prize is no longer size. The colleges that grasp this first, and move the money accordingly, will be the ones still here, still small and still keeping their students known, long after the arms race has claimed the rest.