My friend Brian and I have known each other since sixth grade. Same middle school, same high school, then Vassar together, though I lasted one year before transferring to NYU, which is its own story. Brian stayed. He loves Vassar the way you love a place that actually shaped you: fiercely, and with mild proselytizing tendencies.
We had dinner recently, and at some point I pulled up KFT students’ results for the 2026 college admissions cycle: Penn, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Rice, Vanderbilt, Michigan, and a dozen others. He scrolled through it.
“No Vassar.”
I told him two students had gotten into liberal arts colleges, Williams and Wesleyan. Neither is going.
He put his fork down.
This is the thing that interests me professionally. Not that our students aren’t applying to liberal arts colleges (though mostly they aren’t) but that when they do get in, they’re often not going. Williams and Wesleyan are not consolation prizes. They are excellent schools with strong alumni networks and serious academic reputations. They turned them down anyway.
What they chose instead: Penn, Cornell, Michigan, Vanderbilt. Schools where the name works as shorthand for ambition, for outcomes, for a particular image of what success looks like at 22. I understand this. We work with these families. We know the pressure that builds over years of preparation, the way The List calcifies into something almost moral, the way choosing Williams over Penn can feel, to a seventeen-year-old and her parents, like leaving something on the table.
But it’s worth looking at what’s actually on that table.
A piece in The Atlantic earlier this year argued that elite liberal arts colleges may be the unexpected winners of the current higher education crisis. The argument: no graduate programs means no dependence on federal research funding, which means far less exposure to the political and financial pressures currently destabilizing major research universities. Small classes. Faculty whose only job is teaching undergraduates. Endowments, at the wealthiest schools, that fund serious financial aid.
The piece is probably too optimistic about the full range of liberal arts colleges. Most of them are not Williams, and many are struggling. But for the schools at the top, the point holds: in a higher education system that is in real crisis, these schools have structural insulation that large research universities don’t. For families weighing a liberal arts college against a research university, that distinction matters more right now than it has in years.
What I’d add from eighteen years of working with students: a seminar of fifteen people where the professor knows your name is a categorically different educational experience than a 300-person lecture with a graduate student leading your discussion section. For certain students, the ones who need to be known to do their best work, the ones who think by talking, the ones who get swallowed by large institutions, that difference isn’t incidental. It’s the whole thing.
There’s one more thing worth mentioning: AI. The same features that insulate liberal arts colleges from federal funding pressures, small classes, discussion-based teaching, faculty who know their students’ work, also make them harder to fake your way through. In a 300-person lecture, no one notices if your essay came from ChatGPT without AI-detecting technology. In a seminar of fifteen where your professor has read everything you’ve written and wants you to actively engage in discussion? Good luck.
The liberal arts model has always been about learning to think on your own. Turns out that’s worth more now than it was ten years ago.
I’m not arguing that Williams or Vassar or Amherst is the right choice for every student. Some of our students will thrive at large research universities, and they know themselves well enough to know it. What I’m saying is that the decision to turn down a top liberal arts college for a research university is often made less on the basis of college fit than on the basis of optics, and optics are a poor guide to where a person is actually going to learn.
The students we’ve watched flourish at liberal arts colleges are not the students who settled. They’re the students who bet on the right environment for themselves, which turned out to be smaller, more intimate, more academically relentless than the school they’d originally been chasing. Almost universally, they’re glad.
Brian would like you to know that he thinks all of this is obvious, we should have listened to him years ago, and also that Vassar in the fall is beautiful. On that last point, at least, I can’t argue with him.
This piece first appeared on our Substack. Read it there or subscribe to get new essays on testing, admissions, and learning in your inbox.