A growing number of students are turning to microcolleges—intentionally small, immersive educational programs with around a dozen participants—as traditional higher education faces declining public confidence, enrollment challenges, and institutional closures, according to a recent report published by the Foundation for Economic Education. These emerging institutions blend manual labor, self-governance, and academic study, offering semester-long or summer programs that prioritize authentic human connection and mentorship. The movement draws inspiration from Deep Springs College, a tiny two-year accredited institution founded in 1917, and represents a creative response to the struggles of conventional post-secondary education.
Thoreau College in rural Wisconsin, launched in 2016, charges approximately $8,500 for its semester-long program, with extra fees if students want college credit through a partnership with Prescott College in Arizona. The fall 2024 semester enrolled just five students, who learned skills like sheep-shearing, foraging, and fire-making while studying works by Wendell Berry, Henry David Thoreau, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. The Gull Island Institute in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, founded in 2022, offers a tuition-free month-long summer program that served 10 undergraduates from Princeton, Harvard, and other universities this year, running from mid-May to mid-June in Martha's Vineyard. Programs during the academic year served roughly four dozen students last year through partnerships with Yale, Columbia, Wesleyan, and Cape Cod Community College.
Jacob Hundt, who founded Thoreau College after attending Deep Springs and earning a master's degree from the University of Chicago, argues that "a microcollege, a place with a dozen or two students, is way more suited to the moment than even a school with two or three hundred students," noting that much of higher education has become "really overbuilt" over the past half-century. Ana Isabel Keilson, cofounder of Gull Island Institute, believes the movement will gain momentum because "there's a real hunger to do things differently because what has traditionally been done in classrooms is no longer tenable given the rapid intrusion of AI." According to the report, leaders of these institutions say their focus on relationship-building and mentorship sets them apart from traditional higher education spaces.
The report explains that microcolleges emerge at a time when established small colleges face the highest risk of closure, with nontraditional institutions like Hampshire College in Massachusetts and Sterling College in Vermont both shutting down this year. However, microcollege founders say their model's nimbleness and emphasis on genuine human interaction make it particularly suited to an era of artificial intelligence, where conventional classroom approaches are becoming less viable. The programs share three core pillars—academics, manual labor, and self-governance—inherited from the Nunnian Schools consortium inspired by Deep Springs College. Gull Island's Keilson notes that resistance exists among faculty, students, and administrators to being consumed by new technologies, creating an opening for alternative educational models that can't be easily replicated by AI.
The report suggests microcolleges may function less as replacements for conventional degrees and more as stepping stones, helping students discover interests and develop skills before or alongside pursuing formal college credentials. Layla Coyne, who attended Thoreau College's fall 2024 semester after an unconventional K-12 education that included self-directed learning communities and dual enrollment at community college, will move to England this fall to study architecture and urban planning at Newcastle University. She met her partner at Thoreau College and describes the microcollege experience as "an in-between" rather than a complete substitute for higher education. While the future of the movement remains uncertain, the report concludes that microcolleges can expand post-secondary pathways for students seeking clarity about their next steps in an educational landscape that's increasingly fragmented and expensive.