When I was in sixth grade, I received an academic scholarship to an independent school in Maryland. It changed the direction of my life. My experiences at that private school led to a scholarship to Duke University, followed by a scholarship to Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business. My post-secondary education at those two private universities ultimately helped shape a career in consulting and healthcare finance and, later, a second career in higher education leadership. Looking back, the lesson is obvious but easy to overlook: Those scholarships did more than simply afford me access to knowledge. They opened the door to their communities.
That distinction matters now more than ever.
For generations, colleges benefited from a scarcity model. Colleges had the key books and textbooks, the professors, the libraries, the laboratories, the curriculum, the credentials, and the network. Students enrolled in colleges because colleges controlled access to knowledge and opportunity.
However, artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the economics of knowledge. Explanations, summaries, tutoring, translation, coding assistance, writing feedback, research support, and individualized practice are increasingly available outside the walls of any institution. This does not mean college is becoming irrelevant. It means the old justification for college is becoming insufficient.
New Expectations Have Arrived
The pressure on private colleges is already visible. National Student Clearinghouse data showed total postsecondary enrollment rising modestly in fall 2025, but private nonprofit four-year undergraduate enrollment declined by 1.6%. Among the many negative predictions for higher education, an April 2026 Huron Consulting Group projection reported by NPR and The Hechinger Report estimated that 442 of the nation’s roughly 1,700 private nonprofit four-year colleges are at risk of closing or merging within the next decade.
College leaders facing enrollment challenges should note that the public appetite for higher education remains strong. The 2026 Gallup-Lumina State of Higher Education study found that 73% of adults without a degree still believe a credential is as important as it was 20 years ago, even as only 25% believe most people can access a quality, affordable education after high school.
That is the central paradox. Most U.S. adults still believe education matters, but they are increasingly skeptical of its price, promise, and proof.
AI will sharpen that skepticism. If a student can get a competent explanation of Aristotle, calculus, accounting, biology, or marketing strategy from an AI tool in seconds, then a college cannot justify its value by saying, “We provide information that you cannot find elsewhere.” If a learner can assemble a personalized curriculum online, then a college cannot rely on “course delivery” as its main claim. If employers increasingly ask candidates to demonstrate skills rather than merely list credentials, then the degree must become more than a transcript. The National Association of Colleges + Employers (NACE)’s 2026 reporting found that employers still prize communication, teamwork, professionalism, and critical thinking, while also seeing room for improvement in how graduates demonstrate those abilities.
Private colleges that thrive, not just survive, will need to prove what I call the community premium.
What is the Community Premium?
The community premium is the measurable value created when a student joins a serious, intentional, high-expectation community of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and outside partners. It is not nostalgia. It is not simply “small classes,” “beautiful campus,” or “lifelong friendships,” although those may be part of it. The community premium is the difference between accessing knowledge and being formed by people who help you use knowledge wisely.
Reading still matters. But reading for rote memorization is no longer a defensible center of gravity. “Can the student recall the assigned material?” is now an irrelevant question. The better question is, “Can the student enter a conversation with the material, challenge it, connect it to other ideas, apply it to ambiguous problems, and explain why it matters?” AI makes recall cheaper. It makes judgment more valuable.
This should be liberating for private colleges, especially liberal arts colleges. The best of them were never supposed to be warehouses of facts. They were meant to be communities of inquiry. Their purpose was to cultivate judgment, curiosity, courage, taste, discipline, ethical reasoning, and the ability to live and work with others. In an AI-saturated world, those aims become more important, not less.
Designing for the Community Premium
Institutions cannot merely claim those outcomes of the community premium, as if they were amenities in a promotional pamphlet. They must design for them.
The first design challenge is curricular. Colleges should ask whether their courses are organized around coverage or capability. Too many syllabi still function as if the professor’s primary job is to move students through content. In the AI era, content coverage will be the least distinctive part of the experience. The more valuable course will ask students to wrestle with real questions, defend interpretations, test assumptions, work in teams, revise their thinking, and present their conclusions to people who can challenge them.
Assessments will need to change accordingly. If an assignment can be completed by outsourcing the thinking to AI, the assignment may be poorly designed. That does not mean banning AI. In many cases, it means requiring students to use AI transparently, critique its output, improve upon it, and then defend their own reasoning orally or in writing. A student should be able to say not only, “Here is my answer,” but also, “Here is how I arrived at it, here is where the tool was useful, here is where it was wrong, and here is what I now believe.”
The second design challenge is relational. Every small private college claims to offer personal attention. Boards should ask: Is that promise systematic or accidental? Does every student have a faculty mentor who knows them well? Does every student have meaningful contact with alumni before senior year? Does every student work with their college’s outside partners on consequential problems? Does every student graduate with adults who can credibly speak to their character, work habits, and potential?
Successful private colleges build formal mentoring teams around each student. An ideal mentoring team would include a faculty adviser, a career adviser, an alumni mentor, a peer mentor, and at least one external professional connected to the student’s interests. That may sound expensive, but so are under-enrolled programs, weak retention, and graduates who feel little lasting attachment to the institution. Community costs money. The pertinent issue is whether anything else private colleges do will matter more.
The third design challenge is the alumni network. Most colleges treat alumni as donors, reunion attendees, admissions ambassadors, or occasional career contacts. In the future, alumni should be part of the curriculum itself. Imagine if every department had an alumni-and-partner project marketplace. Students in economics, English, public health, computer science, history, entrepreneurship, philosophy, and environmental studies could work on problems supplied by alumni and community partners. Faculty would remain the intellectual architects, but students would repeatedly practice applying knowledge in public, accountable settings.
That would make the network real. It would also give students a portfolio of evidence. The transcript says what courses a student took. The portfolio should show what the student can do, how the student thinks, how the student collaborates, and how the student responds to critique.
The fourth design challenge is AI fluency. AI should not be treated as a computer science elective or an academic integrity problem alone. It is now part of the lifecycle of education. EDUCAUSE’s 2025 AI Landscape Study described AI adoption as a strategic issue involving leadership, policy, workforce, infrastructure, and a growing digital AI divide among institutions. Every graduate of a private college should understand how to use AI tools effectively, how to question their outputs, how to protect privacy, how to recognize bias, how to preserve human judgment, and how to decide when not to use AI at all.
I see this as an opportunity for private colleges. They can make AI fluency part of a humane education rather than a technical add-on. Producing graduates who are dependent on machines serves no one. The goal is to produce graduates who can use powerful tools without surrendering their own minds.
The fifth design challenge is lifelong membership. Historically, liberal arts colleges have thought in four-year increments. When knowledge changes quickly and careers are disrupted repeatedly, then the most valuable college relationship may not end at commencement. Private colleges should think of themselves as lifelong learning communities. Alumni should be able to return for short courses, AI updates, career transitions, leadership seminars, civic forums, and intergenerational problem-solving networks. The degree should be the beginning of membership, not the end of service.
This may be especially important for smaller private colleges. They cannot all win by becoming more famous, more selective, or more luxurious. They can win by becoming more necessary. A college that is deeply embedded in the lives of its students and alumni has a stronger value proposition than one that offers a pleasant four-year experience followed by occasional fundraising appeals.
The Task Before Private College Boards
For boards, the AI conversation should not be delegated solely to the technology committee. It belongs at the center of strategy. Trustees should be asking uncomfortable questions:
- What can a motivated learner get from us that they cannot get from AI, online content, a public university, or a lower-cost credential?
- Where, exactly, do students experience the community we advertise?
- How do we know whether students are forming durable relationships with faculty, peers, alumni, and partners?
- Are we rewarding faculty and staff for mentoring, advising, and community-building, or only for traditional measures of academic production?
- What parts of our curriculum still assume that information is scarce?
- What evidence do graduates carry into the world beyond a transcript?
- What are we willing to stop doing so we can invest more deeply in the relationships and experiences that truly differentiate us?
The private colleges that thrive will not be the ones that bolt AI onto the old model and declare themselves innovative. They will be the ones that use this moment to clarify their purpose. They will be honest that knowledge is abundant, attention is scarce, trust is fragile, and young adults need more than information. They need a challenge. They need belonging. They need mentors. They need standards. They need practice making judgments in the presence of other human beings.
My life was changed by education because institutions opened doors and people helped me walk through them. That is still the promise. But in the age of AI, private colleges will have to make that promise more explicit, more intentional, and more measurable.
The future of private higher education will not be won by better curriculum and well-published faculty. AI can produce well-scripted lectures. The future of private higher education will not be won by better marketing alone. Families are too skeptical and too smart to fall for advertising slogans. The future of private higher education will not be won by amenities alone. Amenities are expensive and easily copied.
The future of higher education will be won by colleges that become indispensable communities of formation, connection, and lifelong opportunity. I wonder how many private college leadership teams and boards are weighing the importance of their communities. If not, they should be.
