Matthew Minich has pulled his fair share of all-nighters at the Saint Michael’s College Fire and Rescue station, where he’s been a volunteer firefighter for the past couple of years.
“Hopefully you get some time off during your shift where you can work on school work and get that stuff done,” he said, wrapping up a 12-hour shift the week before finals.
On a recent evening, he gave a tour of the station just across the street from the campus in Colchester, Vermont.
“It’s not a traditional classroom, but there is definitely a lot of learning going on here,” he said, pausing for a beat before adding: “Most of the time.”
Asked what’s going on the rest of the time, he laughed. “Shenanigans,” he said.
Between the shenanigans and responding to dozens of local emergency calls each year, the junior from Scituate is studying business administration. But next fall, when Saint Michael’s launches a new emergency services major, he plans to add it as a second field of study.
“I’ve fallen in love with this now,” said Minich, who was recently elected captain of the rescue unit. “I’ve decided that I want to do this for my career.”
The new program reflects the increasingly urgent choices facing small colleges across the country, where enrollment offices are often on fire as the number of traditional college-age students shrinks. It’s a long-predicted demographic cliff driven by falling birthrates after the 2008 recession, and many tuition-dependent schools are scrambling to survive as a result. Saint Michael’s is betting that career-focused programs such as emergency services, finance and nutrition, along with lower tuition and hands-on training, can help extinguish years of enrollment declines while preserving its liberal arts identity.
This all comes as American higher education becomes a winner-take-all market. Selective private colleges and flagship state universities continue to attract students and their tuition dollars while many smaller schools struggle to compete.
Saint Michael’s, founded 122 years ago in 1904, is among them.
Enrollment at the Catholic liberal arts college has fallen nearly 50% over the past decade. Net tuition revenue has dropped from about $70 million to roughly $40 million. More than 80% of applicants are admitted, and few pay full tuition.
So administrators are making sweeping changes. The college recently consolidated 20 academic departments into four interdisciplinary schools.
“We don’t have an English department anymore,” said Saint Michael’s president Richard Plumb matter-of-factly, sitting in his office wearing a flannel shirt.
Plumb said the college is confronting the same demographic pressures reshaping campuses nationwide. That pressure is keen in Vermont, a state that consistently has one of the nation’s lowest birthrates.
“There will be fewer students going to college,” Plumb said plainly.
To compete for those students still choosing higher education, Saint Michael’s is now matching in-state tuition rates at flagship public universities in students’ home states.
“The vast majority of our students who we admit and don’t matriculate here go to large flagship schools,” Plumb said. “Fine. We’ll charge the same tuition.”
The strategy reflects how dramatically the market has shifted for smaller colleges. Deep tuition discounts, program cuts and department mergers are increasingly common as schools compete for a shrinking pool of students.
And it’s not just small colleges. Syracuse University announced in April that it would close 93 of its 460 academic programs, including 55 with no enrolled majors. The University of North Texas in Denton also plans to cut or consolidate more than 70 programs.
“Cutting programs that are under-enrolled or add little value is mission-critical, frankly,” said Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christenson Institute, which has long predicted widespread college closures and mergers based on demographic projections. “You basically have these zombie programs – one, two, three students, maybe. And part of the reason a lot of these schools keep it up is they feel like, ‘Oh, every university needs an English program, needs a Spanish program, needs these things that we associate with quote unquote ‘a normal college.’”
Looking ahead, Horn said, more colleges will be forced to confront whether there’s real demand for what they offer – both from students on campus and from the broader job market.
“This is the consolidation phase,” said Gary Stocker, a former administrator at Westminster College in Missouri and founder of College Viability, a company that tracks the financial health of higher education institutions and then makes it available to the public.
“There are way too many colleges, both public and private, and not enough students willing to pay even heavily discounted tuition,” he said.
Stocker is skeptical that adding programs like emergency services will be enough to offset broader financial pressures and enrollment headwinds.
“What are the colleges in the region going to do when they see St. Michael’s has a successful EMT program?” he asked. “They’re going to do one too.”
Federal data show that a decade ago, only about a dozen colleges offered crisis, emergency or disaster management programs. Today, more than 75 do.
Robert Kelchen, who studies higher education policy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, said career-oriented programs can attract students but they can also be expensive to operate.
“Giving people hands-on emergency training is not cheap,” he said. “If it brings in 20 students, is that enough to really make a difference on the budget?”
Saint Michael’s leaders believe it can.
The campus rescue station was created in 1969 after the death of a student exposed gaps in local emergency medical services. The unit has long been student-run and supported by nearby communities. An alumni donor recently provided funding to help launch the new academic program.
Provost Gretchen Galbraith hopes the emergency services major will initially attract 15 to 20 students this fall and eventually generate enough revenue to support other parts of the college.
From her office window, Galbraith looks out onto a campus garden filled with stones engraved with nouns, verbs and adjectives.
She says the school is trying to answer a broader question increasingly posed by students and their tuition-paying parents: What is a liberal arts education worth in the age of artificial intelligence?
“I understand AI can make music and paintings, but they can’t make art,” Galbraith said. “Or word gardens.”
“Yes, you can write a perfectly decent and boring essay with AI,” she added. “But if you can find your own voice, that is so powerful.”
Faculty members worry the growing skepticism toward liberal arts signals a broader cultural shift away from deep and complex thinking.
“I think that’s the most frustrating thing to me,” said history professor Jen Purcell, who will begin teaching a medieval history course this fall after a longtime faculty member retired and was not replaced.
“If I had another life to live,” she said with a laugh, “I’d have been a medievalist.”
GBH News
For now, Matthew Minich is still writing papers, finding his voice and balancing overnight rescue shifts with his classes. He believes the emergency services major could attract his peers who might otherwise skip college altogether, or else choose a larger university.
“They want to go to football games and they want to have frats and have a good time with 30,000, 100,000 other people,” he said. “I wanted to do that too.”
But Minich says he chose a much smaller school environment in northern Vermont where professors know him personally — and where the fire and rescue station gives him something many colleges now promise prospective students: practical, hand-on experience tied directly to a career.
And, of course, there are the shenanigans, too.
