Thoreau College and the microcollege movement
An Educational Model for the future?
When the history of American higher education in the 21st century comes to be written, 2024 will stand out as a watershed year when many dire predictions finally came true. Less than halfway through the year, at least a dozen colleges with long histories announced that they are closing, or are teetering on the brink. These include some of the most innovative small colleges in the country, as well as more mainstream private and public institutions of all kinds. The reasons for this mass extinction event are numerous and well-publicized, including a sharp demographic decline in the college-aged population, a botched roll-out of the new federal financial aid form by the Department of Education, and a disastrous college business model that continues to drive runaway tuition increases and deepening student debt.
However, when you spend a little time digging deeper into the state of higher education by talking with current students, professors, and administrators or by browsing publications like Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education, you quickly realize that these quantitative woes are really just the tip of the iceberg. No one, it seems, thinks that things are going well on any level. This includes both ends of our increasingly polarized political spectrum, for whom colleges serve as a primary battleground and punching bag, as well as business leaders who fret about finding the next generation of educated and resilient workers. More urgently, this distress also includes many of the people actually engaged in higher education – the educators and students themselves – whose levels of mental and emotional health, not to mention sense of meaning, pur- pose, and hope for the future, have collapsed catastrophically. If we as a civilization find ourselves in the midst of a “meaning crisis,” as cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and others have argued, it stands to reason that colleges and universities, the very heart of meaning-making in modern societies, are Ground Zero.
Thoreau College & The Microcollege Movement It is in the context of this metastasizing cultural crisis that Thoreau College and the wider microcollege movement finds its calling. Rooted in the green ridges and valleys of the unglaciated Driftless Region of rural southwestern Wisconsin, Thoreau College seeks to experimentally rethink and renew education for young adults from the grassroots up.
Since incorporating in 2015, Thoreau College has prototyped and staged a variety of immersive full-time residential programs for small groups of young adults.
These programs range in length from three weeks to a full year. In addition to Henry David Thoreau and the American transcendentalists, this project has drawn inspiration from the ideas of Rudolf Steiner and Waldorf pedagogy, from the Danish folk high school movement, and from Deep Springs College (https://www.deepsprings.edu/), a remarkable and highly respected microcollege with twenty-six students that has operated on a remote cattle ranch in eastern California since its founding in 1917. Today, Thoreau College stands alongside Deep Springs and a number of other young initiatives around the world as representatives of a growing movement of “microcolleges” seeking to reinvent post-secondary education with a human face. (For information about other members of this movement, tune in to “Microcollege: The Thoreau College Podcast” or visit https://thoreaucollege.org/ microcollege-movement/)
