In 2009, wearing thick-rimmed glasses and sideburns, Eric Buck pedaled his bicycle through Jamaica Plain and other crunchy neighborhoods of Boston, hanging flyers in coffee shops and on lampposts. The propaganda offered an unexpected invitation: “We’ve started a radical new college. If you’re interested in learning more, invite us to your ‘cooperative house’ to tell you about it.” What followed was a series of pitches to Boston’s tattooed and pierced Ivy League–adjacent youth. The courses Eric and his colleagues promoted were not on generic topics like world religions or corporate finance. Instead, they were designed to disrupt the bureaucratic status quo of higher education, donning titles like “Paradise Lost … with Puppets,” “Tinkers and Steampunks: The Philosophy of Repair,” and “Money Matters, or Does It?”
Their plan worked. Students enrolled, and classes met in coffee shops and living rooms, even hiding in plain sight at MIT’s Stratton Student Center. Eric was an anarchist, and he named his school Corvid College, after the family of birds that includes crows, jays, and magpies—symbols of the college’s non-hierarchical approach to learning. The anti-institution offered no degrees and had no accreditation, and many of its students were concurrently enrolled at one of Boston’s high-profile universities. Students paid however they could—with hand-woven garments, foraged produce, a five-dollar bill.
I met Eric in 2020 while researching the history of startup colleges as part of my own effort to found an alternative college. At that time, after Corvid had closed, he was the interim president of Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, a Catholic micro-college in New Hampshire that would later shutter in 2024. Corvid and Magdalen were both alternative colleges, but their differences abounded: one was innovative for its rejection of traditional higher education, the other for its return to a liberal arts model so traditional that it had been forgotten.
Corvid and Magdalen were early innovations in what has now become a new alternative micro-college movement. And these new college startups have much to teach us about the state of higher education, the changing value proposition of college, and consumers’ growing desire for a clearer—even if more radical—answer to the question, what is education for?
I discovered the micro-college movement almost a decade ago while teaching at a mid-sized Christian university. I had begun wondering about the vulnerability of conventional private higher education—concerns that were heightened during a meeting with the university’s CFO, who bragged about the fact that, due to the growth of professional programs, our closest competitors were no longer other private Christian schools but large state universities. At the time, public schools in California were virtually free for in-state residents, so I asked him how he planned to win this competition. “Faith integration,” he answered—the amorphous catchall religious schools use to differentiate themselves.
Within a few years, the university had dropped in undergraduate enrollment by 75 percent, the governing board was under fire in national media for mission drift, and the CFO had left for greener pastures. Families were voting with their tuition money, but the demand and need for religious education still remained.
While enrollment at comprehensive Christian universities was dwindling, small Christian college startups were growing. And after visiting and talking with the founders of such newcomers as New College Franklin in Tennessee, New Saint Andrews College in Idaho, Wyoming Catholic College, Gutenberg College in Oregon, and Thales College in North Carolina, I discovered where the students seeking a religious education were now going.
Christian institutions occupy the vanguard of the startup college movement, though we’ve also seen the launches of a Buddhist liberal arts school, Naropa University in Boulder, as well as an Islamic one, Zaytuna College in Berkeley. Many of the Christian micro-colleges use classical models. Contrary to popular belief, “classical” education is relatively modern—newer, in fact, than the “Great Books” approach spearheaded by Mortimer Adler in the 1930s. The classical model combines the medieval liberal arts with a Christian interpretation of education for a self-governing society. Thus, many of these new institutions offer only one degree track, in which students study classic texts, logic, rhetoric, Latin, natural philosophy, and music.
What makes these institutions disruptive to the industry is not only their return to the traditional liberal arts but also their streamlined institutional structures. Many simplify things by offering just one degree option, investing in teaching faculty instead of research, using modest or even shared campus facilities, getting creative with student housing, maintaining relatively small student bodies, and (as a consequence of these factors) advertising radically affordable annual tuition prices—sometimes in the ten- to fifteen-thousand-dollar range.
If you talk to the founders of these schools, however, you won’t hear a story about a strategy to disrupt a stagnant industry. Instead, they speak with passion about the social, religious, and moral problems they endeavored to solve by starting their colleges. Nevertheless, such micro-colleges are indeed innovative, and they’ve attracted early adopters by appealing to pressure points like mission drift at mainstream Christian schools, ideological homogeneity at secular universities, and financial waste across the board at U.S. colleges.
Most religious startup colleges are politically conservative, and some aggressively so. New Saint Andrews College’s recent ad begins with a direct indictment of Wheaton College, the country’s most famous Protestant liberal arts college, for its removal of a social media post congratulating recent Trump administration appointee Russell Vought—a tweet removal ostensibly in capitulation to alumni criticism. NSA’s marketing campaign slogan is “Don’t be a steer,” referring to C.S. Lewis’s warning that “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise…. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” Their claim is that mainstream universities are ideologically and spiritually castrating their students by “doubling down on D.E.I. until we are D.E.A.D.”
While the messaging of some startups like New Saint Andrews and Patrick Henry College in Virginia stresses not being progressive, others, like New College Franklin in Tennessee, Saint Constantine College in Houston, Sattler College (a Mennonite institution near MIT and Harvard), Gutenberg College in Oregon, and Saint Andrew’s College in northern California, hold politics with a lighter grip and instead focus on emphasizing the congruity between the Christian and liberal arts traditions.
So while the alternative college movement is not exclusively political in motivation, most schools view themselves as existing within an embattled political landscape. The University of Austin has made the biggest national splash as a secular but conservative startup. In its high-profile 2021 PR launch, the university denounced mainstream higher education’s “cancel culture” and its censorship of free speech. Similarly, the Savannah-based startup Ralston College positions itself as an answer to the loss of intellectual freedom it sees in America’s elite institutions.
It makes sense that many alternative colleges foreground their political or religious commitments. Prospective students and their families are often motivated by a desire to avoid perceived ideological drift—whether toward radicalization or secularization. At the same time, these schools differentiate themselves in a crowded market by making those commitments explicit. As with any new offering, early adopters must be willing to take risks; they must believe in something more than they fear nonconformity.
Christian institutions occupy the vanguard of the startup college movement, though we’ve also seen the launches of a Buddhist liberal arts school, Naropa University in Boulder, as well as an Islamic one, Zaytuna College in Berkeley.
Sometimes conformity itself is the social force that alternative colleges promise to resist. As a case in point, perhaps the country’s oldest extant alternative college is far from conservative or religious yet still deeply ideological. Deep Springs College, near Death Valley in Nevada, was founded in 1917 to educate young adults for “a life of service to humanity.” It offers only an associate’s degree but is one of the nation’s most selective institutions, partly because of its impressive history of graduates transferring to Ivies. Its student body of only twenty to thirty students earns tuition by working the ranch that serves as the school’s campus, reads historical texts in the humanities, and has an extraordinary say in the school’s programming and admissions. In fact, during my visits to alternative schools, Deep Springs was the only college to which I was denied entry, as the student council voted against my request, instead suggesting that I read up on the Telluride Foundation, with which they share an educational philosophy.
Deep Springs has inspired several spinoffs in recent decades, including Outer Coast in Alaska, the Arete Project, also in Alaska, and Wayfinding College in Oregon (which closed in 2023). Such institutions prioritize the traditional liberal arts while also adopting programs and cultures that are conventionally considered to be progressive. A long way from their expressly conservative counterparts, institutions like Thoreau College in Wisconsin, College of the Atlantic in Maine, and Prescott College in Arizona offer programs that emphasize place-based learning, ecology and environmental studies, social justice, and small cohorts.
The common denominators among the majority of startup liberal arts colleges include intentionally small student populations, a focus on teaching instead of research, core and common liberal arts curricular programs, academic rigor through the study of historical primary sources, lower tuition costs, and stronger and clearer educational missions. Alternative colleges and micro-colleges tend to eschew the strict division between general education and majors in efforts to stress the integrity of the liberal arts. They also avoid enormous tuition costs, opulent facilities, and the appearance of ideological neutrality that characterize conventional universities. In fact, as seen in the recent closures of University of Saint Katherine and Providence Christian College, startups struggle when they replicate aspects of large higher education institutions.
None of these startup colleges opens with accreditation, and many founders complain that the cost and timeline for acquiring accreditation constitute the greatest barrier to innovation in higher education. But the initial lack of accreditation is not a problem for compliance, and it’s less of a problem for grad school transferability, than many people assume. The most significant obstacle is public perception, since many families falsely assume that accreditation is given by the government. Additionally, while non-accredited colleges can offer degrees, they cannot accept Title IV government funding, meaning students cannot access key sources of federal aid such as Pell Grants and federally subsidized loans. But the recent economic and enrollment success of Hillsdale College, a conservative university that voluntarily rejects federal funding, has inspired interest among a segment of the population in seeking out colleges that are independent of government strings.
Further, as the U.S. Department of Education promises to introduce more economic accountability to universities, startup colleges tend to welcome these changes. Their growth depends on accreditors, as well as the public, evaluating them not by their size or conformity to higher education norms but by their programs, their mission, and the success of their graduates.
On the whole, startups are thriving. Some of the upstart Christian micro-colleges, for example, boast more competitive admissions rates than universities ranked in the top fifty of mainstream rankings. Unlike large universities, however, these smaller schools tend not to publicize this; my conversations with their leaders suggest an average acceptance rate near fifty percent.
So why is momentum building now? One reason is ideological distrust of university policies and faculty. Illustrating this trend, we are witnessing a consolidation of Protestant university enrollment, where a smaller number of religious schools are capturing a greater market share of applications. Institutions that double down on their theological distinctives are thriving through the “demographic cliff,” while religious families are avoiding universities whose faith positions they perceive to be watered down.
There are also economic reasons for the current surge in startup colleges. Comprehensive universities try to be everything for everyone, but in doing so they struggle to articulate clear value propositions for what students will learn, what kind of people they will become, and what sorts of careers they will have. Sometimes, the most reliable promise they can make is the debt their graduates will carry with them.
Beginning in the 1960s and continuing through the early 2000s, the common thread among college startups was a return to the traditional liberal arts, especially in the form of Great Books programs. Thomas Aquinas College in California (which recently opened a second campus in New England), St. John’s College in Santa Fe and Annapolis, Christendom College in Virginia, and Wyoming Catholic College are some of the most successful in this group in terms of growth.
But the shape of innovation in traditional undergraduate education is changing as colleges respond to the alarming challenges graduates experience as they try to find meaningful employment.
The most recent wave of alternative college startups answers this problem by combining intensive liberal arts education with various approaches to professional development. Students at the University of Austin read the Great Books of Western civilization while also studying technical and quantitative fields. Students at Excel College in North Carolina begin with a cohort-based core curriculum and then matriculate into an apprenticeship program.
Hildegard College in southern California (the school I founded in 2022) integrates the study of Great Books with what we call the “entrepreneurial arts”—where students learn business, economics, and leadership by designing real ventures. The College of St. Joseph the Worker in Ohio opened its doors in 2024, blending Catholic liberal education with hands-on work in skilled trades.
To be sure, we will continue to see new colleges that combine rigorous liberal arts programs with career development. Such programs are innovative on both ends. Unlike the hyper-focused minutiae that characterizes prestigious private colleges, they approach the liberal arts as interdisciplinary and grounded in historical primary sources. And unlike traditional business and professional majors, their smaller sizes provide greater opportunities for students to participate in apprenticeships, mentorship, and real-world experience.
For now, startup schools appeal mainly to demographics and psychographics that already possess motivation for thinking independently about college. By the time an innovation is adopted by the early and late majorities—by the time it is viewed as established—what is considered to be “independent” thinking today will be legitimated as a viable option for more people. We’re not there yet. But consider the related values and factors that have helped alternative colleges gain traction: religion, politics, social justice, and economics. If we expect such topics to continue to drive the ways we think and what we invest in, then we should also expect the alternative college movement to grow.
Yet in addition to the ideas that drive innovation, the alternative college movement is, at heart, an economic phenomenon. What characterizes and will continue to differentiate startup schools is their radical acceptance of market accountability. Universities are among the most economically insulated organizations in the country. They are protected by accreditation and by federal and state funding. New ideological and religious models enter the field without this armor, allowing them to say and deliver with refreshing clarity what their education is for.