At Amherst, we take for granted that our college is having a positive impact on the world—that it gives out more than it takes in. Amherst certainly markets itself as a benevolent force and benefits immensely from its resulting nonprofit status. Yet if we examine exactly what Amherst provides the world in relation to what it consumes, our alma mater starts to lose its saintly glow.

First, let’s consider the positive effects Amherst has upon the world. Every year, just under five hundred students graduate with an Amherst degree, representing four years of study in the liberal arts. An Amherst education is undoubtedly valuable and prepares people to do a lot of good in the world. Amherst also employs about two hundred professors who, in addition to teaching, do valuable research. Finally, Amherst provides a number of public services, such as Frost Library, its archives, and the numerous public events the college hosts.

Each of these positives, however, comes with serious disclaimers. Amherst students, for example, rarely use their education to serve any kind of public good. A recent series in the Amherst Student has revealed that Amherst students go into publicly-oriented jobs at a shockingly low rate. On the other hand, almost half go into finance, consulting, or tech, not exactly publicly-spirited endeavors. Amherst’s talent is being wasted not solving the world’s most pressing problems, where the most good could be done. Instead, these students are helping enrich billionaires and wealthy corporations. Similarly, Amherst has not always been generous in sharing its resources with the broader community. For the entirety of the pandemic, Frost Library and other public institutions have been closed off to the wider community. Even in normal times, Amherst does little to advertise its services, and the vast majority of users are students and faculty.

Now, let’s take these positive impacts and compare them to the immense costs Amherst incurs to produce them. Each year, Amherst spends about $200 million in its operations. That’s equivalent to more than $100,000 per student, almost triple the amount spent by a state school like UMass. And that money isn’t even being paid to professors or librarians, it’s increasingly going to administrators, PR experts, lawyers, and the other individuals needed to run Amherst Incorporated. In short, Amherst is a bloated, inefficient, money-grubbing nanny-goat of an institution.

According to GiveWell, an organization that tracks charities, the same amount of money that Amherst spends on a single four-year education could buy 100,000 mosquito nets and would save roughly 89 lives. If it were spent on Vitamin A supplements, it could save about 133 lives. Or, it could pay for 40 people to go through Massachusetts community college. It’s hard to imagine that the money isn’t better spent elsewhere, even if it’s another institution of higher education, where every dollar could have a huge impact on students who are more disadvantaged. Here, at best, every dollar is being used to enrich already well-off and successful students, helping grease their path into the consulting teams of Qatari Princes or into programming jobs for tech companies like Facebook.

And at worst, it sits in an already massive 3.75 billion dollar endowment, collecting dust in banks. I would argue that the size of the endowment is borderline unconscionable when there is so much going wrong in the world. And where does all this money come from? Well, a lot of it comes from alumni who donate millions each year. Amherst has the temerity to call people who want to donate money to charitable causes and say “forget Greenpeace, community college, or the Salvation Army, Amherst College will make the best use of your money.” Every penny Amherst takes away from these far more efficient organizations is a disservice to the world. Alumni donations would be better spent on community colleges and other non-profits.

The rest of the money comes from students. Those who are lucky enough to afford it are fine, but many more take on heavy debts to pay for the dream of the prestigious diploma. And every year, Amherst hikes up tuition higher, in a desperate rat race with other institutions to keep up that image of prestige. At the very least, Amherst could unlock some of its coffers to lower tuition and ensure that students would graduate debt-free. Instead, the tuition money is siphoned away from students and is spent on the artist Common, programs like Grammarly, or more high-wage administrators with ambiguously defined roles. I don’t think the world as a whole benefits from that exchange.

Today, Amherst College is entirely incapable of living up to the public ideals of a liberal arts institution. But there are things the College could try. The school could open academic resources to the public, especially research and classes. Given the rise of digital technologies like Zoom, this is not unreasonable. The endowment, held in reserve out of excessive fear to preserve the college far into the future, could be unlocked and utilized. And the College could encourage graduates to pursue careers in public service and research, not in fields like consulting.

When you walk around campus, enjoying its facilities and academics, it may be hard to imagine that the school is having a negative impact on the world. Yet this is the nature of elite liberal arts education. By creating an exclusive environment that showers billions in benefits on a couple thousand individuals, Amherst wins the approval of an in-group while insulating itself from the far greater number of people who are harmed by institutions like Amherst. I have nothing against higher education in general. Society desperately needs well-educated people. Yet colleges should enrich their communities, not impoverish them, and well-educated people should work for the common good, not their own interests. As it stands, Amherst’s noble goal of public education is overshadowed by the edifice of consumption and waste it has constructed around itself. ■

— Anonymous