What Vermont Colleges Owe Students in the Age of AI

Saint Michael’s College pumps roughly $180 million into Vermont’s economy each year, according to the college’s own impact study. But Richard Plumb, Saint Michael’s president, isn’t leading with that number. He’s making a harder case: that higher education has been lying to students about what a degree actually delivers.

Plumb published a commentary this week arguing that the old bargain, get your diploma and get your job, doesn’t hold anymore. Hiring markets have slowed. Automation is accelerating. And Vermont’s smaller colleges, he wrote, can’t keep pretending the equation still works the way it used to.

“A diploma is not a promise of a particular job,” Plumb said. “It is preparation for what comes next, and that distinction matters more now than ever.”

That’s not a small rhetorical shift. It’s Plumb essentially telling students and families that they’ve been sold something that colleges can’t actually guarantee, and that the honest version of higher education’s pitch looks different.

The $180 million figure comes from an economic impact study Saint Michael’s conducted on its footprint in and around Colchester. It covers jobs, local business spending, and services throughout the region. Saint Michael’s students run the college’s own fire and rescue unit, which handles thousands of emergency calls annually, and they log tens of thousands of community service hours across schools, healthcare organizations, and nonprofits throughout Chittenden County.

Still, Plumb doesn’t think the numbers close the argument. Colleges that justify themselves mainly through economic output are standing on unstable ground, he wrote. A big impact figure won’t answer the question parents and students are actually asking: will this education hold up?

As VTDigger covered, the harder problem is that artificial intelligence can retrieve specific information in seconds, which collapses a significant part of what a traditional college credential used to signal. What’s left, what Plumb says institutions have to actually build, is something harder to quantify: the capacity to judge what’s true, determine what’s just, and act with purpose when conditions keep shifting.

Rigorous. That word shows up repeatedly in how Plumb frames what Vermont’s colleges need to be. He pairs it with language about critical thinking, communicating across difference, and making decisions under real uncertainty. None of that demands a particular major. It demands that an institution treat intellectual seriousness as the floor, not a feature.

For Vermont, this conversation cuts across institutions. Middlebury is navigating its own enrollment pressures. Norwich University has spent years repositioning around leadership and experiential training. Saint Michael’s is in Colchester, deep in Chittenden County’s orbit, but the pressure it’s describing isn’t local. It’s structural.

Dartmouth sits at a different point in the prestige hierarchy, but the underlying questions aren’t that different. The College has pushed more undergraduates into experiential learning tracks over the past two years, blending classroom instruction with research and community placements. The logic maps onto what Plumb is describing: students need practice making decisions under conditions that don’t come with an answer key.

When a college president in a small Vermont city writes publicly that his institution needs to stop overpromising, it’s worth paying attention to what he’s actually admitting. The 19 Vermont colleges operating in 2026 face a market that won’t absorb credential inflation indefinitely. Plumb’s argument is that the ones that survive will be the ones that give students something real, not a particular job, but the capacity to figure out what comes next.

“A diploma is not a promise of a particular job,” Plumb said.

He means it. And the Upper Valley, where institutional health sends real ripples through municipal budgets and local businesses, has reason to watch whether other college presidents start saying the same thing out loud.