Reflecting on Amherst’s “Care-ocracy”

Amherst College cares tremendously for its students. Much, much, much more than other schools. This might seem obvious. The tour guides love to tout Amherst’s 7:1 student-to-faculty ratio. Their pride isn’t unwarranted, either — I’ve both had professors check in on me via email and have literally gone out to dinner with them. As a Senator for the Association of Amherst Students (AAS), I’ve interacted with nearly every facet of the campus bureaucracy and have found nothing but a genuine desire amongst the staff and administration to listen to students’ concerns. But for me, it took being dropped into Edinburgh University, a large public university with over 49,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students, to realize how much Amherst cares for its students. 

When I was abroad, I did not feel like Edinburgh University cared about me. The school’s bureaucracy was both impersonal and dysfunctional. I felt that the only reason Edinburgh University wanted me was to make money off of me by charging the international tuition fee. Perhaps, these differences between Amherst College and Edinburgh University are a result of  the schools’ differing sizes, in that Amherst has just over 1,900 students and Edinburgh has at least 20 times more students. However, more fundamentally, I’ve realized that Amherst College operates as what I have termed a “care-ocracy.” What this means is that every aspect of the college is designed to care for us – and for us to not even notice. The easiest way to demonstrate how Amherst is a “care-ocracy” is with how many amenities the college provides for us. Close to every Amherst student eats their meals at Valentine Dining Hall. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are all provided for us. Even during breaks, the college makes sure that students on-campus are fed, whether by keeping Valentine Dining Hall open during school breaks, by providing stipends for students remaining on campus during closures, or by housing essential workers in the Valentine Residence Halls during the recent blizzard to make sure we students were able to navigate campus and were fed. Amherst is, in effect, a utopia. 

By contrast, when I was on exchange at Edinburgh University, the norm was for students to prepare their own meals. This is great for students with money. Other Amherst students who have studied abroad and have been able to cook for themselves have reported quite positive experiences. Amherst students who study abroad generally are not going hungry because the financial aid office provides stipends to those who receive more financial aid than the cost of tuition. However, for local students at Edinburgh University, the institution’s lack of support for them means that many students go hungry. At Edinburgh University, 57% of students have skipped meals because they are unable to afford them. Considering that Edinburgh University is already facing substantial financial difficulties, it therefore becomes extremely easy for the school to let students fall through the cracks and starve. I witnessed this firsthand: Wealthier university students, such as many of the other exchange students, were able to enjoy living in Edinburgh through everything, from being able to buy a cup of coffee to going out to pubs. Lower-income students, however, become invisible.

Though this comparison is just one example, it symbolizes how Amherst’s “care-ocracy” effectively supports its students, especially compared to larger and less wealthy schools. Using its vast monetary resources, Amherst College endeavors to meet every possible facet of a student’s needs throughout their four years here. There are no graduate students here. Instead, Amherst can target all its resources toward a smaller student body than my high school has. Former Dining Services Director Bill Connor encapsulated how staff members perceive themselves within the “care-ocracy” when he said, in a presentation to the AAS, that “our job is to make you happy.” Moreover, unlike say, the University of Edinburgh, which distributes on-campus resources like housing according to how much one can pay, Amherst College treats every student the same, regardless of how much their family or themselves are paying. I think this is awesome. It is awesome to go to a school that cares about me and my peers as people, and not as walking dollar signs. It is awesome to go to a school that has so many resources at its disposal to support us. In many ways, existing in the “care-ocracy” feels quite utopian. 

However, as any good reader of overly-dramatic, young-adult science fiction novels knows, every supposed utopia has a darker side. Personally, I’ve noticed that living in the “care-ocracy” can shape our perceptions of the world, and that it leaves us blind to our own privilege. I have noticed this in some conversations we have had in Senate meetings, such as when we discussed the introduction of the herd-housing system. During this conversation, we Senators got caught up in the minutia, such as the difference between being neighbors with one’s friends and living a five-to-ten-minute walk away from them. We lacked the collective self-awareness to acknowledge the privilege that we are guaranteed housing for all four years in a town that is in the midst of a local and national housing crisis. 

I bring this up not to criticize anyone specifically in this conversation, nor to imply that all criticism of Amherst College is illegitimate — just ask any student with food allergies about their thoughts on Val to see the limitations of Amherst’s “care-ocracy” in action. However, I write to demonstrate that Amherst’s “care-ocracy” can warp our worldviews to the point that we become intolerant of any little inconvenience we still have to face at Amherst. We are cared for so well at Amherst that we risk losing perspective, and thus, we become unable to empathize with people who have less privilege than us, without even realizing it. It can lead to an attitude of “everything exists to serve me and my needs.” Olivia Tennant ’27 summed up the dangerous real-world consequences of this attitude perfectly when she described the experience of walking into bathrooms filled with the vomit and messes that other people have created after parties every weekend. 

Furthermore, I have also noticed that the “care-ocracy” can cause us, ironically enough, to become overly-cynical towards the institution and administration; I have noticed this from comments I have heard from students along the lines of “administration only cares about us to keep us quiet and placated.” Of course, having a healthy level of skepticism towards Amherst’s “care-ocracy” and administration is immensely important . 

However, to me, this cynicism existst, in part, because the “care-ocracy” treats us Amherst students so well. Our privilege blinds us and, for lack of a better word, makes us spoiled. When we complain, as a hypothetical, about the janitorial staff not cleaning up our vomit by Sunday morning party, we are also signaling our own perceived entitlement that we should have somebody clean up after ourselves every moment. When we allow the “care-ocracy” spoil us, it lets us become cynical and dismissive towards the staff and administrators whose entire jobs are to care for us.

So then, where does this leave us? How should we wrap our heads around the fact that we exist in the “care-ocracy”? Well, firstly, we should be grateful that Amherst as an institution cares so much about us, and treat the administration with sincerity and good faith, because its staff really do care about us. I say you should go all in: Go to the Sophomore Summit and network with all the alums who are taking time out of their busy lives to speak to you and send your feedback to Val! We as students also should reject cynical criticism of the “care-ocracy,” but, I also think we should be off-put by the “care-ocracy.” This is because the root of the “care-ocracy” is that we are students at an extremely wealthy college. This goes without saying, but if we were not students at Amherst College, then Amherst College would not care one cent about us. I myself recall feeling thoroughly put off by everything about Amherst and the “care-ocracy” when I took “Justice” and went to the Hampshire County Correctional Facility on a weekly basis. Of course, prisons are a rather extreme example of an environment where people are not cared for, but it was jarring to think about the big question of, “Why have I been given so much and am treated so well while others have so little and are treated so cruelly?” 

Moreover, as I learned when studying abroad, the privileges that Amherst gives us — like being fed everyday — are not even ones that other college students can enjoy, much less the millions of people on Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits who were potentially on the verge of starvation during the October 2025 government shutdown. 

Why is having three meals a day on your plate contingent on attending a college with an endowment of over three billion dollars? Why do Amherst College students get to be fed, but our neighbors in the Town of Amherst have to go hungry? We should be put off by Amherst’s “care-ocracy” because everybody should have access to the resources and care that we students have access to, whether this is coming from charities, the government, families, nonprofits, or another source. Ultimately, we Amherst students ought to be grateful and appreciative of the “care-ocracy,” self-aware of how it can negatively impact our worldviews, and use the resources it provides us to make a positive impact for those who have not been given the same resources that we have.