Welcome to Scamherst College

Last Wednesday, President Michael Elliott sent an email to the campus community with the subject line “Amherst College Comprehensive Fee for 2026–27,”  wherein he outlined the increased costs for the next academic year, accompanied by a series of carefully phrased rationales. The fee for attending Amherst College will increase by 3.5%, following last year’s 4.75% increase, making the cost $96,360.

The body of the email reads: 

“[T]he Board of Trustees sought to balance two fundamental priorities: first, that Amherst continues to offer an exceptional academic and student experience, and second, that an Amherst education remains accessible to students from all economic backgrounds through generous financial aid.”

So, I have a few questions. Are they actually maintaining accessibility? Is the academic and student experience really being prioritized? From where many students like myself are sitting, the answer is no.

Just to be clear before I continue, I receive financial aid. Amherst pays for a large portion of my education. And I am grateful. Yet, there is an anxiety that always looms ahead — the knowledge that the price of being here inches upward every single year, while my ability to pay does not.

Financial aid is often used to signal that institutions remain committed to affordability, but this can create a misleading sense of protection while tuition continues to climb and the true financial burden becomes harder for students and families to anticipate. And yes, sometimes, it feels like a scam. Not in the sense that Amherst isn’t an excellent institution. My professors are world-class, like the email says, and the Amherst name alone carries enormous weight and will open doors for me. However, invoking gratitude to defend a fundamentally flawed system is neither honest nor reasonable.

I do understand that budget restrictions may be necessary given the unavoidable rise in operational costs. However, Amherst’s current approach fails to prioritize student experience. The college is choosing to cut programs and resources that have a direct, measurable impact on student life while leaving untouched expenditures whose value is far less visible — or defensible. This raises an unavoidable and deeply troubling question: Where, exactly, is this money going?

What We Should Fund

Amherst’s Form 990 describes the college’s mission like this: “Amherst College educates students of exceptional potential from all backgrounds so that they may seek value and advance knowledge, engage the world around them and lead principled lives of consequence.”

It goes on to emphasize intellectual freedom, close engagement between students and faculty, research, artistic creation, and the preparation of graduates to serve their communities and the world. But if that is the mission, then the college should invest its energy and resources in these priorities. Not that we aren’t doing these things — but we should be funding them more. That means research, which Amherst prides itself on but consistently underfunds. It means professors and academic departments, because a liberal arts college lives or dies by student–faculty relationships. Funding should reflect the importance that the college claims these areas have. There are many other parts of this campus that are understaffed — departments where the people doing the work that keeps Amherst functioning are stretched thin and underpaid.

On Campus Right Now

If Amherst is serious about prioritizing the parts of campus that actually make student life possible, then the place to start is with the people whose labor keeps the college functioning every single day. Take custodial staff. While administrators sit in climate-controlled offices discussing budgetary priorities, custodial workers keep this place operational so that these conversations can happen in the first place. I spoke with one custodian who told me he was working 60 hours a week — to shovel snow, clean up vomit, mop floors, and deal with whatever else 2,000 college students manage to spill, break, or leave behind. During the last big snowstorm, I heard that some custodial staff were spending their nights in Valentine Dining Hall (Val) so they could keep campus safe by promptly clearing the snow.These people needed to confine themselves to their workplaces to ensure the rest of us could move around campus safely.

I am deeply, deeply grateful to the custodial staff and dining hall workers who keep this place running. The Val workers deserve enormous credit for what they do every day. But appreciation alone doesn’t fix the problem. These departments need higher pay and more coworkers. If the college truly values the student experience, then it should start by investing in the people who make it possible.

Cuts That Miss the Point

Meanwhile, some of the things that actually made campus life feel alive are disappearing. For example, Winterfest is gone. The college laid off the well-loved directors of the resource centers. Students who relied on those spaces watched the people who built them disappear. I recently overheard that eleven people were laid off in the Office of Advancement — the office that works with alumni and fundraising. It seems like a strange place to cut staff, since the college’s financial strategy is heavily dependent on alumni endowment. Also, if the Office of Advancement can suddenly remove eleven people, then what exactly was going on there beforehand? If eleven positions can disappear overnight, it raises a pretty uncomfortable question: how did we have eleven people to get rid of there in the first place? 

I also want to flag what appears to be significant restructuring within the Office of Identity and Cultural Resources (OICR), which again seems to correspond to the broader pattern of cost‑cutting and reallocation. From what I’ve heard from current student workers at OICR, next semester students will apply to the office as a whole rather than to individual resource centers —a change that effectively erases the identities of those centers. Without student staff designated for these very specific spaces, for example, queer students may lose the sense of safety in a space meant for that purpose, knowing that they may not be guided by someone who is qualified to speak on queer issues and genuinely committed to supporting the community. I want to be clear that this information is based on what I’ve heard and not on official reporting, and readers should do their own research and look out for further coverage. Still, this restructuring illustrates exactly how financial decisions are being made: Savings are extracted from student‑facing, community‑building resources. 

Human resources aside, there’s the issue of physical resources. Some of the buildings on this campus are falling apart. Elevators frequently stop working, hot water often goes out without warning, and some dorms don’t have elevators at all, creating serious accessibility issues for students who need them. These are basic necessities in the modern era, not luxuries, and yet they remain inconsistent across campus.  

As I have already acknowledged, I understand that some level of budget cutting may be necessary. However, acceptance of cuts does not imply acceptance of indiscriminate or poorly reasoned decisions. What follows is an argument for where those cuts should — and should not — be made, grounded in a clear assessment of their consequences for student life and institutional priorities.

Where Many Funds Go

First, before I get into any details about the jobs, let’s chat about the Board of Trustees and the upper administrative layer — the people deciding on this $96,360 tuition. The decision to increase tuition suggests a sense of indifference, as some of those making it have almost certainly never had to question affordability for themselves or their children.

Yes, Amherst is an elite private institution. But this fails to justify budget cuts across campus while administrative salaries are enormous. The college’s financial leadership reportedly makes well over a million dollars a year. An open job posting for Assistant Vice President for Development is $200,000–$225,000. Meanwhile, an open job posting for Director of Communications advertises something like $260,000-$315,000 annually.   

I understand that these are highly specialized positions requiring elite resumes, decades of experience, and the ability to manage complex institutions, and I’m sure many of these people are extremely qualified. But at some point, the word qualified becomes an elitist shield that shuts down any serious conversation about whether these salaries are remotely justified in a college that keeps adding to students’ financial burden.

The college maintains an expansive — and increasingly top-heavy — administrative structure whose compensation and privileges feel wildly out of step with the constant claims of fiscal urgency. And a more pressing question is, do students even know who these people are? Do you know the Vice President for Strategic Initiatives? The Senior Director for Administrative Priorities? The Associate Vice President for Student Affairs and Senior Associate Dean of Students? In fact, some students would be surprised to learn that Amherst even has a vice president at all. 

When student-facing programs are being cut, staff are being laid off, and tuition keeps rising, it becomes very hard to justify preserving the many layers of administration whose impact on daily student life is, at best, indirect. If the institution is serious about tightening its belt, then the conversation cannot only focus on cutting student-oriented programs and people. Because right now, from the outside, it simply looks like Amherst has accumulated a large number of administrative positions with overlapping responsibilities and left students wondering why so many of them are necessary in the first place.

But if we’re going to invoke capitalism as the underlying logic here, then let’s actually follow that logic all the way through. Because capitalism’s favorite premise — the one invoked whenever workers ask for more pay or better conditions — is that everyone is replaceable. So here’s my cynical question: If Amherst is so comfortable applying market logic to students — raising tuition year after year because of “costs” — why does that logic suddenly disappear when we start talking about the very top of the salary ladder? Why is the burden of “economic reality” always shifted downward?

Every tuition increase feels like the system squeezes the people at the bottom while insulating the people at the top. And yes — I know this is how institutions function inside the broader economic system. But understanding a system doesn’t make it any more acceptable when you see it playing out right in front of you. 

Moreover, there are many roles, offices, and programs on this campus that feel completely detached from the college's actual educational mission. To illustrate this disconnect, I turn to two offices that explicitly claim to improve student life, yet fail to do so in any meaningful way.

The Campus Activities Board (CAB), for example, spends an enormous amount of money — roughly $90,000 — each year, yet it is unclear what students actually receive in return. The most visible outcome is the spring concert — which has been consistently underwhelming for years. Students complain every single time it is announced, and attendance reflects that dissatisfaction. Somehow, a substantial budget continues to produce an event that turns the student body away.

More troubling is the apparent lack of financial transparency. When the Association of Amherst Students reportedly requested an itemized budget, CAB was unable to provide one. This is deeply concerning. Budgeting is a basic responsibility, especially when funds are drawn directly from the tuition we pay.

Student Engagement and Leadership presents a similar problem. Rather than meaningfully improving student life, the office appears primarily focused on creating additional programming structures — structures that then require more administrators to oversee them. The result is a self‑perpetuating cycle of bureaucracy: new initiatives justify new positions, which in turn justify further initiatives. This layered infrastructure has not translated into better student outcomes, and dissatisfaction with the office’s leadership is widespread among the student body.

And then there are the programs themselves. There are so many of them that they start to blur together. For example: Mammoth Leadership Academy and Amherst LEADS. From the outside they appear to do extremely similar things — leadership development, professional skills, networking, only that Amherst LEADS is aimed at student athletes, which raises another question: Why are we separating resources at a school where the student-athlete divide is already a constant source of tension? And given the value of leadership development is valuable, why is it being duplicated in programs?  This brings us back to the central question. If the college truly needs to charge $96,360 per student per year, then why does the financial ecosystem of this campus feel so bloated in so many places at once? 

The Price Tag of Prestige

I will be the first to admit that I am not an expert in college finances, but I’m making efforts to understand why the price of being here keeps going up. My research raises a pressing question: How are other schools managing to do this differently? Places like Yale University and Brown University have rolled out policies where families earning under $150,000 or $200,000 a year pay no tuition. Clearly, elite institutions with large endowments can  structure financial aid in ways that dramatically reduce students’ burdens.

Administration says the college will cover the rise in tuition for those receiving financial aid — that they will still have 100% of their calculated financial need met. But that did not happen for me last year. I did not receive more aid because of the tuition increase. My family’s finances did not change. Nothing about our situation suddenly improved. It has put my family in a genuinely difficult financial situation. We are literally having to move into a family member’s house because we cannot afford Amherst. I know for a fact that I am not the only student dealing with these issues.

The reason this happens is hidden in one phrase we see over and over again — “100% of calculated student financial need.” The keyword there is calculated. On paper, everything looks fair by some formula the college uses for these calculations. In reality, students are scrambling to fill the gap. I may very well have to take out loans to stay at Amherst — for things like my mom’s car, not my education — despite the email claiming that students won’t need to take on additional debt.

The explanation we received is that the tuition increase is in line with inflation. The administration points to the Higher Education Price Index, which was reportedly 3.6%, and argues that a 3.5% increase is therefore reasonable. But that logic does not reflect the perspective of the people actually paying the bill. Inflation does not mean families suddenly have 3.5% more disposable income. The argument treats the college and individual households as if they are two identical economic actors facing the same financial pressures. But while one has billions of dollars in institutional wealth, the other is scrambling to pay a bill that is now almost $100,000 a year.

Let’s talk more specifically about the endowment, because last year’s 2025–26 comprehensive fee email included this explanation: “Our reliance on our endowment to fund the operation of the College is greater than that of many of our peers, and this support plays a critical role in supporting our financial aid policies.” I understand the theory of that argument. But when you put that explanation next to everything else — the rising tuition, the layoffs, the claims that financial aid is fully covering students’ needs — the whole picture starts to feel incredibly hard to reconcile. Maybe there are complicated financial answers to that question. But right now, from where many of us are sitting, it just feels like we’re being told two contradictory things: that Amherst is extraordinarily wealthy, and that Amherst somehow still needs to charge students more every single year.

The Black Box of Tuition

I would like to bring back my initial question: Where is the money actually going? Tuition keeps rising, yet staff who directly support students keep vanishing. At the same time, administrative positions multiply. What is unfolding before our eyes is a reallocation of resources away from student‑facing work and toward an expanding bureaucratic and managerial class. While financial pressures have indeed grown, this is not an unavoidable reality but rather a choice — one that consistently prioritizes bureaucracy over students.

I ask Amherst to show us the costs. While budget documents are available, their structure undermines transparency, which I understand is required by the IRS. Broad categories such as “salary” and “other operating expenses” are repeatedly consolidated, flattened, and stripped of detail. I understand that tax documents and financial disclosures must follow certain reporting standards — but that doesn’t mean the college couldn’t provide more accessible, detailed explanations if it wanted to. Show us where the nearly $100,000 per student per year is meaningfully allocated. 

From the student perspective, the current pattern resembles less a model of careful financial stewardship and more a black box — one whose only visible output is a tuition‑increase email every spring. The increasing vagueness makes it nearly impossible for students to understand how money is actually being spent, let alone evaluate whether those expenditures align with the college’s stated priorities. 

Students, after all, are essential to maintaining the college. With tuition approaching six figures, it is not unreasonable for students to expect a clear, intelligible explanation of where that money actually goes. Appeals to privacy or technical reporting requirements only breed doubt when they, unfortunately, shield institutional decisions from meaningful scrutiny. Transparency is not an unreasonable demand. It is the bare minimum when the price of attendance is this high. Future generations will not “have access to the same opportunities as our current students” as the administration claims if this trajectory continues.

The email signed off with “thank you for choosing Amherst.” I have a more apt proposal: “Thank you for choosing Scamherst.”