Higher-education analysts have predicted it: The global financial shambles will cause the closing or merger of a growing number of colleges. At the top of the endangered list are rural colleges. Included in this group is the author's own college, Sterling College, in Craftsbury Common, Vermont. Despite this prediction, the author is counting on his institution's strengths to help it survive. Here, he shares what he has learned from the histories of at least three other liberal-arts colleges in Vermont that like his are among the smallest. He has learned that while economic slumps might shutter a business, at these small, mission-driven colleges, downturns provide impetus to change, adjust, work harder. What matters is that you keep moving, keep teaching, keep to your mission. He has learned, too, that it is only institutional character and educational quality that ultimately drive, and save, small colleges: a distinctive curriculum, expertly taught; a philosophy of education, articulately expressed; engaged students seeking their strengths; inquisitive teachers serving as mentors.