On “Eight Predictions for the Future of Higher Education”

Greetings from a sunny, steaming mid-Atlantic in June. I write this quickly, before a trip further south, where I’m keynoting the University of Central Florida’s Teaching and Learning with AI conference.  I hope to share that speech on my AI newsletter.

On this blog, there are a series of posts in the hopper, but today I wanted to quickly respond to a prominent column on higher education’s future. Jay Caspian Kang recently shared “Eight Predictions for the Future of Higher Education” and it’s a very good introduction to the topic.  Because it’s behind a paywall, I’ll summarize it here, then add some reflections.

Interesting cartoon the New Yorker added.

Kang’s framing imagines how higher ed might turn out in 2035. He starts with demographics, emphasizing Nathan Grawe’s demographic cliff model (here’s my blog post on that book; here’s our Future Trends Forum conversation with the author). He sees this as having a drastic impact: “A winner-take-all dynamic will emerge quickly, as hundreds of campuses will either be shut down completely or absorbed into larger institutions.” (Hence the cartoon, I suspect.)

He then takes Grawe still further, arguing that not only will there be fewer high school graduates, but that fewer of them will apply to college.  This is based on recent history: “In 2009, seventy per cent of high-school graduates—an all-time high—went on to pursue some form of higher education. Today, the number is sixty-one.”

Another challenge is AI, which Kang sees academia struggling to deal with. He anticipates some institutions striking deals with AI companies, but the bigger problem is that faculty will be unable to stop students from cheating with AI.  He adds a dark sequel: “professors will have to dutifully pass [cheating students], because the university can’t afford to lose any more students.”

Additionally, the post-COVID decline of learning in K-12 will continue and have major depressive effects: “within a few years a course that used to be appropriate for tenth graders will become the standard 200-level course in many universities across the country.”

Kang sets aside Ivy League institutions from these pressures, seeing their reputations as protecting them.  He then adds this delicious line about believing in a “fantasy [that] employers hire Ivy Leaguers because of merit and not because of network effects and cultural affinities.”  He identifies other survivors over the next decade, starting with community colleges:

[C]ommunity colleges should be some of the biggest winners of the next several years. If A.I. and economic ruin eliminate the middle and lower middle classes of universities, more students might decide to get associate’s degrees and then transfer to four-year institutions.

Other institutions and regions may prosper:

Some flagship state universities might also expand, whether by absorbing struggling campuses in their network or by adding more spots for undergraduates. The schools that do this will almost certainly be in the South and the Southwest, the two regions that face the least amount of demographic decline, in large part owing to their growing Latino populations.

Losers will include administrators and staff at financially stressed colleges and universities. The reason: “when it’s cutting time, it’s easier to lay off student-success coördinators than it is to eliminate the handful of professors who teach chemistry to all of your undergrads.”

What do I make of this, as someone whose professional work is all about higher ed’s future?

Kang does a good job of selecting key points.  Demographics, AI, K-12 learning loss – these are major forces indeed.  I’m especially delighted that he discusses the varied institutional types within higher ed; most discussions usually focus on just one tranche. You might do well to hand this article out to audiences in order to get them quickly thinking about the subject.

I would quibble with some of the points.  He’s right to mention Grawe’s cliff, but that’s a one time deal, a single event anchored in the historical break of 2008’s great recession. The broader and deeper population problem is that great demographic transition working its way through most of the world, whereby we have fewer children and enjoy longer lives. Nothing is slowing this down, meaning there’s no population rebound after Grawe’s cliff.  To the extent campuses teach traditional age undergraduates, that audience will keep dwindling. (Here’s one of our Forum discussions on the topic.)

Kang sees the Ivies as triumphing, but I’m surprised he didn’t mention Republican attacks specifically on that kind of university, notably directed by the second Trump administration.  We’ve seen those result in high financial costs, which have translated into cuts. (I’ve been documenting the Trump campaign against the academy in these dour videos.)

The article sees institutions preferring to cut staff instead of faculty, but academics will generally view both as targets in the present and recent past. We’ve seen adjunct and tenured faculty terminated, along with lower-ranked staff and senior administrators.  Much depends on campus politics, of course.  (For examples, consult my latest post on closures, mergers, and cuts, which also links to previous posts in that dark line.)

Any thoughtful piece of writing elicits in some of us the desire to read more from the author in that vein, and I found that with “Eight Predictions.”  I’m curious what Kang makes of the fact that a good numbers of students are adults, not teenagers. Does he anticipate colleges and universities pivot to teach more of the former as the demographic transition does its work?  Or, as I’ve been urging, pivots further to teach senior citizens?

Similarly, I would add all kinds of additional reasons for financial pressures on academic institutions.  Deferred maintenance looms large for some, especially if they built heavily during the low interest rates period or received major gifts without maintenance budgets. Medical costs continue to soar.  Generally, the labor market tends to reward people with advanced degrees, and colleges and universities alike have hired more such faculty and staff across the full range of positions.

On top of that there’s the long-term problem afflicting public institutions (roughly two-thirds of the American system), of state defunding.  Put too simply, after a mid-twentieth century high, states cut back on a per-student basis, which drove state colleges and universities to charge more and stoked up the loans crisis. My favorite quote on this come from a former president of my alma mater, the University of Michigan:

Over the past 30 years we had seen our public support decline from 70% of our operating budget to less than 6% (more specifically, state support of $322 million/year compares to the total University of Michigan budget of $5.5 billion/year). As university president I used to explain that during this period we had evolved from a state-supported to a state-assisted to a state-related to a state-located university. In fact, with Michigan campuses now located in Europe and Asia, we remain only a state-molested institution.

Naturally I’m curious what Kang thinks of some of my specific foci in the future of higher education.  Does he see climate change having any impact on the sector over the next decade?  What does he think of how campuses grapple with this enormous problem through their physical plants, teaching missions, research enterprises, and community/public outreach?

Similarly, I’m fascinated by the credentials arms race, with the undergrad degree now serving as yesterday’s high school diploma. In Peak Higher Ed I wrote about some aspects of this, like the paper ceiling movement, the push for high school students to pursue non-academic work, and the social problems of “elite overproduction.”  All of these issues can exert some influence over post-secondary education through the next decade.

The subject of higher ed’s future is, as you can see, a very large and complicated one.  There are plenty of moving parts within the sector and a whole fleet of external pressures.  Bravo to Jay Caspian Kang for taking a good run at it.