The 2031 Crisis in Higher Education: a stark scenario

Greetings from a surprisingly pleasant late July.  Smoke from Canada’s fires has dissipated and temperatures have dwindled to the 80s F.  It’s actually delightful to be outside.

Today’s post is about a scenario for higher ed’s future.  It’s not from me, but created by one Matthew F. Wilson, director of Research Translation and AI Strategy at Baylor’s Institute for Global Human Flourishing.  “The 2031 Crisis in Higher Education” is a dark one, imagining an accelerating decline for American colleges and universities.

Some of the scenario’s details will be familiar to my readers, starting with demographic effects.  The One Big Beautiful Bill Act plays a role by cutting loans (and therefore enrollment) while also threatening academic programs without good ROI.  State funding to public universities declines again, while demand for skilled trades rises.

Wilson’s scenario adds some more details.  I was struck by his imagining that professional schools collapse, mostly due to AI, and with them their subsidies to the rest of their institutions.  Wilson also projects this interesting and sad fate for AI literacy:

A child who began using Claude or its successors at age thirteen grew up building projects with AI assistants. They learned to prompt naturally the way earlier generations learned to Google, and this new generation did not need a $160,000 degree to become “AI literate.” They already were. By 2029, most high schools had absorbed AI tools into everyday coursework the way they’d once absorbed graphing calculators. AI was no longer a subject to study but infrastructure to use.

“The 2031 Crisis in Higher Education” anticipates an Intelligence Recession starting in 2029, as AI devours early entry jobs.  Following that, it offers a sobering glimpse of Congressional action:

The emergency workforce legislation that passed in the summer of 2030 created retraining vouchers, expanded community college funding, and established portable benefit accounts for displaced workers. Every dollar was aimed at individuals.⁴³ Not a single provision was directed at sustaining four-year colleges or universities. The political constituency for “save my job” had overwhelmed the one chanting “save my alma mater.”

Crucially, all of these developments combine and exacerbate each other.  Wilson imagines that process as a doom loop:

One key assumption of this scenario is that most colleges and universities will be unable to redesign themselves for the changing time.  The author sees boards and governments blocking changes, and tenure protecting faculty lines.  Clearly the scenario’s purpose is to spur imaginative actions.

I had some questions and issues with the scenario. I am curious about how the richest institutions survive the Trump campaign.  Indeed, the Trump family only appears twice and Republicans not at all.  The scenario’s assumption that corporations will increasingly not require undergraduate degrees is one we’ve discussed for decades, but it hasn’t happened yet.  The computer science enrollment drop is an important one, but I’m not sure we can generalize from that to other fields.  More, like most people the author doesn’t distinguish between the demographic cliff and the broader, more sustained demographic transition.  The scenario tends to focus on residential schools teaching traditional-age undergraduates, underplaying community colleges and other campuses significantly enrolling adult learners, although it does have CCs triumph at the end.

All of that said, it’s a fascinating and daunting scenario.  It’s an interesting vision of my post-peak higher ed world.

See what you make of it and how it might describe your situation.

(thanks to Dahn Shaulis)