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.
Double Kudos, Bryan!
One Kudo for the “credential arms race” and a second for — just as deep and complex a topic — “elite overproduction”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
More to the point, what Kang describes are on-the-surface trend lines — demographics, AI, enrollment, institutional winners and losers — that all but ignore the extent to which each of these are (a) class-projects, and (b) consistent with neo-liberal flattening of society.
Thus, the story of Demographic decline is not just “fewer customers” but the ways in which the state and “market” jointly decide which classes remain entitled to subsidized formation, and which are abandoned. So, when the story is told as “objective” demography, the political choices disappear — things like wage stagnation become background noise rather than the mechanisms by which some populations were made “non‑viable” customers for college.
A more class‑oriented reading would ask: whose children are being priced or pushed out, and whose are still routed through ever more elaborately credentialed pipelines.
Likewise, Kang’s lament about lowered standards can itself be a class move: it frames the problem as students being less capable when it could just as easily be about how the system has been and continues to reallocating pedagogical and fiscal effort away from mass uplift and toward elite reproduction.
And the idea that AI will force professors to pass students because “the university can’t afford to lose any more students” is a perfect vignette of neoliberal governance: the professor’s authority is subordinated to enrollment and revenue metrics. Even more devastating is how AI — especially in Kang’s framing — has unveiled the sector as one massive sorting algorithm that produces signals that are piped over into another sector for interpretation and additional sorting. But as that signal loses distinctiveness, as it has been in terms of the wage premium, the long term looks more like Apocalypse than “slow burn”.
But even the “community colleges as winners” line covers over what in practice means offloading risk onto the least resourced students and institutions. They enroll more low‑income, first‑gen, and racially marginalized students, with less per‑student funding, weaker advising, and often lower transfer completion rates.
Lastly, adjunctification and the academic labor regime is old news — going back at least 50 years in my experience. When cuts come, Kang says, institutions will prefer to lay off staff (e.g., student success coordinators) rather than core faculty in high‑demand disciplines. But this is the tip of an iceberg — decades‑long adjunctification and casualization of academic labor. What has changed is the growth of admin-based managerial-professional elites that now dominate the entire sector. Why doesn’t Kang grab the bull by the horns and wrestle it down to the ground? Is he afraid of the dirt and dust?
Truth is, Kang’s drone-level view is recognizable to his readers — and his editor(s) at New Yorker.
But we deserve better.
I remember reading Jonathan Schell’s early 1980s series in The New Yorker on the danger of nuclear weapons. It was an eye-opening, life-changing event for me, and many others. Schell did not merely describe a geopolitical condition from above; he forced his readers to descend into its moral and existential depths.
He rendered the abstract intolerable. Nuclear deterrence was not a “system” to be coolly mapped but a standing judgment on human rationality itself — a structure that, once truly seen, implicated the reader in its quiet violence. The same is now true for higher education.
What made Schell’s work in The New Yorker so enduring was not simply its prescience, but its refusal of distance. He wrote as though the reader’s life depended on understanding — and, more importantly, on refusing — the logic he described. It demanded that the reader inhabit the consequences of policy, not merely observe them from above.
By contrast, Kang’s aerial perspective, for all its descriptive competence, leaves intact the very conditions it surveys. It maps without unsettling, catalogs without convicting. One comes away informed, perhaps even impressed, but not changed. And in a moment when our institutional and technological arrangements increasingly operate at scales that evade ordinary perception, this failure is not stylistic — it is ethical.
We do not lack for information. But we lack writing that risks something: that names complicity, that collapses the safe distance between system and self, that restores concrete consequences to such abstraction. The tradition Schell represents is not nostalgic; it is necessary. Without it, journalism becomes another mechanism by which we learn to live comfortably inside structures that ought to trouble us beyond endurance.
Thanks for elevating Kang’s series, Bryan.
I think that Kang doesn’t address the question of adult students because it’s outside his frame; he framed the series as “what will college be like for my daughter [and, inferentially, her classmates]?” And even when he says that, in hindsight, he should have asked about his grandchildren instead, he still seems to be focused on what Ian Bogost has usefully called the collegiate experience: in which the recent high school graduate, old enough to vote and be tried as an adult but too young to drink alcohol legally or rent a car, leaves home and lives semi-independently with a bunch of agemates and has various growing-up experiences while also focusing mostly on completing classes for credit. I think he’s right to think that this experience will be either (a) increasingly limited to a smaller group of students attending better-resourced institutions, (b) much reduced at other institutions from its recent heyday, or (c) both. But the model still holds a powerful sway.
I also continue to think that there are limits to decline. For example, he notes the decline in the college-going rate from 70% in 2009 to 61% “today,” and expects that percentage to continue to fall. It probably will fall, but not infinitely so; I can’t see it falling below, say, 40% without some major policy initiatives to “get more of our high schoolers into college.”
But these are quibbles. In some ways, what he calls “the dearth of truly hot takes” in his predictions points to the validity of his conclusions. He is calling those of us in higher ed to develop stronger arguments for higher education and more public support, and that’s the work we need to do.
#collegemeltdown