Greetings from August, that time when academics teaching fall classes are in various stages of excitement, redesign, and panic.
Out of the many questions I’m considering for this fall term, one I wanted to share today concerns international students in American colleges and universities. Actually, that’s two questions. First, how far will enrollment shrink? Second, what are the possible impacts on academia?
To recap the reasons for shrinkage: the new Trump administration has been doing all kinds of things which could deter would-be students from applying to, much less attending American campuses. Detaining international students, officials proclaiming some of those students to be terrible people, making visa applications more difficult, targeting students for their speech, implementing travel bans do not make the nation’s post-secondary sector more appealing. Geopolitical tensions, notably with China and now with India, might discourage some people. (My YouTube series on Trump vs higher ed offers a more detailed survey.) Memories of anti-Asian sentiments and actions from the COVID era linger. And stories of gun violence on or near campuses, like last week’s shooting causing an Emory University lockdown, don’t help things.
Ironically, this should be a moment when American colleges and universities could win more international students. Other Anglophonic nations – Canada, Britain, Australia – are experiencing declines in their international recruitment for various, often self-inflicted reasons. The United States is in a fine position to take advantage… or was, until Trump unleashed his anti-academic campaign.
It is still early to get good data on fall 2025 international enrollment. Anecdotally, academics have told me stories of individual campuses and programs seeing smaller foreign student numbers. Professionals have given me widely varying estimates of a decline from 5-40%. NAFSA published models based on a 30-40% drop.
I’m waiting for the next Open Doors report, which should arrive in September, hopefully.
And things may well change during the academic year, possibly for the worse. We could see international students arrive on campuses in August-September, then return to their home countries over the next few months depending on what happens in the US. I can think of many possible events which could drive enrolled students away: more university violence, more federal travel bans, troop presence in or adjacent to campus grounds, well publicized acts of bigotry, geopolitical events (tariffs, blockades, acts of war). We’ll have to look to spring 2026 to get a real handle on actual numbers.
What impact might a significant decline in international student numbers have?
To begin with, there could be a reduction in the cultural and interpersonal benefits of international study. Fewer students would experience that challenging and rewarding time of learning in America. Fewer academics (students, faculty, staff) would have the opportunity of engaging and learning from students drawn from other nations. American campuses become a touch less global, a bit more parochial.
There is also a potential hit to campus finances. International students tend to pay full price for their education, unlike a good number of Americans, and might even pay more, so institutions will lose some of that revenue. This would hit campuses already suffering from financial stresses quite hard, stresses caused by Trump actions and/or from trends predating this year.
More broadly, international students contribute to local economies and the national economy overall. That NAFSA student I mentioned earlier estimates “nearly $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer jobs.”
One additional impact of a potential drop might be a hit to American global academic influence and leadership. As Trisha Tewari observed in the Times of India, “[t]he economic losses are measurable, the academic consequences visible, but the erosion of America’s global leadership in education may be the deepest wound of all.”
Please remember that such an outcome is very contingent on many different developments across multiple domains: popular culture, geopolitics, academic institutions, media, national politics, and more. America might escape such a decline if nations and families decide sending people to the United States is worth the risk. Interest in certain fields, notably AI and STEM in general, might overcome political and cultural barriers. And the reduction in competition with Canada, Australia, and Britain might boost enrollment.
In the meantime, I think it’s prudent to plan for the possibility of an international student decline. We in academia might also be wise to be extra careful given the deepening threat environment. Some of us might also step up to critique and resist the situation.
Greetings from a northeastern Virginia where the heat has been brutal. For several weeks we lived under temperatures reaching 100 ° F, while humidity sopped everything badly enough that the “feels like” reading hit 110. (And the Trump administration decided to federalize and militarize DC – that’s for another post.)
North of us, epic wildfires burned swathes of Canada. “‘It’s the size of New Brunswick, to put it into context,’ Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University, told CBC News.” This is apparently the second worst fire year on record. Climate change has not only increased temperatures in that nation but dried out regions, making them tinder.
Parts of Europe are also suffering under horrendous heat waves. As a result the region is experiencing upticks in fires, heat exhaustion, and deaths. Temperatures are hitting the 30s and even 40s (centigrade; for Americans, this means upper 90s and over 100 F).
I’d like to explain about how these are predictable outcomes of the worsening climate crisis, how global warming is doing precisely what we thought it would do, but I’d also like to get in the habit of issuing shorter blog posts. Besides, I suspect my readers either get the point or have turned away by now.
What I wanted to focus on today was a recent connection made between Europe’s fierce summar, the climate crisis… and digital technology. Britain is suffering under drought conditions exacerbated by global warming, a drought so harsh that the government has assembled a National Drought Group to organize responses. (One of my shorthand expressions for thinking of climate change is that regions with too much water will receive more, while those with less, less. A kind of climate Matthew Effect. The UK drought is an exception for now.)
Yesterday the drought team issued a report on the crisis, summing up steps various local authorities are taking along with series of recommendations for Britons wanting to take actions against the drought. I’d like to draw your attention to one of them:
Fiery red box not in the original.
“Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.”
There’s much we can say or ask about that single line. Just how much of an impact does cloud computing hosting have on British water use? If this is aimed at residents, are businesses or the government taking similar measures? Should one use cloud services not colocated in drought-stricken areas?
At a broader level I wonder about the possibility that the growing anti-digital movement, which some call the techlash, might finally become focused on climate implications. Do we decide that advanced computing (think generative AI or bitcoin mining) has too large a footprint and must be curtailed? Or do we instead assess its climate benefits – crunching vast arrays of data, running simulations, generating new research – as outweighing these costs?
For years I’ve been asking audiences about the climate-digital connection. I’ve asked people to imagine individual and group choices they might have to make in the future as the crisis worsens and electricity becomes more fragile, more restricted. These are provocative, clarifying questions. Think of choosing between WiFi and air conditioning, or cloud computing versus refrigeration. And now we have a first glimpse of that future with the British government requesting Britons to cut back their digital memories. We can imagine new questions in that light. How would you choose between streaming video and potable water, or Zoom versus crop irrigation?
The Higher Education Inquirer reminds us of the higher education implications.
For colleges and universities, the connection between digital behavior and resource conservation is an opportunity to model sustainability. Digital housekeeping campaigns could encourage staff and students to purge outdated files, trim redundant email chains, and archive with intent. Institutions can audit cloud storage use, revisit data retention policies, and prioritize providers that invest in energy- and water-efficient infrastructure. These choices can be paired with curriculum initiatives that make students aware of the climate–digital nexus, grounding sustainability not just in labs and gardens, but in inboxes and servers.
Indeed. These actions are available to us, should we choose to take them.
Yet this is a difficult conversation to have now, at least in the United States, as the Trump administration attacks climate science even to the point of hurling a satellite out of Earth orbit. Businesses are walking back climate commitments. Journalists don’t mention the crisis very often. Democrats are falling silent. Yet, strangely enough, climate change continues, ratcheting up steadily. We must think and act in response. That means, among other things, rethinking our digital infrastructure and practices.
When will the first American college or university cost more than $100,000 per year to attend?
I first raised this question back in 2018. I was studying higher education finances, doing some basic extrapolations, and wondered about the possibility of an upcoming six figure price as a milestone. Would campus pricing continue to rise to that level? If so, when would the first institution breach it? How might academics and the broader world respond?
After raising the question I have followed it up fairly regularly ever since, with blog posts in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. With each entry I checked in with a group of campuses and their published prices. I developed a forecast, honing it over time, of the most expensive universities crossing over the $100,000/annum barrier around the 2026-2027 academic year.
It looks like I was one year late. Because two American campuses just broke that barrier, for the 2025-2026 academic year. And so far it hasn’t caused a ruckus.
Before I go further, a word of background. The six figure price might be astonishing, but remember that only a handful of campuses would – will – charge anything near that price. The lion’s share of American colleges and universities post lower, usually far lower amounts. Moreover, the widespread practice of tuition discounting means a lot of students attending that handful of highly-priced schools don’t pay the full price. Grants, scholarships, work-study, etc. cut down what a good number of students actually end up paying. No, our focus today is on a sliver of the academia – but a disproportionately influential one, and perhaps a group which tells us something about higher education as a whole.
I’m also focusing on undergraduate, residential education. These leaves off commuters who don’t pay housing, although they pay for their own in some way. It also doesn’t include graduate schools, which often charge more for tuition, although rarely have a residential component.
So what just happened?
A few months ago Wellesley College (private, liberal arts, Massachusetts) posted their 2025-2026 “Tuition and Cost” page. It breaks down prices for services a student would engage, including tuition ($69,800), housing ($11,520), meals ($10,776), a student activity fee ($344), and health insurance ($4,051). That page then estimates prices for additional and very likely expenses incurred when living on campus for that time: books ($800), personal expenses ($1,250), and travel/transportation ($0 to $2,000). If we accept all of those figures for now, and assume the full 2K transportation figure and that a student doesn’t forego medical insurance, the total is $100,541. Inside Higher Ed summed it up: “Wellesley now appears to be the most expensive college in the country.”
(We could take issue with some of these numbers. Perhaps a student saves money living off campus, lucks out with professors assigning a lot of open educational resources instead of pricy textbooks, skips health insurance or gets it some other way, and somehow travels for free. Alternatively, prices could well be higher if the student has to buy high end materials, travels over the 2K cap, or spends more on food. For now let’s use the posted numbers.)
Similarly, around 20 miles away Tufts University (private research university) posted their undergraduate cost of attendance for the upcoming year. Under “Costs Paid to the School” we find tuition ($71,982), housing ($10,660), food ($8,906), and unspecified fees ($1,634). Next, under “Out-of-Pocket Expenses (Costs Paid to Others) for All Students” stand books and supplies ($1,000) and personal expenses ($1,846). Transportation doesn’t get a dollar amount, as they prefer this explanation:”Varies, based on how far from Tufts a student’s home is.” Tufts has health insurance on a separate page, where we learn that “[t]he cost of the individual student plan is… estimated to be $4693 in 2025-2026.” I total this up at $100,721. Again, we can adjust numbers slightly. On the upward side, Tufts mentions that campus housing is $1928 more for juniors and seniors, and transportation costs are going to be something for many students.
In other words, we’ve established two campuses broke the six figure barrier, based on their own published numbers. It’s something of a historical moment. On a personal note I was gratified that some journalists turned to my blog work on this topic, citing it or interviewing me.
So why does this matter? For one, while the campuses noted above are financial outliers, they are not entirely alone. Other colleges and universities seem to be pressing close behind them. Here’s a chart from Boston’s Business Journal, looking at the most expensive schools in just that state:
We can find institutions pushing towards the six figure milestone across the nation. Let’s check back on the leaders from prior posts. Colorado College estimates $99,035 for students who accept their health insurance. Amherst College looks like $99,116. The University of Miami will charge $98,118. Harvey Mudd? $98,984. The University of Southern California? $99,139. Washington University estimates $97,995. Northwestern University: $96,236. Stanford University: $96,513. Wesleyan University: “$96,596 (frosh) / $96,296 (continuing students)”. New York University’s College of Arts and Science: $96,988. Vassar College: $96,668. Cornell University: “Total, (Billed + Non-Billed) $96,268.” The University of Pennsylvania: $95,612. Brown University: $95,984. Vanderbilt looks around $93,000. There are others.
Where does this take us next year? Inflation right now stands at 2.7%. I’ll round academic price inflation to 3%, since we tend to run higher than consumer goods. At that rate we might expect any institution charging around $97,500 or more to join Tufts and Wellesley in breaking the six figure barrier, like Amherst, Colorado College, Harvard, Harvey Mudd, Smith, University of Miami, University of Southern California, and Washington University. Others might as well, of course, depending on individual circumstances and if general inflation ticks upward. We shouldn’t be surprised to see a dozen or more schools in the six figure club by spring 2026.
Second, these top-level prices remind us that the wealthiest families tend to get even richer. Some of them pay full freight and can do so because their financial situations are accelerating away from the rest of ours. American academic financial structures reflect (and to an extend contribute to) our escalating income and wealth inequality.
Third… to be honest, I thought breaking the six figure threshold would cause a stir. Americans can be very price sensitive. Our culture has an unhealthy obsession with the economic elite. And polling shows the nation to be concerned about college costs. As one thoughtful Canadian observer, Stephen Downes, wrote: “The survey paints a picture of an education system that has gone very wrong, and is designed to preserve privilege rather than advance the interests of society.”
Yet apart from a few articles in the higher education, nonprofit, and business presses, respectively, Tufts and Wellesley didn’t cause any other ripples. Perhaps we simply accept these new figures as an expression of an inflationary era. Maybe we’ve grown to expect elite campuses to charge elite prices. It could be we’re focused on what institutions charge, setting aside the other costs of residential study. Or, and I suspect this is more likely, most people haven’t heard.
Here’s how I concluded my last blog on this topic:
Perhaps we will grow accustomed to the six figure bracket, much as we accepted campuses charging above $90,000 without much complaint. Fees of $104,000 and up will simply express value. Alternatively, six figures will become the new lazy river, a much-cited figure, then a cliche, symbolizing academic greed, waste, fecklessness, or whichever other feature the speaker wishes to evoke.
It seems that we are more supportive, or at least more sympathetic, than we have been lately, according to a new Gallup poll:
After worsening over the past decade, Americans’ confidence in higher education showed a modest reversal in that trend this year. The improved outlook has occurred across most societal subgroups. At a time when higher education confidence is improved but remains below the majority level, solid majorities of Americans still believe that higher education benefits individuals and society in a variety of ways, particularly by increasing knowledge, innovation and prosperity.
Gallup broke this up by subgroups, starting with race: “Confidence among Black and Hispanic Americans is slightly above the national average, at 49% and 50%, respectively.” Additionally,
Increased confidence in higher education since last year is seen among most societal subgroups, including college graduates (up six percentage points to 48%) and those without a four-year college degree (up seven points to 40%). The major U.S. political party groups show similar increases, with Democrats up five points (to 61%) and independents and Republicans up six points each (to 41% and 26%, respectively).
We are a bit more pleased with community colleges than four-year institutions:
There is a noteworthy political divide over institutional types:
All party groups are more confident in four-year institutions than they were last year, with increases around 10 points for each subgroup. Still, significant party gaps remain: 66% of Democrats, 40% of independents and 26% of Republicans are confident in four-year colleges.
Confidence in two-year institutions has increased more among Republicans (up 12 points) than independents (6 points) and Democrats (no meaningful change). Party gaps in confidence in two-year colleges are smaller than the gaps for four-year institutions because Republicans and independents are significantly more confident in two-year than four-year colleges. Democrats now have similar confidence in each type of institution.
Gallup also asked respondents about different potential values of higher ed, and these results are interesting:
We are happier this year with quality of education and especially innovation, but less pleased with higher ed for fostering opportunities.
When asked why respondents were unhappy with higher ed, nearly 40% said it was for political reasons “political agendas.”
Note what people want to see from higher ed to improve it: “practical teaching” and ” be less politically biased” lead, along with lowering costs.
My intuition is that we’re seeing responses to the Trump administration’s campaign against higher education (here’s my ongoing video series on the topic). Some of those supporting Trump are pleased by the many actions against colleges and universities, but more people are horrified by international student deportations, budget cuts, etc. Perhaps protests against those actions have also boosted public support.
I do wonder if rising anxiety about AI and jobs is reflected here as well. Perhaps a solid number of Americans, fearing job losses due to the technology, are returning to old habits of viewing colleges and universities as ways to strengthen themselves on the job market.
Looking ahead, I hope this improved collective attitude persists.
Happy 36th World Population Day, everyone. This United Nations-decreed event asks us to consider demographics and I’ll do so in this post. I’ll start with a recap of what we know and where we stand, then offer some futures reflections. These will be macro, big picture discussions.
Three quick notes before we proceed. First, demographics is a tricky subject to discuss. The topic involves sex, bodies, personal choice, death, and religion, all easily capable of vexing us. In the American context I call this the worst possible Thanksgiving dinner conversation. Additionally, in my experience of researching, talking, and writing about demographics I find a lot of people like to adhere to what they saw of demographics decades ago. Second, and speaking of which, I’ve been working on this topic also for decades. You can find plenty of posts on this site as well as material in some of my books. Audiences in my talks know I love mentioning demographics because it’s an important tool in the futurist’s toolbox. We can find plenty of data and analysis in the demographics field, as well as in the insurance industry and national policies. Third, I’m going to focus on population ages for this post, because the topic is so deep. Demographics of race, gender, ethnicity need their own posts.
To start with, recall the literally extraordinary boom in the human population in recent history. For millennia the total number of people was relatively stable until increasing in the early modern era. Then the first industrial revolution set in and woosh!
In my own lifetime (born 1967) the human population more than doubled. The reasons are pretty clear: revolutionary improvements in public health, medicine, and agriculture helped more children live to adulthood. We gradually responded to this boom culturally and politically with anxieties and policies about overpopulation. You can see this in the historical record from movies and bestselling books to national population controlefforts. I still hear people, mostly older ones, state that overpopulation is a major global crisis.
Then reality pulled the rug out from under all of that. While the population and our fears shot up, women quietly stopped having so many children. Demographers offer a number, 2.1, which describes the number of children a woman must have during her lifetime for a total population to remain stable – not growing, not shrinking, but a plateau. Historically women have had higher numbers (5, 6, 9) and hence the population explosion. But childbirth rates have crept downwards or plummeted. Today in country after country that childbirth number is under 2, heading down to one. At the same time people are living longer and longer lives. The median age of populations has been rising.
The reasons for this development are pretty well understood. In a word, it’s modernity. Improvements in public health and medicine extended lifespans. Women entering the workforce, receiving access to more education, and gaining more reproductive power drastically cut birth rates. The decline in religious faith also played a role.
This is a gigantic transformation. It’s nearly unprecedented, except for the worst plagues – and this time we are making it happen with our choices. Demographers blandly describe it as “the demographic transition.”
It’s also unevenly distributed around the world. Roughly speaking nations which went through modernity then experience the transition. You can see this at a glance in maps like this one:
Note that number on the Statista map: childbirth globally fell to 2.2. As a species we’re just about at the stability level.
You can see that many countries have fallen below replacement: most of North America, all of Europe, large parts of Asia and the Pacific world, much of South America. And you can see the nations still producing baby surpluses, India and central Asia, but notably in subSaharan Africa. That’s where the demographic future lies for the next generation. That unevenness propels many political and economic strategies, like China’s One Belt, One Road which drives right through those regions.
The demographic transition has implications for nearly every aspect of life. There are economic impacts as the number of working-age people starts to dwindle, and as the retired population grows. This has already resulted in calls for changing (rising) the retirement age, cutting social services, and so on. In America we’ve seen more and more people working after age 65; I fully expect to do so myself. Marketing may shift away from targeting teens and young adults as those populations dwindle. Cultures which see themselves as youthful may change. Rural areas, which tend to age and shrink faster than urban ones, may experience declines or cease to exist, becoming new ghost towns.
This is one reason international immigration is such a fraught topic. On the one hand there is the argument that nations seeing their working-age population shrink should import workers from the countries still producing people at scale. During the Cold War West Germany did this with Turkish workers in their Gastarbeiter program. In the United States we see something similar where farms in areas lacking would-be workers employ migrants for agricultural work. Of course, this is also a way to hire staff for less pay, as people coming from the developing world/global south are more likely to accept lower compensation. Famously (or notoriously) such demand for immigration also elicits anti-immigrant sentiment and politics, which we now see in many national governments, including my own.
This ties into a rising natalist movement, as I’ve long been forecasting. Some nations have tried to grow their fertility rates through various means, like giving tax breaks or awards to mothers. I’m fond of Denmark’s ad campaign to send young couple on holiday to have sex. “Do it for mom” is the slogan. Seriously, I’m not making this up:
All of the efforts have flopped. The natalist movement, which seems small right now, wants to succeed where they failed, through a mix of government subsidies and culture war nostrums. Naturally there are various cultural and political currents intertwined here, from racism (have more children of the race we prefer) to religion (be fruitful and multiply) to sexism (seeing women as primarily baby machines). Others argue for economic reasons (have more kids to become workers and taxpayers). Still others call for more people to increase chances of more exceptional talents arising. Bryan Caplan says large families are just personally, even selfishly awesome. You can see how the demographic transition weaves through so many issues and beliefs.
On another yet related front, Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson have argued that shrinking and aging nations might be less likely to go to war, a state of affairs they dubbed “geriatric peace.” John was a great guest on the Future Trends Forum back in 2020:
Bricker and Ibbitson brought up an additional wrinkle in the problem, noting that the United Nations’ population projections have repeatedly been too high. Marc Novicoff recently noted the same:
Every two years, the UN’s demographers revise their population projections, and for the past 10 years, they’ve always had to revise in the same direction: down. Next year, they’ll do so again. In reality, the worldwide population decline is set to begin decades ahead of their expectations. Because global fertility trends are much worse than they, and probably you, think.
Like I said, this is a hard topic to discuss and reality just keeps pulling the rug out from under many of us.
So when does the total population plateau, then decline, reversing a centuries-old course? When is peak human, at least in terms of sheer numbers? The total won’t fall right away because of “population momentum,” the fact that it takes time for people to age and for societies to experience this transition. The United Nations thinks we’ll max out in the 2080s at just over 10 billion of us. Another group of researchers project an earlier date: “the global population was projected to peak in 2064 at 9·73 billion (8·84–10·9) people and decline to 8·79 billion (6·83–11·8) in 2100.”
What might this world look like? I’ve already mentioned some of the cultural and political responses starting to appear. We can think of others. We might see struggles over (potentially shrinking) public funds between services for elders (growing) versus children (dwindling). What might happen to the built environment – repurposing elementary, then secondary schools as elder care facilities, or turning depopulated towns back to nature a la EO Wilson’s half Earth idea? How will we react to the glimpse of societies and nations ending? Will we see cultural clashes over ageism, as employers compete for fewer younger workers and try to avoid hiring more expensive seniors? Will fewer new ideas surface, as some have argued, or will we support more innovation stemming from older folks? Will women still have access to reproductive capacity or will more governments and civil society actors seek to block it for demographic reasons (among others)? Will assisted suicide become more accepted by people impatient with large bodies of elders? As some rural regions decline, will cities continue to grow in response, accelerating urbanization? I can imagine several vast cities surrounded by large areas large empty of people as nature reclaims towns, inhabited by people nominally retiring at 75 but often working past that point. I can also envision governments defaulting on debt and declaring bankruptcy when they can no longer manage their new economic order.
This is one reason for the major push to develop robots. If there are fewer human workers, why not build more machines to do their jobs? We’ve already done quite a bit of this in some manual labor sectors, like automotive construction, and there is a lot of R&D going on to go beyond that. We’re already seeing robots used in policing, war, food service, deliveries, and more. Perhaps we’ll see the same successfully deployed in care services – already New York state claims its use of companionbots for isolated elders is working well. Imagine cities where robots outnumber people in streets and homes, where single individuals manage a swarm of robots to help them with the many functions of life, including personal interaction. Consider a world where a substantial number of people prefer the automated machine world to humans and such preferences further drive down childbirth. However, robots do not pay taxes nor spend money into the economy, making them only a partial solution.
And obviously the demographic transition impacts education. Start with primary schools, where numbers fall wherever the transition occurs. Secondary schools follow suit in just a few years. Class sizes can shrink, which may be great news for instructors and students alike, but this may also lead to reducing the number of teachers or closing schools. I experienced this in Vermont during the 2000s and 2010s, a state which raced through the demographic transition in a hurry, yielding a big, bipartisan push to cut K-12 spending and to close schools.
Higher education is next, starting with campuses which focus on traditional-age (circa 18-22 years old) undergraduates. Their pipeline shrinks, which triggers more inter-institutional competition. Those who lose out face program and staff cuts, mergers, or closures, as we’ve seen and I’ve been recording. Some of these colleges and universities may pivot to teach more adult learners, as some schools (community colleges, open enrollment state universities) already do. Perhaps some will reach out to teach senior citizens, as I’ve been urging. Will we see education departments, which prepare K-12 teachers, decrease while health care programs aimed at senior citizens boom? Funders and state governments are very aware of the demographic transitions and make education policies accordingly. As I saw in Vermont, it is hard to make the case for maintaining a certain educational system in the face of demographic changes.
Let me close with my typical futurist’s caveats. None of this is 100% certain, as people are creative creatures capable of all sorts of things. Perhaps the Natalists will score a cultural victory and convince women to have more children, although I think this very unlikely. Maybe conservative religious believers will in the generations to come become more culturally and politically powerful and drive up fertility through various, some dystopian means. We might invent and build out artificial wombs, as Shulamith Firestone called for, and use them to produce children without women giving birth. The natural world may, of course, have its way with us, perhaps sending another pandemic to brutally cull swathes of the species. That might accelerate the childbirth decline while cutting down seniors, and might in years to come yield a baby boom as a devastated world seeks to recover.
Speaking of nature and humanity, climate change plays many roles in the demographic transition. Some may – and do – celebrate a reduction in the human race as it might reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Perceptions of climate stress and disasters can drive immigration from afflicted areas, feeding into the migration challenges mentioned above. Some of the most endangered regions, like Sub-Saharan Africa, may suffer population loss due to climate-driven storms, heat increases, floods, and more.
One last note on this World Population Day. I think the demographic transition we’re living through and which will transform civilization plays a key part in what I’ve called the emergence of two competing ideologies of the future. Briefly, one side seeks to continue the industrial revolutions’ exceptional growth on all kinds of metrics – science, technology, lifespan, projection of power, educational attainment, space exploration, etc. – and therefore wants us to keep growing the human population. The other wants us to pause or shrink our civilization, either because it’s morally the right thing to do or because systemic problems will force us to. This side celebrates the dwindling of humanity’s population as a force for good in the natural environment, as well as for personal liberation and social justice. And perhaps they’ll see interpret an economic decline caused by fewer workers as a benign goad for degrowth. Neither side has formal names yet (I’ve been working with “hypermodernist” and “demodernist”), but I think you’ll see their competing worldviews surface more and more as we work through this vast transformation.
If you’d like to read more about this topic, I recommend a good essay by Nicholas Eberstadt. Keep thinking about demographics, everyone.
Greetings from early July. I’m back home in northern Virginia where the heat is blazing and the humidity sopping. Weather.com thinks it “feels like 102° F” and I agree. The cats also agree, because they retreated elegantly inside to air conditioning after a brief outside stroll.
I wrote “back home” because my wife and I spent last week celebrating our 32nd anniversary in Canada (here’s one snapshot). Afterwards I was hoping to get back into the swing of things, blogging, Substacking, vlogging various topics already under way, but things have been advancing at such a manic pace that I have to leap in in a hurry.
Case in point: after blogging about campus closures, cuts, and mergers last month more closures and cuts (albeit no mergers) have appeared in just the past few weeks. In this post you’ll see a list of these, with links to supporting news stories and official documents. Alas, this has become a tradition on this site. (From last year: March 1, March 20, March 28, April, May, June, July, September, November. From this year: February, June.) My book on peak higher education is now in the editing process; hopefully by the time it appears the topic won’t be simply historical.
Today we’ll touch on one closure, then focus on cuts, with a few reflections at the end.
1. Closing colleges and universities
In Michigan Siena Heights University (Catholic) will close after the upcoming academic year. The reasons: “the financial situation, operational challenges, and long-term sustainability,” according to the official statement. A local account concurs, “citing rising costs and stiffer competition for new students.”
The official website doesn’t reflect this on its front page.
2. Program and staffing cuts
Also in Michigan, Concordia University (Lutheran) is shutting down most of its Ann Arbor campus programs. A much smaller set of offerings is what’s next:
Starting June 2025, the private Lutheran institution will offer just nine programs — all in medical-related fields — on its physical campus. That’s down from 53 campus programs the university currently lists on its website. It will offer another seven online programs, mostly in education fields, which is down from more than 60 currently.
Also nearby, Michigan State University (public, research) announced its intention to cut faculty and staff positions this year. The drivers: inflation boosting costs, especially in health care; Trump administration research funding cuts; possible state support cuts; potential international student reduction.
Brown University (research; Rhode Island) is planning to cut an unspecified number of staff this summer. Furthermore, “[a]dditional measures include scaling back capital spending and adjusting graduate admissions levels after limiting budget growth for doctoral programs earlier this year.” The reasons here are financial, but based on the Trump administration’s cuts to federal research funding, not enrollment problems.
The Indiana Commission for Higher Educationannounced shutting down a huge sweep of academic programs across that state’s public universities. More than 400 degrees will end, with 75 ended outright and 333 “merged or consolidated” with other programs. The whole list is staggering. There’s a lot of detail in that Indiana plan, from defining student minima to establishing various options for campuses, appealing closures to timelines for revving up new degrees. It’s unclear how many faculty and/or staff cuts will follow.
Columbia College Chicago (private, arts focused) laid off twenty full-time professors. The school is facing enrollment declines and financial problems. Nearly all of these faculty member are – were – tenure track, which makes this another example of the queen sacrifice.
University of California-Santa Cruz (public, research) is terminating its German and Persian language programs, laying off their instructors. This sounds part of a broader effort to cut costs against a deficit, a deficit caused by “rising labor costs and constrained student enrollment growth,” according to officials.
Boston University (private, research) announced it would lay off 120 staff members as part of a budget-cutting strategy. BU will also close 120 open staff positions and “around 20 positions will undergo a change in schedule” (I’m not sure what that means – shift from full time to part?). The reasons: Trump administration cuts and uncertainty, plus the longstanding issues of “rising inflation, changing demographics, declining graduate enrollment, and the need to adapt to new technologies.”
The president of Temple University (public, research, Pennsylvania) discussed job cuts as part of a 5% budget cut. Reasons include lower enrollment which led to “a structural deficit [for which] university reserves were used to cover expenses.”
Champlain College (Vermont) is closing some low-enrolling majors. The avowed goal is to
“design a new ‘career-focused’ curriculum for the fall of 2026 ‘that is focused on and driven by employer needs and student interests.'”
The accounting program, for instance, saw its enrollment decline from 60 students in 2015 to 20 in February 2024, according to documents from the school’s Academic Affairs Committee. The law program, similarly, had little student interest, Hernandez said, and had only three students apply in the fall of 2023, while the data analytics program had only two applications.
At the same time the school is facing serious challenges. Enrollment has sunk from 4,778 students in 2016 to 3,200 last year. The college ran deficits in some reason years and a federal audit criticized the amount of debt it carries. This year “the college’s bond rating was lowered, and its outlook downgraded to ‘negative’ by S&P Global Ratings.”
Looking across the lake from Burlington, near Champlain’s campus back in 2017: a cheery image to balance sad stories.
A small but symbolic cut is under way at Albright College (private, liberal arts, Pennsylvania), whose president decided to sell their art college at auction. “It includes pieces by Karel Appel, Romare Bearden, Robert Colescott, Bridget Riley, Leon Golub, Jasper Johns, Jacob Lawrence, Marisol, Gordon Parks, Jesús Rafael Soto and Frederick Eversley, among others.”
Why do this? according to the administration, it was a question of relative value:
“We needed to stop the bleeding,” says James Gaddy, vice-president for administration at Albright, noting that over the past two years the college has experienced shortfalls of $20m. Calling himself and the college’s president Debra Townsley, both of whom were hired last year, “turn-around specialists”, Gaddy claimed that Albright’s 2,300-object art collection was “not core to our mission” as an educational institution and was costing the college more than the art is worth.
“The value of the artworks is not extraordinary,” he says, estimating the total value of the pieces consigned to Pook & Pook at $200,000, but claimed that the cost of maintaining the collection was high and that the cost of staffing the art gallery where the objects were displayed and (mostly) stored was “more than half a million dollars” a year.
A screenshot of some of the auction lots.
3 Budget crises, programs cut, not laying off people yet
Cornell University is preparing staff cuts in the wake of Trump administration research funding reductions.
The University of Minnesota’s administration agreed to a 7.5% cut across its units, along with a tuition increase. The president cited frozen state support and rising costs.
New York University (NYU) announced a 3% budget cut. So far this is about “emphasizing cuts to such functions as travel, events, meals, and additional other-than-personal-service (OTPS) items.” NYU will keep on not hiring new administrators and is encouraging some administrators and tenured professors to retire.
Yale University paused ten ongoing construction projects because of concerns about cuts to federal monies.
Reflections
Many of these stories reflect trends I’ve been observing for a while. Declining enrollment is a major problem for most institutions. The strategy of cutting jobs to balance a budget remains one at least some leaders find useful. The humanities tend to suffer more cuts than others (scroll down the Indiana pdf for a sample). Depending on the state, state governments can increase budget problems or alter academic program offerings.
The second Trump administration’s campaign against higher education is drawing blood, as we can see from universities citing the federal research cuts in their budgets and personnel decisions. Note that this is before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s provisions take hold, from capping student aid to increasing endowment taxes. And this is also before whatever decrease will appear with international student enrollment this fall. (Here’s my video series on Trump vs higher ed; new episode is in the pipeline.)
Note the number of elite institutions in today’s post. In the past I’ve been told that the closures, mergers, and cuts primarily hit low-ranked and marginal institutions, which was sometimes true. But now we’re seeing top tier universities enacting budget cuts, thanks to the Trump administration.
Let me close by reminding everyone that these are human stories. Program cuts hurt students’ course of student. Budget cuts impact instructors and staff of all kinds. When we see the statistics pile up we can lose sight of the personal reality. My heart goes out to everyone injured by these institutional moves.
Finally, I’d like to invite anyone with information on a college or university’s plans to close, merge, or cut to share them with me, either as comments on this post, as notes on social media, or by contacting me privately here. I write these posts based largely on public, open intelligence (news reports, investigations, roundups) but also through tips, since higher education sometimes has issues with transparency. We need better information on these events.
(thanks to Will Emerson, Karl Hakkarainen, Kristen Nyht, Cristián Opazo, Peter Shea, Jason Siko, George Station, Nancy Smyth, Ed Webb, and Andrew Zubiri for supplying links and feedback)
The radio program/podcast Marketplace hosted me as a guest last week to speak to the question. You can listen to it* or read my notes below, or both. I have one reflection at the end of this post building on one interview question.
One caveat or clarification before I get hate mail: the focus of the show was entirely on higher education’s economics. We didn’t discuss the non-financial functions of post-secondary schooling because that’s not what the show (called “Marketplace”) is about, Nor did we talk about justifying academic study for reasons of personal development, family formation, the public good, etc. The conversation was devoted strictly to the economic proposition.
The hosts, Kimberly Adams and Reema Khrais, began by asking if higher ed still made financial sense. Yes, I answered, for a good number of people – but not everyone. Much depends on your degree and your institution’s reputation. And I hammered home the problem of some college but no degree. The hosts asked if that value proposition was declining. My response: the perception of that value is dropping. Here I emphasized the reality, and the specter, of student debt, along with anxieties about AI and politics. Then I added my hypothesis that the “college for all” consensus is breaking up.
Next the hosts asked me what changing (declining) attitudes about higher education mean for campuses. I responded by outlining the many problems, centered around the financial pressures many schools are under. I noted Trump’s damages then cited my peak higher education model. Marketplace asked me to explain the appeal of alternatives to college (the skilled trades, certificates, boot camps, etc), which I did, and then we turned to automation, which I broke up into AI vs robotics, before noting gender differences.
Back to college for all: which narrative succeeds it? I didn’t have a good, single answer right away. We touched on a resurgence of vocational technology, then I sang the praises of liberal education. We also talked about the changing value of different degrees – is the BA the new high school diploma? Is a master’s degree still a good idea? I cited the move to reduce degree demands from certain fields, as well as the decline of the humanities, the crisis of computer science, and the growing importance of allied health.
After my part ended, Adams and Khrais pondered the role of higher education as a culture war battlefield. Different populations might respond in varied ways – perhaps adults are more into the culture war issues, and maybe women (already the majority of students) are at greater risk of automation.
So what follows the end of college for all?
If the American consensus that K-12 should prepare every student for college breaks down, if we no longer have a rough agreement that the more post-secondary experience people get, the better, the next phase seems to be… mixed. Perhaps we’re entering an intermediary phase before a new settlement becomes clear.
One component seems to be a resurgence in the skilled trades, requiring either apprenticeship, a short community college course of study, or on the job training. Demand is still solid, at least until robotics become reliable and cost-effective in these fields, which doesn’t seem to be happening in at least the short term. This needs preparation in K-12, and we’re already seeing the most prominent voices calling for a return to secondary school trades training. There’s a retro dimension to this which might appeal to older folks. (I’ve experienced this in conversations with Boomers and my fellow Gen Xers, as people reminisce about shop class and home ec.)
A second piece of the puzzle would be businesses and the public sector expanding their education functions. There is already an ecosystem of corporate campuses, online training, chief learning officers, and more; that could simply grow as employers seek to wean employees away from college.
A third might be a greater focus on skills across the board. Employers demand certain skills to a higher degree of clarity, perhaps including measurements for soft skills. K-12 schools better articulate student skill achievement, possibly through microcredentials and/or expanded (portfolio) certification. Higher education expands its use of prior learning assessment for adult learners and transfer students, while also following or paralleling K-12 in more clearly identifying skills within the curriculum and through outcomes.
A fourth would be greater politicization of higher education. If America pulls back from college for all, college for some arrives and the question of who gets to go to campus becomes a culture war battlefield. Already a solid majority of students are women, so we might expect gender politics to intensify, with Republicans and men’s rights activists increasingly calling on male teenagers to skip college while young women view university as an even more appropriate stage of their lives. Academics might buck 2025’s trends and more clearly proclaim the progressive aims they see postsecondary education fulfilling, joined by progressive politicians and cultural figures. Popular culture might echo this, with movies/TV shows/songs/bestsellers depicting the academy as either a grim ideological factory turning students into fiery liberals or as a safe place for the flowering of justice and identity.
Connecting these elements makes me recall and imagine stories. I can envision two teenagers, male and female, talking through their expectations of college. One sees it as mandatory “pink collar” preparation while the other dreads it for that reason. The former was tracked into academic classes while the latter appreciated maker space time and field trips to work sites. Or we might follow a young man as he enters woodworking and succeeds in that field for years, feeling himself supported in his masculinity and also avoiding student debt, until he decides to return to school after health problems limit his professional abilities. Perhaps one business sets up a campus and an apprenticeship system which it codes politically, such as claiming a focus on merit and not DEI, on manly virtues and traditional culture. In contrast another firm does the same but without any political coding, instead carefully anchoring everything in measured and certified skill development.
Over all of these options looms the specter of AI, and here the picture is more muddy. Do “pink collar” jobs persist as alternatives to the experience of chatbots, or do we automate those functions? Does post-secondary education become mandatory for jobs handling AIs, which I’ve been calling “AI wranglers”? If automation depresses the labor force, do we come to see college as a gamble on scoring a rare, well paying job?
I’ll stop here. My thanks to Marketplace for the kind interview on a vital topic.
*My audio quality isn’t the best because I fumbled the recording. Sigh.
Yesterday I joined millions of people in America by participating in the local #NoKings rally. Today I’ll document my experience.
There had been some significant preparation ahead of time. For weeks before I received emails giving us information about the event, with logistical details and advice about what to do. There was a phone/Zoom call as well.
On Saturday the thing was scheduled to start at 11 am, so I had time to raid the local farmers’ market and grocery store, first, which was part of my usual Saturday routine. I also had the chance to perform the essential duty of hosting the cats on catio time. Then I biked across town to the community center where the event was supposed to start.
The crowd was already large when I pedaled within range. People lined Sudley Road (a main drag here) for blocks, holding signs, wearing costumes, sometimes chanting.
The mood was genial and positive. Folks were smiling and hollering, chatting with each other. Rally marshals strode along, sharing water bottles, checking on people.
A steady flow of traffic pushed along the road. Often drivers honked in presumed support, and the crowd cheered. Some passengers and even drivers waved signs, which also elicited praise.
There was no violence at all. Some religious protestors told us to find Jesus and also complained about LGBQT+ people, but they were marginal. There was some shouting, was all.
Participants were quite diverse. All ages appeared, from babies and teens to elders. A good mix of races: while mostly white, there were also blacks and Hispanics. Some disabled people did their part, holding signs and making noises.
Some of the signs emphasized Hispanic culture and ICE:
A state legislator addressed the crowd for a time:
I was impressed by people riffing on the excellent Andor tv series:
Signs were often creative and/or historical in nature:
This one had a double sided sign:
This sign moved me, but I couldn’t find its creator:
At just after 1 pm the crowd started to wind down and dissipate, as per the event’s schedule. It has also become very hot and humid, so people were generally glad to seek air conditioning. Yet the mood remained positive right through the end.
I’m not sure where this goes next. If millions of people did turn out yesterday for political action, as it seems, then maybe we’re talking about 1-2% of the American population. Perhaps there’s room for serious organizing.
Greetings from early June. I’m home now and Virginia’s starting to turn up the summer heat. Bicycling is now more of a workout. I water the plants early, before the sun cooks the water right off. Our cats demand time outdoors, but soon retreat inside for blessed air conditioning.
Today’s topic is campus cuts, closures, and mergers. Last year I did a series of these grim posts (March 1, March 20, March 28, April, May, June, July, September, November 2024), but I’ve fallen out of the habit over the past few months. My last post along these lines was in February, it seems. The next few months were devoured by finishing my latest book, wrapping up a great seminar, making videos about Trump versus higher ed, participating in on the ground politics, and a lot more. I am trying to catch up now. Consider this post a sketch of some of American post-secondary education’s attempts to reduce themselves or survive.
Below are accounts of campuses taking negative or risky strategic steps. I’ve organized them under the headers of closures, mergers, cuts to programs and people, and budget crises which might cause cuts in the near future, followed by a few reflections. This is also more telegraphic than my previous posts, as I don’t want to repeat myself and because this is a lot of material.
One note: the Trump administration’s actions are starting to be felt along these lines. I have been describing and analyzing this in a YouTube series.
One caveat: this is by no means a comprehensive list. It’s a sample from our time, a gathering of documentary evidence.
1 Closing colleges and universities
The Penn State University system will close seven of its campuses (DuBois, Fayette, Mont Alto, New Kensington, Shenango, Wilkes-Barre, and York). The reasons include “declining enrollment, stagnant state funding, rising operational costs, and shifting student demographics,” reasons very familiar to my readers.
“[W]e no longer have the resources needed to navigate the economic and demographic storms endangering small, liberal arts institutions today,” said Ted Bristol, Chair of the Northland College Board of Trustees. “With declining enrollment and soaring costs, it takes more to operate the College than we raise in tuition. Even after enacting aggressive measures to cut costs and raise revenues, Northland College has no sustainable path forward.”
Declaring financial exigency and shrinking in 2024 did not save the college.
Saint Andrews University (private, North Carolina) closed due to financial reasons and losing accreditation. They posted a farewell message but that link, and their whole website, are now gone as of this writing. Limestone University (private, South Carolina) announced it would close, due to declining enrollment and rising financial problems.
Bastyr College (private, alternative medicine) is selling its Washington state campus “in an effort to stabilize its shaky finances.” Georgian College (technical, Ontario) shut down its Collingwood campus due to financial pressures.
2 Mergers
A state authority directed East Georgia State College and Georgia Southern University tomerge. Rosemont College and Villanova University will merge by 2028.
A planned merger between Bluffton University and University of Findlay ended when the latter’s board called it off. Bluffton’s president then stepped down.
3 Campuses cutting programs and jobs
Johns Hopkins University (private, Maryland) cut more than 2,000 jobs, mostly at overseas locations, after it lost $800 million in funding from the US Agency for International Development. Johnson and Wales University (private, Rhode Island and North Carolina) will lay off 90 faculty and staff, “about 5% of its workforce,” due to declining enrollment. Clark University (private, Massachusetts) is laying off “30% of faculty and 5% of staff,” due to an enrollment drop. Ivy Tech Community College (Indiana) will lay off 200 workers following state budget reductions. Bard College (private liberal arts, New York) is laying off 116 faculty and staff as it moves one campus to another state. Catholic University is laying off 66 staff, or 7% of its workers, due to “declining enrollment revenue and rising costs.” Roberts Wesleyan University (private, New York) will cut 20% of its faculty and staff in addition to cutting programs. University of Maryland, Baltimore will lay off 30 staff and reduce compensation for some others. The University of New Hampshire laid off 35 people. Purdue University Fort Wayne (public, Indiana) is ending 45 unspecified positions. Linfield University (private, Oregon) is laying off 27 faculty.
SUNY Buffalo State University is making multiple cuts:
The university will cut the equivalent of 63 full-time staff members through termination of temporary appointments, nonrenewals, retirements and cost-cutting layoffs. Buffalo State will also cut 19 additional programs that have an average of nine students over six bachelor’s degree and two master’s degree programs. It also will merge its schools of Education and Professions, starting this fall.
The reason is a persistent budget deficit worsened by low student numbers: “In the last 10 years, student headcount at Buffalo State has fallen by 43%, with a 25% reduction in the last five years. While the enrollment decrease was 43%, staffing decreased by only 22%.”
Butler County Community College (Pennsylvania) facing in-person enrollment collapse, shifted operations online.
The University of Toledo suspended admissions to a series of programs largely in response to a new, anti-DEI state law, BAs in Africana Studies, Asian Studies, Data Analytics, Disability Studies, Middle East Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Spanish, and Women’s and Gender Studies. The University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School withdrew all admissions for its fall 2025 class in response to Trump cuts to biomedical research.
Bryn Athyn College (private, Pennsylvania) is cutting athletics. Specifically, “all 11 NCAA Division III sports teams will be transitioned into clubs.”
Virginia’s governor stopped $626 million in college and university construction projects because of worries about future budgets. Would-be building examples include:
Virginia State University… plans to renovate Virginia Hall because of multiple infrastructure issues, and Virginia Commonwealth University, which plans to acquire the Altria research building to expand its lab space…
The Virginia Community College System… plans to renovate Amherst and Campbell Halls at Central Virginia Community College (CVCC) in Lynchburg, which are the core classroom spaces for the college. Amherst Hall was built in 1968 and Campbell Hall was completed in 1974. Neither has had a significant renovation since then.
One potentially significant detail in one story of financial stress: Indiana University at Bloomington is asking faculty members who take buyout agreements not to criticize the institution.
One unsigned agreement said the faculty member must “not defame, or otherwise disparage, the University” or any of its “current or former trustees, officers, employees, agents, representatives, attorneys, or insurers.” It also said the employee must agree “not to make negative statements of any kind regarding the University.”
4 Budget crises, programs cut, not laying off people yet
University of Illinois-Chicago leadership is talking about cutting language programs or more.
The preliminary budget plan would make the deepest cuts to university support and administration, reducing those areas by 7.5% overall. Student support would be cut by 2.8%, and the aggregate budget for the university’s colleges would be reduced by 2.2%. It would also decrease facility and utility spending by 1.1% while increasing community outreach by 0.7%.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln extended a hiring freeze and has cuts in the works. Colorado State University is implementing a “hiring chill” in anticipation of state and federal budget cuts.
A court ordered Saint Augustine’s University (historically black, North Carolina) to pay a telecommunications company more than $20 million in unpaid bills. SAU was already suffering from years of financial turmoil, accreditation issues, and legal problems.
Reflections
What can we learn from this litany of cuts, closures, terminations, and endings?
The Bloomington story intrigues me. How many campuses already require faculty and staff to sign non-disparagement language right now? How many more will follow suit?
Campus mergers still seem fairly scarce. They are not easy to do, as we see from one failure. Cuts are politically easier.
Penn State closing seven campuses struck me. Closures are more often seen in the private, both for- and non-profit sector. State governments don’t want to bear the political costs of shutting down public institutions. Yet Pennsylvania did. That state is not suffering unusually; we should not be surprised to see similar states consider similar plans, especially in rural districts.
State budget politics have a strong influence on public institutions, obviously. While there has been some spending recovery since the 2008 Great Recession there are still challenges. Those are likely to become worse as the Trump administration continues to go after higher ed.
Trump: I won’t rehearse my video series here. Suffice to say that if this president retains his focus on higher ed (by no means guarantees, given his wandering attention and shambolic administration) we should anticipate more financial and political hits, which will translate into more cuts and so on. How might the academy effectively resist this? So far legal challenges seem to have had the most traction, so we may expect more of these to come. So far I have seen little appetite for collective action across the sector, but I retain some hope.
I want to end by reminding the reader of the humanity of these stories. The linked accounts point to students whose studies have been shunted aside, staff and faculty losing jobs, careers stymied or ended. Surrounding communities can also suffer as a result, losing the interaction, business, and vibrancy of campus community members.
Finally, I’d like to invite anyone with information on a college or university’s plans to close, merge, or cut to share them with me, either as comments on this post, as notes on social media, or by contacting me privately here. I write these posts based largely on public, open intelligence (news reports, investigations, roundups) but also through tips, since higher education sometimes has issues with transparency. We need better information on these events.
(thanks to Karl Hakkarainen, Peter Shea, Marc Sims, Ed Webb; thanks to Higher Ed Dive and Inside Higher Ed for doing solid work)
Today I’ve been thinking about listening to music, because I wasn’t doing so. This Saturday morning I did a bunch of tasks with some audio accompaniment: read news, biked three miles to the gym, lifted weights, biked back, gave the cats some catio time in pleasant weather, went to the local farmer’s market for produce and gardening advice, made lunch, etc. A soundtrack played over most of this, emitted from my Fold phone, but it wasn’t music. Instead it was spoken word, a series of podcasts and an audiobook’s chapter, which satisfied me.
An old, old music box at the Fairbanks museum.
Yet it also made me reflect on when I actually do listen to music and how. So now I’d like to follow the weekend practice of my friend Kent Anderson. His Geyser newsletter offers solid and provocative content about scholarly publishing all week long, but on weekends takes the time to offer selected musical entertainment. Here I’ll set aside my usual futures work and while what follows might not be quite so entertaining at pure music, readers might find this sample of one interesting as an idiosyncratic slice of technological experience.
Here’s how it works in mid-2025.
YouTube is my music central. This is where I look for and find recordings, starting from the search box. The site also suggests interesting music for me on its front page, both individual tracks and auto-generated mixes. In a sense YouTube acts like a clutch of music radio stations or MTV, playing audio at me. (I also use YouTube for many other purposes, including posting my own videos, watching videos, etc., but that’s not what we’re talking about today.)
There I also make and revise a ton of playlists. My tastes are diverse if not simply strange, so those playlists show that: punk, Russian classical, 1980s New Wave, baroque, atmospheric black metal, Gothic Western, Vienna school, space music, etc. Some playlists are for certain purposes, like a series of martial tracks to help me power through hundreds of emails. There are a couple of arrangements of quietly haunting sounds to help me sleep when my mind won’t shut down. I adjust and grow these lists over time, curating as I learn and find more.
Hardware: most of my music listening takes place on desktop and laptop computers. At home, late at night, I’ll sometimes switch music to a big screen tv. I don’t use tablet computers in general, although I’ve thought of setting one up as a kind of music box. Weirdly, I rarely use my Android phone for music. One downside of YouTube for listening is that on my phone it shuts off when I close the device or when its screen goes dark, unlike some other apps. Instead I use the phone for podcasts and audiobooks.
Beyond YouTube I use several other sites for music at times. On Bandcamp I maintain an odd list of artists and genres which I try to check out daily. I follow and support a few artists on other platforms, such as Patreon, where I find, for example, TC’s glorious Spacemusic show.
What I don’t use much: I don’t use Spotify at all, unless someone shares a playlist there. That service never appealed to me since I have YouTube. I never use iTunes as a place to find music. I was against the thing when they made the big DRM deal, and it hasn’t seemed useful since. Besides, that app is a giant clunky thing.
I usually don’t buy music in physical media, CDs or vinyl or cassettes. I used to as a teenager and when I in my 20s, slowly and carefully assembling a library as best I could. Now I fear having too much stuff now as it is, although I sometimes buy the occasional item to support an independent artist and if the object looks lovely. I’ve dreamed about building up a series collection of physical media against the possibilities of streaming going bad, but that would be a major investment in money, space, and cataloging to do properly.
For finding music, I don’t read music journalism as such. Sometimes friends or contacts on email, social media, messaging apps, or MetaFilter will recommend something and I may search for web articles on it. And I must credit the awesome Map of Metal project for beautifully outlining that genre’s history and scope.
Apart from the digital world, I don’t listen to radio in the traditional sense, except when I drive somewhere I haven’t been and I sample the dial to get a sense of the area, scrolling AM and FM to pick up local voices and tastes. Some web radio does cross my dashboard. For years I loved listening to William Berger’s awesome My Castle of Quiet program (“House of Horrors; with black/death/doom metal, punk/grind, Kosmische/Krautrock, filmmusic, and noise/improv”) on WFMU until his untimely death, and I still return to the impressive archive. And every Wednesday I listen to my dear friend Sara Grosky’s weekly freeform show, Beat the Bezoar, on Michigan’s WCBN.
I haven’t seen live music since before the pandemic. That’s not a deliberate choice so much as I’ve been very, very busy.
That’s where things stand now. My habits don’t seem very futuristic right now. How does this little music autoethnography seem to you? Does it have any echoes with your own practices?
