Higher Education’s Extinction Event

For more than a century, the American university has been one of our nation’s greatest institutional achievements. It has educated generations of citizens and professionals, advanced scientific discovery, fueled extraordinary economic growth, and helped make the United States the world’s preeminent power.

Now the university model is battling for survival. By one estimate, more than 440 colleges are at serious risk of financial failure over the coming decade. Even well-known institutions like New York’s Syracuse University are struggling, as the Wall Street Journal recently documented. In the academic year that began in August, the brand-name school faced a 1.5 percent budget shortfall, perhaps a portent of worse to come.

Yet the financial crisis is only the most visible symptom of something much deeper. Higher education is approaching an “extinction event.”

The comparison is more than rhetorical. For decades, the prevailing explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs centered on a single catastrophic asteroid strike. Scientists now believe the story was considerably more complicated. The asteroid was the catalyst, but it struck an ecosystem already under extraordinary stress from massive volcanic eruptions, dramatic climate change, and collapsing food chains. No single shock destroyed the dinosaurs. It was the convergence of multiple shocks that proved fatal.

Something remarkably similar is happening to American higher education.

The demographic cliff is the asteroid everyone can see. Because of declining birth rates that began nearly two decades ago, the traditional college-age population is shrinking. Too many institutions are now competing for too few students, particularly across the Northeast and Midwest. But demographics alone would not have produced the situation we now face.

The second impact is a profound collapse of public trust. Universities once inspired extraordinary confidence because they were seen as an alloyed public good. Increasingly, however, Americans see many of these institutions as serving narrower ideological and cultural commitments. Only 38 percent of Americans express strong confidence in higher education, according to Gallup. Universities cannot sustain themselves if the public no longer believes they’re acting for the public good.

The third impact is economic. Since the late 1980s, tuition and fees have risen by approximately 438 percent—roughly three times the rate of inflation. But only about one-third of Americans believe a college education is worth the cost, down dramatically from roughly three-quarters only 15 years ago. With so many families questioning the return on investment, college administrators should be deeply worried.

The fourth impact may prove the most consequential of all—the rise of artificial intelligence.

Large language models already perform many of the analytical tasks that once justified years of specialized collegiate education. They summarize, translate, write, code, analyze data, and synthesize enormous bodies of information in seconds. For the colleges that specialize in transmitting specific knowledge—which is most of them—AI is an existential threat.

All these factors have brought higher education to a cliff’s edge. Far more institutions are in danger of disruption and closure than people realize. Yet history suggests that extinction events are also moments of extraordinary creativity. The disappearance of one dominant form of life creates ecological space for another. Birds emerged from the dinosaurs. Mammals flourished in the world the dinosaurs left behind. Something analogous may now happen in higher education.

Some institutions will undoubtedly disappear. Others will survive by rediscovering purposes they had abandoned. And new institutions will emerge, founded on different educational models.

The Trump administration is opening the door to this necessary change. It is moving to recognize new accrediting agencies—the third-party organizations that effectively determine whether colleges can offer degrees. This move means that colleges could soon rethink fundamental assumptions about curriculum, credentials, governance, and educational design.

Must learning be organized around the credit hour? Must every degree look essentially the same? Can new forms of higher education emerge? Even as they ask these questions, institutions must recommit themselves to open inquiry, intellectual pluralism, and the fearless pursuit of truth, as they work to regain public trust and confidence.

This moment demands institutional imagination and courage. University boards must stop assuming that yesterday’s business model can be preserved through incremental reform. College presidents must be willing to rethink long-settled assumptions about curriculum, governance, and institutional mission. Faculty need to recognize that defending higher learning is not the same thing as defending existing structures. Struggling colleges may want to prepare for policymakers or philanthropists to stage takeovers of their campuses, remaking them to ensure their survival.

The extinction event is already underway. Yet endings create the conditions for new beginnings. The future will not belong to the institutions that cling most tightly to the assumptions of the last century. It will belong to those with the imagination to recover the university’s oldest purpose: not merely the transmission of knowledge, but the cultivation of judgment and wisdom and the nurturing of free human beings.