When any business runs into problems attracting customers, two immediate responses are typical.

First, a business will, after assessing the needs of their target market, adjust its lineup of products or services and dump any that are unpopular and/or unprofitable. After completing this review, the next and most critical step is to hire employees who will be able to execute the new mission and encourage those all-important paying customers—to keep paying. These two related strategies are the tried and true path to continued survival and success in the unforgiving jungle of the business world.

Unless, apparently, you are an incredibly insular American college or university. Judging by the actions (and inactions) of administrators and faculty from sea to shining sea, parents and students are supposed to suck it up and buy whatever is being sold—and like it.

The notion that higher education should float above the grimy and messy priorities of the marketplace perhaps has some validity (faculty, administrators, and staff certainly like to believe this is true), but the crux of the problem now facing many colleges and universities is that they have, over the past half century, decided to convert themselves into laughable intellectual echo chambers. Sneering at American history, American values, and American dreams while deciding at least half of the citizens of our nation are troglodytes, morons, and bigots is, unsurprisingly, a lousy way to convince Americans to attend your school, which goes far to explain why many now question the need for a college education at all. 

Moreover, the higher education establishment is now dealing with the blowback of decades of stratospheric tuition increases that were built on the backs of students who are now staggering under the debts they took on just so a burgeoning army of Leftist faculty and college administrators, who are now being paid like brain surgeons by the very country they so often profess to hate, can make the payments on their BMW’s and vacation homes.

Nice work if you can get it.

Having greedily priced numerous students out of their classrooms, many liberal arts colleges are today facing precipitously declining enrollments, leading to many closures and consolidations that are deemed a “crisis” by campus leaders, who are also now being asked to justify the value of undergraduate degrees that can today run upwards of $400,000 at an elite university when all is said and done. Having locked themselves into an unsustainable cost structure during the days when Americans were duped into believing a college degree was a desperate necessity—and before online educational alternatives began to undercut their monopoly—the parade of painful cutbacks is now in full swing, but it has already come too late to save many higher education institutions from a short and swift demise.

However, by far the most cataclysmic problem facing today’s tenured faculty and college staff is their own attitudes—and the impossibility of firing employees who are “superfluous to present needs” because they are either tenured academics or staff protected by layers of union and/or civil service protections.

Imagine if you will a failing business that decides to save itself by changing from manufacturing steel plates to producing fiberglass insulation—but is prohibited from hired new workers skilled at their new undertaking. Even worse, the workers they have been forced to retain have little interest in adapting to a new reality, so skill sets that have probably already atrophied after decades of doing exactly what put the business into financial distress in the first place are unlikely to be updated quickly enough to avoid financial catastrophe. A workforce of those who are just plain angry they are being forced to change to meet a new reality is unlikely to be motivated to do whatever is necessary to save that company from closing.

Convincing obliviously coddled professors, overpaid academic professionals, and hidebound union employees to stop scaring away students with out-of-touch institutional extremism and a prohibitively expensive cost structure is the existential challenge now facing academia. No longer able to act like entitled hyper-specialists while insulting and overcharging the parents and students they need to survive, many college employees are now being smacked square in the face by a harsh new reality they simply want to ignore—or blame on right-wing extremists and Donald Trump—while resolutely refusing to adapt. 

Given that deepening cuts in federal and state funding are already eroding the financial stability of many schools, the importance of higher education reform has likely never been greater at any point in our nation’s history. Unfortunately, many colleges and universities are clinging to Marxist classroom instruction, gender fluid insanity, anti-American rhetoric, and union or governmental rules that discourage innovation, which leaves one to wonder whether plain and simple obstinacy regarding a necessary return to free inquiry and intellectual diversity will hasten the declines of many legacy academic institutions.

Looking down the line, it is a sure bet that many of America’s colleges and universities will either close, consolidate, or continue to limp along in forms that bear scant relationship to their present preeminence. Whether their operations are impacted by difficult marketplace changes, rough demographic realities, or the economic cruelties of artificial intelligence, the higher education monopoly is likely heading for the same fate that erased the old Bell Telephone Company roughly 40 years ago: breakup, reorganization, and an unpredictable future.