The news over the past few years has not been good for America’s college and universities. Fewer students during the lockdowns and shutdowns resulting from the Covid-19 panic has translated into fewer students since, and the so-called “demographic cliff” soon to hit due to declining birthrates since the Great Recession will usher in an even more Darwinian struggle for an ever shrinking pool of students.

Experts expect a wave of college closures is dead ahead, so the financial and enrollment problems we are already seeing today might seem a golden age in comparison to what higher education will be experiencing only a decade from now. The strong—meaning those colleges with wealthy alumni and stupendous endowments—will survive, but we can expect our nation’s landscape to be littered with many shuttered lecture halls and college administrative offices covered in cobwebs as we look into the future.

Worse still, the overall credibility and reputation of our nation’s colleges and universities is in steep decline with the public at large, which likely forecasts an even broader turn away from higher education in the years ahead. According to a recent Gallup survey, a scant 36% of Americans expressed great confidence in higher education (down from an already worrisome 57% in 2015), with Democrats being the only subgroup expressing a majority support at 59% (Republicans stood at only 19%). Clearly, in addition to the enrollment crisis looming just over the horizon, our country’s colleges and universities have joined the trash heap of American institutions held in disdain by the nation they seek to serve.

Pennsylvania will, to take just one example, be an instructive case study concerning what can happen when nearly 250 in-state colleges and universities have to convince a shrinking pool of students to attend. However this battle is fought, the truths we can readily guarantee are that college closures, program cuts, faculty and staff layoffs, and desperate pleas for financial bailouts will strafe that great Keystone state in the years ahead. The economic health of the communities where these institutions of learning are located will be collateral damage in a zero-sum war of attrition, and this pattern will be repeated across America.

The double whammy of fewer students and less confidence in higher education as a whole is a daunting prospect, and we can expect desperate administrators to do whatever is necessary to bring more bodies into the doors in a futile effort to keep the lights on. There will be pushes to recruit more foreign students, more adult learners, more already employed individuals (expect the widespread adoption of regular Saturday and Sunday classes very soon), and enhanced online offerings to attract those with no interest in leaving their homes to attend school. As a side note, we can readily predict that grading will become more and more lax in order to avoid losing students, even those egregiously unprepared ones who have no business being in a college classroom in the first place.

As the educational landscape changes in the years ahead, so too will our notions about what it means to be educated. Except at the fifty or so most elite American colleges, the traditional 4-year Bachelor’s degree is likely going to be increasingly supplanted by shorter term certificate and accreditation programs tailored to meet the needs of those whose interest is entirely vocational. 

This will be a shock to the system as the notion of the well-rounded curriculum loaded with General Education requirements becomes an artifact of an academic environment adapting to changing attitudes among students, parents, and employers, who are all unsure of the utility of taking courses that are far distant from an immediate career goal. The Liberal Arts, already in steep decline, are probably going to become topics studied on YouTube—should a student even want to bother. The Bachelor’s degree may survive in name, but it will be entirely different in scope and content.

Moreover, Americans are asking many questions about the breathtaking cost and stifling left-wing conformity that now reigns on so many campuses. Will institutions of higher education continue to presume to act as the arbiters (at great expense) of what attitudes and beliefs are acceptable, or will a broader array of values and ideologies find acceptance in classrooms where many students now fear to speak out?

The necessary conversations about campus free speech and administrative bloat (many schools now have as many employees as they do students) that today are frustrating many can no longer be avoided, and colleges and universities need to have these tough talks—and soon—if they ever hope to win back the trust of our nation and survive the inevitable and brutal financial shakeout ahead. 

Sometimes it is possible to finesse the march of history, but most often implacable trends simply smack the unwary right in the head. The current model of higher education, one featuring runaway spending and punitive intellectual rigidity, cannot survive.

These institutions are, as much as they might choose to believe otherwise, businesses that need paying customers to remain open. Any business that is alienating the majority of a shrinking pool of buyers, which exactly describes the plight facing a great many colleges and universities today, will very quickly find itself out of business. Therefore, the essential question now facing higher education in America is whether they are nimble enough—and, ironically, smart enough—to meet the needs of a diverse nation of thoughtful and demanding consumers who require value and respect from the educators and administrators who are clamoring for their cash.

It could well be the case that many colleges and universities will prefer institutional suicide to making the changes they must, and our empathy will be tested by those who prefer closure to much-needed reforms. If this is the case, that some choose to march off a cliff with their crazy train banners flying high, it will be a sad—but perhaps educational—spectacle we can all learn from as our nation as a whole fights its own ongoing battles between those who prefer an untenable ideological purity and those who care for what works in a real world filled with risks, challenges, and opportunities.

Can America’s institutions of higher education learn, adapt, and survive the very rough road facing them in the years and decades ahead? Their answer to this question will tell us much about their true character—and that of our American people. Those questions facing our colleges and universities neatly mirror the same basic questions—spending and support for free speech—now facing our divided and troubled nation, and the answers from academia will be a clear and unmistakable signal regarding the future of our nation as a whole.

How shall we spend our scarce dollars and just how much freedom of thought will our institutions deem permissible? These two questions seem to be at the center of so many of the controversies engulfing America today. How higher education answers these questions will determine their futures—or lack thereof—for many years to come.