Posted on 10/05/2026 9:08:23 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
American higher education is in retreat. It’s shrinking. The for-sale signs have gone up. It’s time for “inventory reduction.” Forty-nine colleges have closed since 2020. Forty others have merged with neighbors. The Huron Consulting Group says that 400 colleges are at risk of closing in the next decade. The prospect of insolvency has now moved beyond small colleges. Larger ones are closing programs and laying off faculty.
Not counting community colleges, trade schools, online-only outfits and clandestine thinkatoriums, some 2,700 four-year institutions are currently authorized to hand out college degrees in the US. That compares with 4,150 licensed hot dog stands in New York City alone and 267,000 licensed massage parlors across the country. The market for hot dogs and massages is holding steady.
The market for college degrees? Not so much. It is the old story of more supply than demand: too few students for too many seats. People who build things imagine customers will keep coming forever, until they don’t. In the 1930s, 16 major railroads folded and in the 1970s, 23 more ground to a halt. All was not lost. Americans ended up with some excellent bike paths.
At the top of the list of higher education’s woes is a demographic cliff. During the 2008 recession, young couples became baby-averse. The birthrate plunged and stayed low. Those children who were never conceived would now be freshmen, and the system built to educate them finds itself like a large bus carrying a handful of passengers.
The cost of running the bus doesn’t decline in sync with the loss of riders. Fixed expenses don’t like falling revenues. Moreover, the dearth of children will continue for at least 15 more years. Colleges can’t wait it out.
Higher education knew this was coming and tried to offset it by recruiting more students from abroad and cajoling more Americans unsuited to college to enroll anyway. The ditching of SATs at 90 percent of the institutions marked the advent of the enrollment-at-any-cost era. The gains were marginal and the cost to academic reputation was large.
There are other reasons why college enrollment is in crisis. For one thing, Americans of all political persuasions no longer trust colleges and universities as institutions. The latest Gallup Poll shows that 77 percent of Republicans and 50 percent of Democrats distrust American higher education – a figure that continues to grow.
The distrust comes from the cratering value of the education they provide. Most colleges have become sandboxes for indolent students. The teachers pretend to teach, the students pretend to learn and everybody gets an A. It isn’t all the teachers’ fault. They have to deal with students who have been haphazardly recruited and often subjected to 12 years of “Social Emotional Leaning.” The majority are “book virgins” who have reached college without ever reading an entire work cover to cover. They aren’t going to start with The Republic.
But as teaching standards have fallen, tuition and expenses have surged. Americans now carry a total of $1.863 trillion in student-loan debt. That’s the second largest sum of consumer debt, behind home mortgages. A house, however, has intrinsic value. A college degree is worth only what the graduate can make of it. Student-loan debt impedes graduates who want to get married or change jobs. It cannot be defaulted on. It can linger even into one’s retirement years.
Then there’s the matter of waste and bloat. More than half the salaried employees of colleges and universities are now in “student services” rather than education. What students get for their tuition dollar is a full range of counseling, stroking, reassurance and diversion from the actual acquisition of knowledge and skills.
If the students can’t be relied on to read more than a page or two per week, what can a professor do? He, or more likely she, can profess. Teaching students about racism, sexism, colonialism and the myriad forms of injustice embedded in “late-stage capitalism” is one approach. The list of the top 20 most-assigned college texts incudes The Communist Manifesto and Edward Said’s Orientalism, but the real story is not what books are assigned, but what the professors communicate in class.
Wokeness isn’t in the syllabus; it’s in the air. Gender dynamics also play a role. More than 60 percent of undergraduate students are women. Men increasingly turn away from college as something that doesn’t meet their educational and career goals. They are also turned off by the high degree of bias against men in both the curriculum and campus culture.
Besides, only 17.8 percent of posted jobs even require a bachelor’s degree or higher. More than half list no educational requirements at all. Indeed, with all the debt and opportunity cost now involved, a college degree can be an impediment to the start of a promising career, not counting hot dog provider or masseuse.
AI threatens the entire edifice. Artificial intelligence has made it child’s play to avoid reading assigned texts or writing essays on assigned topics. Many faculty members have capitulated, seeing no way to resist the tide. Some have enthusiastically embraced it as a new way of learning. AI has also dented the proposition that a college degree is an all-purpose, adaptable credential for employment. Some employers still think a college degree testifies to useful knowledge and skills, but they will soon learn better.
This is no reason to despair. These institutions have been making themselves obsolete for a long time. Better not to get in their way.
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Colleges who chose to be trendy will also be empty.
Except for labs or research, there is nothing that colleges can’t teach that can’t be learned from home.
Sounds like an opportunity in developable real estate, with the caution that leftists are notoriously bad at maintaining physical infrastructure.
The time honored system of universities from the days of students gathering to sit on steps outside beneath Socrates who taught them led to today.
Just a certain amount of devolution has taken place. /s
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=images+movie+animal+house+party++scenes&FORM=HDRSC3
RE: there is nothing that colleges can’t teach that can’t be learned from home.
Understood. But will what you learned from home be recognized by companies that hire without the degree?
Turn them into jails and homeless shelters. They can gut the buildings by hand and recycle everything.
One of the two major universities in my state is in the news.
A couple of their dormitories have whole floors closed as there are not enough students to fill them.
A smaller student population and also on-line courses are given as the reason
Change happens
If companies don’t have the resident knowledge to identify and examine applicants......then they deserve to go out of business.
I used to hire within the intelligence field. All were technicians where there was no comparable college diploma because it was such a low density skill set.
The resume got them the interview. The interview was the evaluation on whether or not they could do the job. I could have created a written examination if I desired, but I reached a level where that was unnecessary. There was no way anyone could BS me.
Statue....
Those who don’t respect that tradition....
Dean Vernon Wormer: You’re out! Finished at Faber! Expelled! I want you off this campus at nine o’clock Monday morning, and I’ve contacted your local draft boards and told them that you were all, all eligible for military service.
Bluto: Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the f——g Peace Corps.
True. Hiring systems have filters to only look at resumes with degrees. AI will only make the system even more tech oriented.
Thomas Edison was rejected in grade school because the teacher said he had an addled mind and was incapable of being able to receive an education. His mother believed in him and taught him herself at home.
Later, he was on record for 2,332 patents worldwide for his inventions. 1,093 of Edison’s patents were in the United States.
Patents for a practical incandescent light bulb (another’s search light giant arc lights preceded that-—try that in your living room.) Phonograph. Motion picture and studio. Electric pen.
And here’s a special one: Edison’s First Invention – The Electrographic Vote Recorder.
They have to take their money and run.
“As of fiscal year 2025, the eight Ivy League universities have total endowments ranging from $8 billion to $56.9 billion, with Harvard leading by a wide margin.”
University of Michigan $21.2 Billion (Ahmad el-Sayed’s alma mater).
There needs to be a cultural change. With the internet and chat groups and AI, etc, there is a lot of unnecessity to college.
IMO, we should be taking away from colleges and universities their ability to determine who passed their course. Give it to the professional colleges that anybody with a trade belongs to. If you can prove your ability by the professional colleges and unions, it doesn’t matter how you went about becoming qualified.
Now it’s gettin’ scary.
Not enough.
Columbia and HaaVaahhhd both need to go.
AI tutors outperform college classes in student achievement.
No more need for “perfessers.”
Based on your comment, I now understand the premise of that recruitment pitch was my professor's recognition of my sense of current events as caused, conditioned, and constrained by history and the elements of national power. Looking back, I recall being astonished by my classmates' seeming inability to recognize that.
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