The Future of Higher Education

Today, higher education faces a confluence of internal and external crises that have accumulated over the past half century. Without urgent reform, the system will collapse.

The internal pressures are well known: 1) enrollment expansion that nears or exceeds the cognitive participatory maximum; 2) administrative bloat that mirrors faculty costs while usurping faculty governance; 3) proliferation of new and interdisciplinary programs that require their own bureaucracies while draining traditional majors; 4) unchecked growth in student services—from fitness centers to counseling, private dorms to vegan dining—all adding cost, compliance, and legal exposure; 5) dependence on foreign enrollment driven by tuition differentials; 6) severe grade inflation and degraded standards for both admission and graduation; and 7) politicization that manifests as speech suppression and ideological homogeneity within institutions once defined by pluralism.

But these internal problems pale beside the external existential threat posed by large language models. LLMs, even in their current form, do not automate academic labor, they destabilize it. Automation substitutes repetition; LLMs simulate expertise. By performing competence rather than possessing it, they collapse distinctions between scholar, student, and administrator, reducing intellectual work to undifferentiated linguistic output. The university thus faces not efficiency gains but an epistemic crisis: the erosion of authorship, expertise, and evaluation as stable categories. To survive, institutions must enact structural, curricular, and pedagogical reforms that restore authentic human contribution and reassert the university’s relevance in an AI-simulated economy.

Once cheating becomes visibly endemic, and it already is just without being glaringly obvious, degrees will lose their signaling value. Employers will cease to treat higher education as a credible filter for competence or integrity. At the same time, corporations are erasing entry-level roles and replacing routine cognitive functions with weakly agentic AI systems. These twin forces, that of credential collapse and labor contraction, will converge, accelerating the university’s disintegration from within as its graduates cease to represent verifiable human expertise.

I speak from within the system, as a full professor, former director of educational technology, and as an architect of CUNY’s first fully asynchronous, competency-based degree in Liberal Studies. I began teaching asynchronously in 2006, filling in for a colleague during CUNY SPS’s foundational year, and have taught online continuously for nineteen years. I spoke at the CUNY Board of Trustees meeting in Brooklyn Borough Hall when SPS’s online completer degrees were first proposed, arguing that online education would expand access for students with disabilities, deployed service members, parents, and workers with unstable schedules. For nineteen years, those ambitions have largely been realized. But the system I once defended, against quite vigorous opposition from our own faculty union, I can no longer support without radical reform.

I. Reclaim and Simplify Governance

The first step in recovery is to return the university to faculty control. Administrative growth has metastasized beyond necessity, consuming both funds and authority. Academic policy must again be made by academics.

Non-academic administrative layers should be merged, downsized, or eliminated outright. Offices and coordinatorships not directly tied to teaching, research, or student evaluation must justify their existence through demonstrable educational outcomes or statutory obligation. No new office should exist unless legally required, and any expansion must be externally self-supporting, not funded through internal reallocation. The proliferation of divisive and legally ambiguous entities, such as DEI offices and similar bureaucracies, has fractured institutions and drained resources; such bodies should be closed unless they fulfill a clearly defined compliance mandate under federal or state law.

Faculty senates must be restored to their original composition: faculty. Representation should return to the older model, students as observers, not veto holders; staff and administrators as advisors, not legislators. Governance by professional educators is not elitism but integrity: it keeps the people most accountable for academic standards in charge of them.

Directorates and program leadership positions must likewise revert to senior tenured faculty. The drift toward administrative appointments, junior-faculty managers, and non-academic directors has eroded both competence and legitimacy. When I served as director of educational technology and simultaneously as director of honors, the norm was clear, directors were professors, chosen from the ranks, and answerable to their peers. However, when I later served as acting director of Communication and Media and founding acting director of Liberal Studies, directors at CUNY SPS were almost uniformly appointed as untenured Distinguished Lecturers rather than tenured professors. This created a profound imbalance of authority: academic programs came to serve at the pleasure of a dean who, according to his own biography, had never held a faculty line and did not hold a doctorate. Such structures invert academic hierarchy and transform scholarship into administration. They must be abolished if universities are to retain intellectual self-governance.

Clear, linear accountability must connect faculty to presidents and presidents to trustees. The bureaucratic fog that now obscures responsibility protects mediocrity and diffuses failure. Simplifying governance will cut costs, sharpen decision-making, and restore moral clarity: the university exists to teach and to know, not to manage itself.

II. Revert Campus Services to Core Academic Support Only

The university must abandon its decades-long drift toward consumerism. Amenities once justified as recruitment tools have become liabilities, financially, pedagogically, and politically. The campus should no longer mimic a lifestyle brand.

Non-instructional facilities, 24-hour gyms, boutique cafés, themed dining, copy centers, chapels, wellness and “success” hubs, should be blown up, closed, leased, or spun off. Only classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and essential safety infrastructure should remain within the academic budget. All auxiliary services must be removed from governance; they exist to support study, not to legislate it.

The principle of austerity should also extend to student housing. The painted concrete-block dorm room, with two beds, two desks, and two dressers, down the hall from a communal shower, should again be the standard. It was spare, but it worked, and it supported a culture of study rather than consumption. When I visited Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary College, Cambridge in the mid 1990s, I was told that until 1980 the college had a single bathtub and a single toilet for its residents. That level of austerity is unnecessary now, but it served generations of scholars well, E. P. Thompson, Liddell Hart, Kit Marlowe, and Matthew Parker among them. The lesson is simple: comfort does not produce intellect; constraint does.

Similarly, the physical classroom itself should return to purposeful simplicity. Instructional spaces can and should be deliberately impoverished: no data projectors, no networked screens, no audiovisual clutter, just light, boards, and desks. The teacher at the podium, not the interface, carries the intellectual load. Multimodality has never demonstrated measurable improvement in learning outcomes; its real function has been to inflate budgets and distract both students and instructors.

Savings from these eliminations should be directed toward maintaining durable facilities, funding instructional labor, and securing academic spaces against digital intrusion. The stripped-down environment will appear austere, but austerity restores focus. A classroom should be a place where attention cannot escape, quiet, analog, and oriented around the voice and presence of the instructor.

These eliminations will not require philosophical conversion, they will be forced by revenue collapse. The only question is whether institutions simplify deliberately, preserving academic function, or chaotically, through sequential budget crises that destroy both amenities and instruction simultaneously.

III. Restructure Academic Programs

Every program in the university should be tested for its ability to survive in an economy shaped by artificial intelligence. Some fields naturally resist automation because they depend on human judgment, presence, or responsibility. Others do not. The goal is to separate what must be preserved from what must be retired.

Each department should be examined for what it actually teaches students to do. Programs that train people to make decisions with real consequences, to work directly with others, to handle confidential or ethical information, to interpret complex situations, or to create work that carries visible public risk will remain valuable. These are human domains where failure has weight and where trust, accountability, and judgment matter.

Programs that mainly teach routine writing, reporting, or data handling, work that machines now perform fluently, cannot justify their cost unless they form essential gateways to other learning either through introducing important threshold concepts or serving as hard gatekeepers. Those gateway courses can be restructured so that they demand evidence of real human thought: oral explanation, direct observation, problem-solving in physical settings, or work built from local or original data that cannot be faked by software.

Programs organized around textual interpretation, secondary research, or symbolic manipulation will contract or vanish. Literary studies, most subfields of history, non-applied philosophy, cultural anthropology, and much of the social sciences produce graduates whose analytical skills are now replicable by LLMs at near-zero cost. These fields have already been hemorrhaging majors for two decades; AI will finish what adjunctification began. What remains will be programs grounded in direct human action: clinical work, field research requiring physical presence, studio practice tied to craft traditions, engineering and laboratory sciences where failure has material consequences, and professional programs where licensure or liability still require verified human judgment.

Any program that offers neither inherent human value nor the possibility of being rebuilt around genuine human effort should be closed or merged. What remains will be smaller but stronger: a university focused on disciplines that still require intellect, responsibility, presence, and risk. These are the traits that define both learning and work that cannot be replaced by machines.

Programs that will remain central in the AI economy are those built around complementary and unaligned disciplinary skills, fields that reinforce one another but cannot be collapsed into a single algorithmic process. Mathematics and the hard sciences will again become the spine of higher education: every level of calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, discrete mathematics, statistics, and physics will be essential. Surrounding these will be the applied and design fields that give such skills context, for example electrical and computer engineering, data science, and analytics, along with the interpretive and procedural disciplines that determine how those capabilities are used: public administration, business administration, accounting, and law. Allied health programs will remain indispensable as well, along with any other physically located or ethically constrained disciplines where embodied judgment, liability, and care cannot be automated. These are the programs that align with the emerging economy and that justify their continuation by necessity rather than nostalgia.

A limited number of boutique programs may remain, but only under strict financial quarantine. These are specialized or aesthetic disciplines, often intellectually valuable but economically inert, that serve no clear professional or civic function. They may exist only if they are entirely self-funded through permanent endowments that cover all operating, staffing, and support costs, including full financial aid for their students. Properly managed, such programs could even generate revenue: as the hood ornaments of higher education, the preserve of the idle wealthy, they may charge differential tuition and operate without access to government subsidy. This would allow, for example, fields like Creative Writing (my own thoroughly useless undergraduate major) to exist as luxury studies for those who can afford them, rather than as debt traps for students who will never recover the cost of instruction.

Such programs must also secure general faculty assent before approval or renewal. As the public-facing decoration of the institution, they carry reputational risk as well as aesthetic value. Every proposal should be vetted for coherence, seriousness, and institutional fit to ensure that no program exists merely for spectacle or patronage. Boutique programs may adorn the university, but they must never feed on it, and they must never bring it into disrepute.

If such reforms were carried out, the university that emerged would look far more like the institution of the mid-to-late twentieth century than the one that exists today. When I began at the University of Victoria in 1985, there were roughly forty degree programs; in 1970 there had been about twenty-five. By 2025, that number had swollen to nearly three hundred. The difference is not progress but diffusion. Returning to a smaller, more disciplined academic structure would not mark regression, it would represent recovery: a restoration of focus, intellectual seriousness, and fiscal sanity after half a century of unchecked expansion.

The final consideration is admission. Entry to the university must again reflect ability, not sentiment. Standardized testing, the SAT, the ACT, and their equivalents, will regain primacy as objective filters. The era of symbolic inclusivity, of admitting a student “because we’ve never had one from Wyoming,” will end. High-school grades, already unreliable and now grotesquely inflated and distorted by exemptions and accommodations, should be discarded. Selection will become transparent: ranked scores by date until the available seats are filled. No appeals, no negotiations, no exceptions. The process will be mechanical by design, meritocratic, impartial, and immune to influence. It is what it is.

IV. Harden Pedagogical and Assessment Integrity

The university must reestablish proof of human authorship and verifiable competence. That requires ending the illusion that digital convenience and academic rigor can coexist.

All asynchronous and remote-synchronous instruction should be discontinued. Courses must return to the physical classroom, where attention, authorship, and accountability can be directly observed. Take-home assignments should be permitted only when their design makes machine use pointless, projects built from primary data, local observation, field notes, or embodied work.

Major assessments must be conducted in person, on closed networks, and under supervision. High-stakes finals should constitute no less than twenty percent of the course grade and must be cross-graded by a second faculty member to check inflation and confirm consistency. Oral defenses, in-class writing, and live demonstrations should replace online submissions wherever possible.

Students should advance only by passing clear gatekeeping stages, such as a verified sophomore-to-junior transition exam, that confirm actual mastery rather than accumulation of credits. Graduation should trigger an external audit or verification process to certify the degree’s integrity.

Faculty must be retrained to design and grade within these hardened conditions: building portfolios that connect work across courses, using embedded verification markers, and creating assignments that expose, rather than conceal, authorship.

If these measures seem austere, it is because austerity is now the precondition of trust. Without visible human work, higher education has no claim to credibility, and its degrees will soon be indistinguishable from algorithmic output.

A revived form of the rising-junior examination would serve as the system’s central gate. CUNY’s own Proficiency Exam, created after the late-1990s scandal that exposed widespread functional illiteracy, provides the model. That exam required students to compose an in-person comparison-and-contrast essay and to interpret quantitative data under timed conditions. Passing it was mandatory before advancing into upper-division coursework, effectively gatekeeping every major at once.

A modern version could again ensure that no student progresses without demonstrating command of analysis, writing, and interpretation without digital assistance. Likewise, each major could end in a terminal in-person examination—oral or written—of the kind long used at Oxford and Cambridge, confirming that the degree represents mastery rather than attendance.

Degree verification could be further strengthened by contracting an independent service to administer standardized instruments, and here I suggest revived GRE general and subject tests, ACT-style essay exams, or equivalent evaluations, providing external confirmation that graduates meet disciplinary and institutional standards.

These measures would restore higher education’s most basic function: certifying that a human being has learned something real, in real time, under real conditions.

V. Fortify Physical and Digital Infrastructure

Once governance and pedagogy are restored, the university must harden its physical and digital environment. The goal is to make cheating technically impossible and distraction structurally unlikely.

Campuses should designate specific buildings, or entire quadrants, as exam zones. These rooms must be physically secured and electromagnetically sealed. Installing Faraday-cage shielding is simple and inexpensive; even residential wiring density can block wireless signals. Within these spaces, all devices would operate on closed local networks, monitored and air-gapped from the public internet.

The broader campus should also be re-conceived as an intentional isolation environment. The model is not Silicon Valley but the monastery: focused, quiet, and insulated from external noise. West Point, Annapolis, and the Coast Guard Academy demonstrate that isolation strengthens discipline and identity. Their campuses are literal islands of attention where intrusion is controlled, and integrity is enforced not as policy but as culture. Honor violations there carry consequences up to dismissal or confinement. That ethos, where dishonesty is seen as betrayal, not minor misconduct, should again inform civilian higher education.

Personal devices should be excluded from all formal assessments. The “bring-your-own-device” culture has turned testing into surveillance management. Universities should instead provide secured terminals or analog tools under faculty supervision. Network integrity must be treated as a core academic function, not a technical convenience.

Capital budgets should prioritize durable classrooms, exam rooms, and libraries over lifestyle amenities. Physical simplicity, quiet halls, minimal signage, limited entry points, reduces cost while reinforcing focus.

A fortified university would look less like a shopping mall and more like a disciplined community of study: limited access, stable tools, trusted faculty, and verifiable human achievement. Only within such controlled environments can learning remain authentic in the age of artificial simulation.

This re-fortification will inevitably revive the old town-versus-gown divide. That separation is not a failure but a necessary outcome of what the coming economy demands. The next generation of employable people will, by definition, live at a remove from ordinary life. Mastery of the multi-disciplinary core now required by industry, engineering, data science, applied mathematics, and specialized tradecraft, demands cognitive concentration that cannot coexist with the distractions of mass culture.

Enrollment will contract sharply. The long experiment in universal higher education is ending. Where half of all young adults once attended college, the number may soon fall to one in ten, and fewer still will finish. Institutions must therefore resist the instinct to maintain scale for its own sake. Overproduction of degrees, sustained only by contingent faculty labor and sunk-cost delusion, has already hollowed the profession. The future university will be smaller, more monastic, and more exacting, but also more honest about what learning now costs and what it means to know something that a machine cannot.

Conclusion

I already know none of this will happen, at least not willingly, not deliberately. But I can speculate as to what the future will resemble.

A few months ago, I saw a job posting on LinkedIn that explicitly excluded degrees earned after 2023. That's not age discrimination; it's legally permissible temporal filtering. A candidate who graduated early at twenty-one in 2022 and another who graduated on time at twenty-two in 2023 are the same age, but only the first is hireable. The second earned their credential in the LLM era and is therefore suspect. This sort of gatekeeping will proliferate. Employers are already reducing entry-level hiring and eliminating positions whose functions can be offloaded to weakly agentic systems. Both trends will compound, eroding enrollment as students and employers simultaneously lose faith in the system's integrity.

The first wave of contraction will appear benign, even restorative. Enrollment declines will strand auxiliary services without customers. The fitness centers, themed dining halls, climbing walls, and wellness hubs will close not because administrators rediscover austerity but because they become unprofitable. Campuses will simplify by attrition, not principle. What might look like deliberate reform will actually be financial abandonment.

Enrollment contraction will then trigger mass faculty terminations. Adjuncts disappear first since there is no legal or political barrier to their removal. Tenure-track lines follow as programs close and budgets contract. For a brief window, the remaining faculty will be disproportionately tenured, teaching smaller cohorts under better conditions. This will feel like recovery. It is not. Attrition will hollow departments from within. Retiring faculty will not be replaced. Within fifteen years, most departments will consist of one or two senior professors and a rotating cast of contingent labor, now hired not to expand access but to manage collapse. The profession will survive, but only as a vestigial guild, smaller, older, and increasingly irrelevant to the institutions that employ it.

The sorts of reforms I have outlined require buy-in from the very layers that created the structures now collapsing under their own weight. No Program Director of Women and Gender Studies will vote for their program's elimination. Faculty in traditional disciplines are no more capable of reading the room. From 2021 to 2024, I chaired—some might say was imposed upon—a once-massive ESL department that had contracted from roughly 1,200 students to fewer than 200 and from a couple of dozen faculty to nine, with a single adjunct. No new lines had been advertised since before 2010. Faculty could no longer fill their required instructional hours without scrounging reassigned time. I attempted mergers with English and Modern Languages, streamlined course offerings, rewrote every course description and learning outcome, toughened program standards, and had secretarial staff purge decades of retained files in compliance with CUNY policy. None of it produced buy-in from any stakeholder. The department still exists. I am long gone. Its website lists faculty I know to be deceased. It occupies an entire office suite with dedicated secretarial support, computers, copiers, a refrigerator, and a water cooler. So yes, I know for a fact that nothing will change voluntarily.

The deciding factor will be economics. Student loan debt is no longer sustainable. When enrollment craters—not if, but when—governments will panic, but too late to intervene effectively. Colleges are already closing en masse. Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, St. Andrews University, Northland College, College of Saint Rose, Alliance University, Mills College—at least eighty institutions have closed, merged, or announced imminent closure since 2020. And these closures preceded the full deployment of large language models. Kelchen, Ritter, and Webber's Federal Reserve working paper, published in December 2024, shows enrollment declined fifteen percent from 2010 to 2021, with accelerating drops during the pandemic. Their machine learning models predict closure risk intensifying sharply in coming years, particularly as the demographic cliff fully materializes. But their data stops in 2023. They could not have accounted for what happens when LLMs move from experimental to ubiquitous, when every employer knows that a 2024 graduate may have produced nothing verifiable, when every degree becomes suspect. What they describe is guaranteed to become infinitely worse.

The financial model collapses entirely. You cut services, housing, programs, online revenue. Enrollment craters. What replaces tuition dependency? State funding? Politically impossible as legislatures have systematically defunded higher education for decades and will not reverse course for a sector they now distrust. Endowment draw? Only viable for a few dozen wealthy institutions. The rest operate on tuition revenue that is about to evaporate. The math does not close. There is no rescue coming.

And what of my suggestions? People will call me an elitist and claim that the future I am describing is bifurcated starkly between intellectual haves and have-nots, perhaps determined not only by genetics but by decent parenting, an ethos that values hard work and integrity, and the financial stability that allows the young to read and explore the world of ideas. So be it. I can think of no other way any of this will work. The alternative is not egalitarian access, it is the wholesale collapse of credibility, where degrees certify nothing and universities become obsolete. If higher education is to survive as something other than a simulation of itself, it must again become difficult, expensive in effort if not always in dollars, and reserved for those capable of demonstrating mastery under conditions that cannot be faked. That has always been unfair. It has also always been the only way scholarship survives.