There is no existential crisis in higher education. Rather, higher education is under attack from media-fabricated projections of emergency and disaster that are doomed to fail in the long run but are dangerous in the short term.
Institutions of higher education have been serving the common good for over 11 centuries. The oldest is the University of Al Quaraouiyine in Fez, Morocco—originally a mosque, then a madrasa (Arabic for university).
Similarly, the University of Bologna and the University of Paris started as monastic schools. In modern times, despite the defunding of National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation,NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Environmental Protection Agency, the Ivy League is going strong, offering a high-quality education with highly competitive admission processes (4 – 8%).
Another example of high public regard for higher education is, ironically, Operation Varsity Blues—the college admissions scandal of 2019—where even the most privileged resorted to cheating and bribing their children’s admission to a prestigious college.
Stressors may bring challenges, but adaptation is the antithesis to existential crisis. Institutions of higher education are designed to adapt through built-in checks and balances that foster intellectual growth and innovation—such as academic freedom and peer review.
Common sense cannot replace higher learning
The media perpetuates the idea of crisis in higher education by relentlessly reporting on supposed problems like AI, the demographic cliff, the glorification of common sense, protests, no-confidence votes and high costs. However, calling those challenges “crises” serves only to denigrate the perceived societal value of education.
The liberal pursuit of new knowledge, skills and technologies cannot be replaced by AI, the internet or bots. Modern technology brings only “canned” knowledge to our fingertips, often misinterpreted by AI, which may perpetuate assumed knowledge, common sense and fad. Neither the internet nor AI can create new ideas or ask ingenious questions; only humans can do that.
Institutions of higher education are homes to new knowledge, skills, and technologies that are passed on to new generations. Ingenuity and innovation are fundamental to the very essence of humanity. Only in academia is the pursuit of innovation deliberately liberal and protected from biased interests through academic freedom and peer review.
Common sense cannot replace higher learning because it is often wrong and dangerous. “Popular wisdom,” perpetually repeated on social media, includes sugar causing hyperactivity, vaccines causing autism, celestial bodies affecting human behavior, the moon landing being fabricated, detoxes and cleanses outperforming medicine, ethnic/cultural superiority, and IQ tests as unequivocal measures of intelligence—to name a few. The danger is that these misconceptions are easily manipulated by fraudsters.
The adage “you are what you eat” was artfully exploited by Belle Gibson, who claimed to recover from multiple cancers, including brain cancer (none of which she had), with a healthy diet and alternative therapies. Gibson’s lies damaged thousands of cancer patients who found her “health tips” more common sensical than legitimate medical advice.
Higher learning may be expensive but it is the strongest safeguard against dangerous faux truths that are immeasurably costlier than college.
More hype than crisis
One of the core raisons d’etre of higher education is providing students with credentials, but college offers much more: broader intellectual growth, greater satisfaction from life, new knowledge, and meaningful contributions to society.
Moreover, the life expectancy for the current college-age generation is roughly 80 years—a long enough time that one career will not suffice. So, a college education is invaluable, offering the practice of higher-order cognitive skills such as critical thinking, innovation, problem solving, ethical reasoning and quantitative modeling. These skills allow alumni to shift careers with little or no need for another degree.
The demographic cliff is more hype than crisis. And it is neither new nor unsolvable. In the 1950s, concerns that the Great Depression would fuel an enrollment decline were offset by the post-war boom and the GI bill.
The number of high school graduates peaked in 2025 with 3.9 million. A 15-year enrollment decline stemming from the recession of 2007 is anticipated to begin in 2026, projecting a drop of 13% by 2041.
The enrollment cliff is founded on a faulty premise, however: that the number of students pursuing college is a fixed proportion of those who graduate high school. Instead, multiple factors determine if a high schooler will become a college freshman.
The demographic cliff expected after the COVID-19 pandemic was smaller than anticipated. Moreover, 13% decline over 15 years is unlikely to break the bank if institutions of higher education increase student retention, grow recruitment programs from local high schools and augment curricular quality and relevance.
Lastly, protests and no-confidence votes rarely affect enrollment. While the seemingly rising number of ousters of senior administrators constitute a crisis for the institutions of higher education involved, they are few among a total of 6,000 institutions in the US.
The reasons are variable, including scandalous activity, college boards hiring presidents whom faculty find objectionable, a mismatch of institutional priorities, and weak shared governance. Even so, afflicted institutions of higher education often recover from such academic malaise.
Evergreen State University suffered a 14% enrollment decline following racial tensions in 2017, but its enrollment has been steadily growing since. Historically, the closure of one institution of higher education spurs the opening of others, like the closure of the University of Paris in 1970 due to student protests resulted in the decentralization of higher education in France.
