The coming extinction of the university

A report by NPR earlier this week warned of a drop in college enrollments starting this fall. The cause is a "demographic cliff" starting in 2007, the beginning of the Great Recession. The declining US birth rate since that point has been dramatic and unrelenting. By 2039, colleges can expect 15% fewer students than today.

If only.

They're right about the decline, but the forecast is much too sunny. The cause is more devastating than a reversible reduction of units in the pipeline. Unless I miss my guess, the ravaging of high education will be quicker and more complete than a 15% cull of the student herd.

The college experience in two different universes

I went to Berkeley in the 1980s. Loved it so much I stayed an extra year. I double-majored and took a lot of courses that weren't required. I left my claw marks on the gate as I was dragged out after ten semesters, having hit the absolute ceiling of allowable credits with the first credit of my last term, then went on to grad school, then again to grad school, then taught at the college level for 18 years. I am a happy creature of the academy.

A close friend of mine—let's call him Kevin—attended another nationally-ranked public university in the 2010s and loathed it so much he left after a year.

Kevin doesn't fit the traditional image of a college dropout. He's among the most intelligent polymaths I've ever known, with an astonishing breadth and depth of knowledge and interest. He has a well-developed perspective on culture and the arts. He is a creative and inspired graphic designer.

Then there's his sci-tech side. His intensive study of subatomic physics yielded a novel theory of particle behavior that needed visualization to be understood—so he built a computer from scratch and wrote tens of thousands of lines of code so it could model and reorient the particles in three dimensions and depict their interactions.

To optimize his own health, he has learned everything he could about the biochemistry of nutrition and exercise. He has studied Japanese and French, as well as film history and architecture.

We were both driven by curiosity at an early age. But while I found the fulfillment of that curiosity in college, he was repulsed.

It took me years to figure out why.

Two different brains

I grew up with card files, typewriters, libraries that closed at 5. I read a lot when I was young, experiencing the acquisition of knowledge and insight in the way books convey information—linearly. An author designs an unchanging, sequential presentation of parts and chapters and headings, captured in the table of contents, and I dutifully take the path laid out before me.

In classes, I experienced the acquisition of knowledge and insight in the way traditional courses convey information—linearly. A teacher designs an unchanging, sequential presentation of topics and subtopics, captured in the syllabus, and I dutifully take the path laid out before me.

Kevin is a digital native. There has never been a time in his life when he didn't have instant access to the world's accumulated knowledge and the full range of expert opinion. To a deeply curious kid of 12 and 14 and 16, this was an absolute playground, and Kevin spent nearly as many hours per day learning on his own as he did in classrooms. It was there that he acquired the astonishingly broad base of knowledge and insight that has made him who he is today.

Think about the actual experience of online learning. Start wherever you want, with a video or podcast and article. Then each subsequent step is driven not by someone else's curriculum but by your curiosity. In many cases, it's down to a feature of online experience we don't even think about anymore—the algorithmically generated recommendations in the right sidebar. The purpose is prosaic—the website wants to keep you there to generate more ad revenue. But the impact on the user can be profound. Instead of a syllabus directing you to the next step, you are offered an array of choices based on what has already interested you.

For a certain kind of internet user, this is an invitation to a rabbit hole of vacuous crap. But to Kevin, it was an intellectual playground without limits.

My own self-guided learning outside of the classroom largely matched the linear, other-directed nature of the classroom itself. Kevin's absolutely did not. And a mind wired up for curiosity-driven learning began to seriously thrash inside its halter in high school, then fully rebelled in college.

I don't think Kevin is remotely alone.

A generation, and now two, misconfigured for college

He was in the vanguard of true digital natives, entering kindergarten in 2000, the year a majority of American homes had a computer and nearly half had internet access. Curiosity-driven access to the world's knowledge was new to me then. I adapted gradually and incompletely. But Kevin never knew anything else—except the increasingly stultifying classroom.

There is of course a great deal to be said for disciplined curricula with defined steps and end points. Entire fields and technologies and discoveries are built not on a squirming bowl of unguided curiosities but a (yes) linear, cumulative, disciplined structure. Fully granted.

Yet we can't wish the mismatch away.

This mismatch, combined with insane and indefensible college costs, will devastate traditional undergraduate higher education in the coming years. It can't be otherwise. Rigid curricula and linear teaching methods are becoming increasingly incompatible with the brains walking through the gates. And as those brains register the decades of debt they stand to acquire for this unsatisfying experience, a movement against college as a default expectation will quickly grow, depopulating lecture halls and institutional incomes in the process.

NPR’s projection of a 15% drop in college enrollments by 2039 is a massive undercount. More aggressive projections suggest that 25–30% of colleges could close their doors by the mid-2030s. Some studies note that the speed of closures is already exceeding earlier estimates. Heavily-endowed behemoths will survive, along with freestanding graduate institutions, untethered from undergrad programs. Small liberal arts colleges, regional universities, and other institutions reliant on undergrad tuition revenue will bear the brunt, unable to compete with the flexibility, affordability, and accessibility of alternative learning platforms.

Greater acceptance of credentials from online institutions will follow, at which point most of the brick-and-mortars are done.

It gives me zero joy to imagine the extinction of the university. Even when I was in it, I knew that most of the value of the experience happened outside of the academics—the whole climb out of dependence, the self-discovery, the mistakes. Losing that would mean losing yet another social institution whose tangible and intangible benefits we aren't fully ready to replace.

The best case may be a rapid retooling of physical universities to incorporate more curiosity-driven undergraduate learning without completely throttling rigor. I don't know how to do that.

But Kevin might.