The Higher Ed Death Spiral

AI might be the final destabilizing pressure on a deeply unstable edifice.

Photo by mhajr invincible on Unsplash

I read a recent blog post that suggested that the growth of AI had contributed to faculty feeling “moral disorientation;” that (to paraphrase) AI is is changing who faculty and universities think they are.

I’ll be uncharacteristically brutal for a second: if this is the first time faculty are feeling moral disorientation about higher education I’m worried that Trump might be right about academics after all.

Seems pretty harsh, I know, but the truth is almost as brutal.

To see the depth of the problem, let’s look at just a few trends together:

1. Student loan debt will hit $2 trillion (yes, that’s trillion) in 2025 and the return on investment of student loan debt is deeply uneven. Somewhere around 40% of Americans with student loan debt don’t have a four year degree (the numbers are fuzzy) and generally speaking those with the lowest incomes and least education are (unsurprisingly) most likely to default on their loans.

2. Cheating is now endemic in higher education and will only become more so as the AI revolution moves onward. Tuition-driven institutions have no real incentive to hold cheaters accountable and faculty (in my experience) often don’t bother reporting academic misconduct because doing so tangles them in pages and hours of paperwork and bureaucratic meetings.

3. Student time spent on classwork (and even in class) has dropped dramatically over the past few decades, despite the same theoretical commitment (120 credit hours) to earn a BA degree. While the Carnegie Model assumes students spend 2-3 hours outside of class for each hour spent in class (for around 45 hours of work per week) the modern reality is far more minimal, with estimates as low as 15-20 hours per week total outside of class. While some argue students must now struggle to balance jobs and higher ed, the data (and my own experience with 18+ years in the classroom) doesn’t support that theory. It’s often the students doing the least work outside of class are usually those with the least going on.

4. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the above, a range of evidence suggests that a college education may not do much to improve writing, communication or critical thinking. The primary benefit of a college degree seems to be the signal that you can stick something out for four years. A secondary benefit in the employment space is better networks, which probably is most meaningful for elite college attendees. Whatever college does or does not add to student abilities, employers report serious and growing gaps in basic skills like communication, teamwork, and critical thinking, which would seem - at least in theory - to be possible to improve over 4 years of earnest effort.

5. Maybe even more heartbreaking, for the first time, men with a college degree are less likely to be employed than men with a high school diploma. While women still see employment and earnings benefits from college degrees, young men are hardest hit by slowing job markets in computing and tech, precisely the degrees everyone told them to lean into, hard. Women, more likely to go into healthcare fields, have made themselves far more future-proof, at least for the moment.

6. Finally, we have far fewer skilled tradespeople than jobs and far too many college educated young people than we have jobs for. Skilled trades have been culturally and educationally sidelined for decades in favor of pushing more and more young Americans into increasingly costly academic work that is frequently a poor fit for individual personalities, temperaments and talents.

To review this all again:

Students aren’t doing the work, aren’t learning much, are going into debt while delaying earning, are increasingly not seeing benefits in terms of employment or financial security, and are poorly matched with the needs of the broader economy.

And all this is before we even take into account troubling patterns on the faculty and research side, including a crisis of peer review, the rise of predatory journals, a replication crisis in the social sciences and elsewhere, and a completely unsustainable research dissemination model.

The student side alone seems like cause enough for moral disorientation if not full blown moral panic. What are we doing here if students end up at most marginally better off and at worst deeply in debt with few skills and even fewer pathways to meaningful work?

While I’m as big a proponent of liberal education for its own sake as anyone else, being able to read Plato from the comfort of your parents’ basement while paying off $100,000 in debt is not exactly a vision of human excellence.

And it’s not the meaningful life of contribution that we claim we’re preparing students for.

Cause and Effect

While part of me is hopeful that these are temporary disruptions, I can’t stop worrying that higher education is in a death spiral that will take a LOT of really focused attention to get out of. And it turns out that higher education is - as an institution - pretty bad at that kind of meta-thinking about its own mission.

So why is higher ed failing so hard? How did we get here?

While many point to the withdrawal of government investment in higher education in recent years, the story is far more complex. Not only are many more students entering higher education than ever before, but universities are also providing far more in the way of non-academic services than they were tasked to do in the days of the GI Bill. As a result, the costs of education have soared while the number of students needing to be served has skyrocketed. Higher need students, rapidly changing workforce needs, and a deeply change-averse culture within academia generally makes it unsurprising that higher ed has failed to handle the scale well.

On the institutional front there are lots of reasons why we’re failing to adapt:

On a basic level, faculty (typically) control the curriculum, but they are frequently siloed in departments where territoriality outweighs student needs and they’re often mostly or completely insulated from information about how their graduates fare after graduation. Many faculty (like me) have very limited work experience outside of academia, making it hard for us to align the curriculum with what students need in the “real” world.

Administrators may say they want curricular innovation, but they are deeply risk-averse about everything from curricular change to hiring. They also (surprisingly) frequently lack data on national trends or regional employment statistics, including long-term information on how students fare post-graduation. Many too are mired in the uglier side of academia, which focuses on keeping the lights on and avoiding lawsuits, which leaves little time for attending to the rigor of the education itself or what to do about the crisis of academic integrity on our campuses.

Meanwhile, regulators and accreditors pile on bureaucracy that makes even minor curricular changes feel like trying to steer the Titanic. My administrative experience working with the New York State Department of Education (NYSED) sometimes resembles a low-stakes Kafka novel. And the grit that NYSED doesn’t manage to add into the gears is added in bucketfuls by our internal curricular processes. For some kinds of curricular changes, the timeframe from idea to launch can be two to three years and that’s for just for programs requiring zero additional hiring or resources.

Finally, demographics matter (a lot). As greater numbers of students enter higher education, student preparedness has crumbled and, particularly post-pandemic, student mental health is at an all-time low. In an increasingly resource-scarce environment, colleges are plowing larger and larger shares of the shrinking pie into arguably non-academic expenditures like mental health, student success initiatives, and remedial classes. These are all valuable programs. Don’t get me wrong. But we can’t escape the math that the pie is shrinking as the demands for what higher education is supposed to do and for whom grow ever larger.

We Need More (Accurate) Moral Disorientation in Academia

To pull back from total moral despair for a moment, I’ll clarify that I love higher education. I’ve spent my entire adult life in higher education in one form or another. And I see inspirational stories every day from students who got real value from their education and end up doing meaningful work with lives of purpose. The anecdotal data are what give me hope.

But I look at the landscape now and I see a model that is fundamentally unsustainable. It’s a model that does not - in the aggregate - provide the outcomes it needs to to justify the expense in private and public money, human life years, and lost earnings.

I sometimes feel like I spend a large part of my day watching a sinking cruise ship. And on that cruise ship are faculty who seem oblivious, administrators scurrying to fill cracks with toothpaste, and student services staff desperately try to bail out the boat with a teaspoon.

The oblivious faculty are clustered in the cruise ship break room fighting each other and everyone else about every minor policy or curriculum change while the icebergs of student loan debt, post-graduation outcomes, and the actual learning that may or may not happen in the classroom are gutting the bow.

I’m being particularly harsh on faculty because I’m one of them.

I spent 18 years in the classroom defending turf, fighting off administrative attempts to guide the curriculum, and poo-pooing various initiatives because they inconvenienced my flexible schedule devoted to the life of the mind.

I didn’t think I was being deeply selfish at the time. I thought - like many faculty - that I was protecting an important way of life.

But I didn’t think deeply enough about who was being sacrificed for my way of life and how unstable the entire model was becoming.

Next Time: False Binaries in Education and Beyond

I dislike ending posts on a negative note, so I’ll promise a more upbeat post next week. But for now I want to reiterate that faculty and administrators should be experiencing deep moral disorientation about higher education. We should have been feeling it for years.

Perhaps gen AI and the dangers it poses to higher education broadly will wake faculty up to the challenges our students are facing and how little we’re doing to prepare them for that world. But I worry - knowing faculty and administrative minds the way I do - that this will become just another external enemy to distract us from meaningful reckoning and reform that needs to come from within.

Your Turn!

Let me know what you think! I expect a lot of higher ed irritation at this one, so let me know why I’m wrong! What am I missing? Am I being too pessimistic? How and why? Please convince me that things aren’t as bad as I think they are! You would be doing me a valuable service. So drop some contrarianism in the comments and - as always - share and subscribe if you like what you read.