Presidents Sound Off on the State of Higher Ed

The writer is a current president (public).

While the pendulum of American higher education swings between “Work! Only work!” and “Learning to think critically about yourself and your place in the world,” don’t be fooled: The place we’re in now is class warfare.

Detractors don’t just want to freeze the pendulum; they want to smash it—especially for those who dare believe they belong inside. Too many who benefited from higher education, and the power that comes with it, are yanking the ladders up behind them. White working-class folks who thought they were next in line for post-manufacturing prosperity now rage that others—Black, Latino, queer—seem to be getting opportunities denied to them. The images of campus life they see—pronouns, protests—look like alien worlds.

This isn’t the end of higher education, but it could well be the gutting of public higher education, once a genuine ornament of mass democracy. After World War II, GIs came home and states built out colleges and universities, opening the middle class to people who never could have afforded it. Others demanded entry, too. And now, as the powerful dismantle the very mechanisms that made public higher ed possible, those of us leading these institutions must face reality: It’s our job to save them.

States confuse triangulation with leadership, treating stability as a virtue in itself. But stability is no longer an option. Here’s what we can do:

Treat colleges as ecosystems. We don’t exist just to process students. Students are not students without instruction, guidance, community. Campuses are sites of purposeful educational interaction. That truth—not budget spreadsheets—should drive our actions.

Aim for near–100 percent on-time graduation. Our sector’s graduation rates are dismal. Too many students learn in ways convenient for them (skipping class, hiding online) and convenient for us (mass lectures, poor teaching). If we’re serious about equity, we must build systems—intensive advising, transfer credit acceptance, robust aid—that make timely graduation the norm. Yes, it’s costly. But imagine the statement: We guarantee you will graduate in five years with an excellent education. Fewer broken promises, fewer broken lives.

Enforce standards. If a student ends their first semester with a 0.0 GPA, we do them no favors by keeping them enrolled and taking their loan dollars. Clear standards, firmly applied, serve students better than false hope.

Honor the public mission. Whether public or private, higher education is a public good. That means being active and present in our communities: housing partnerships, libraries, nonprofits. It also means building coalitions with other colleges—even competitors. Silence and isolation make us easy targets. Collaboration, even consolidation, may be the only path forward.

Confront tenure. Academic freedom—the right to teach, write, and speak without fear—is a hill worth dying on. But tenure, as it exists, doesn’t always protect that freedom. Too often it just protects faculty who should have retired decades ago. Dedicated teachers and scholars will keep their jobs because they’re good at them—and employment law already offers safeguards. We can cling to tenure until it’s stripped from us, or we can rethink it ourselves. Either way, it will be bruising.

Stop tinkering with majors. Killing off a low-enrolled major saves almost nothing. Some of those programs—unique, vital—exist only in the public sector. Should they be reserved only for students who can afford private tuition? If we cut programs, let it be strategic, not cosmetic. And let’s not fool ourselves into thinking the latest “hot” major will rescue us, either. Strategy, not tinkering, will.

Refuse to compromise on DEI. Diversity and equity aren’t add-ons; they’re inseparable from our mission. Every time we bargain them away to placate political powers, we move closer to extinction—or to serving an authoritarian government. That’s the road we’re already on.

This is a fight for survival, but also for something larger. Public higher education is the nation’s most powerful tool for advancing equity and democracy. If we lose it, the ladders stay up, the gates stay closed, and the pendulum—once swinging toward opportunity—hangs broken.

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The writer is a current president (private).

If we Americans can agree about anything related to higher education right now, it seems to be that colleges and universities need to change. The drumbeat is deafening on LinkedIn feeds and in the media, including here in The Sandbox. Self-styled higher ed futurists, ambulance-chasing consultants, and social media–savvy college presidents (inevitably the kind who would describe themselves as “visionary”) are all on the bandwagon. Our industry is apparently headed for an extinction-level event because of our inherent conservatism, arrogance, and complacency. And our salvation? As Christopher Walken might put it, “Guess what? We’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more change.”

These ceaseless exhortations to change are, it seems to me, rooted in two erroneous presumptions: First, that universities are mired in inertia and constitutionally unable to reinvent themselves; and second, that change is, in and of itself, either a good thing or a strategy. Say what you will about the agility of corporate America, but a McDonald’s (or a steel mill) today looks and operates more like it did 50 years ago than most universities or college classes do. Similarly, while Silicon Valley’s business model may rely on our acquiescence to the notion that all change is good change—What versions of iPhone and MS Office are we on now?—endless disruption is no more a strategy than locking the gates to the ivory tower and hoping for the best.

As one long-serving president was fond of saying (especially to impetuous trustees and donors), the church and universities are the most enduring institutions in Western civilization because they change so slowly. In other words, the tortoises of higher ed have survived through a process of incremental, adaptive, intentional change while the corporate hares have come and gone by chasing quarterly results and the newest, biggest thing.

Today, the reason to stick with a thoughtful and measured approach to change is not because universities have always done it that way, but because it has served us well historically and continues to do so. For all the handwringing about ever-impending waves of college closures and demographic cliffs and catastrophic Trump policies, American higher education is proving remarkably resilient, just as it did during the Great Depression, World War II, and the cultural churn of the 1960s.

At my small, church-affiliated university in flyover country, we probably look to a lot of pundits like one of those fossilized institutions stuck in the Middle Ages, teetering on the brink of irrelevance: We have not re-engineered the student experience or transformed our processes with AI or required every undergrad to learn welding or HVAC repair. But instead we have focused on the basic blocking and tackling of our business (mission focus, budget discipline, process efficiencies, fundraising) and a careful, intentional process of change (especially by investing in new degree programs and new partnerships).

As we have done with every new presidential administration since Washington became the sugar daddy of higher education, we have rolled with punches from D.C. and, so far, have experienced very little impact on our programs, funding, or students. Although we have a negligible endowment and sweat the numbers at the end of every fiscal year, we have had no layoffs or headline-grabbing program closures on my watch. And this fall, our undergraduate enrollment is nearing record levels, our discount rates are holding steady, our international student population is booming, our faculty and staff are no more grumpy about low wages and high workloads than they ever are, and we see no sign of prospective students and families losing faith in the value of a college education.

Universities like mine do not have luxury of complacency: We do not have an Ivy League piggy bank or the state coffers of public flagships to fall back on. But limited resources also mean that we cannot be on the cutting edge of every higher ed fad or invest in a wholesale makeover of the institution, even if we wanted to do either. So we are left (in our case, quite contently) with the formula that has served universities well for a few centuries now: Never stop changing or adapting to new needs and realities, but always do so as reflectively, deliberately, and cost-effectively as possible. The sky may indeed be falling on American higher education these days, but that doesn’t mean we have to flock up with all the Chicken Littles out there.