The Enrollment Cliff Is Here. Which Schools Will Survive It?
UVM is an extreme case, but over the past two decades the nation’s flagship public schools have aggressively attracted foreign students who typically pay higher tuition. For example, more than half of the undergraduate students at the University of Alabama are not from outside Alabama. One of the most interesting trends in higher education is the explosion in the number of international students attending the South’s big, flagship football universities, largely because they see college as a time to party, to join a fraternity or sorority. But this version of the college experience only really makes sense for kids who were definitely going to attend a four-year school — namely middle- and upper-class kids with educated parents — and the trend suggests that many schools are having a hard time selling students, or their parents, on the educational reasons for paying them so much money.
Importing higher-paid — and often higher-performing — students benefits a school during boom times, when universities have a seemingly infinite choice of applicants. But what happens when the number of applicants decreases nationally? Schools that are slightly more selective or attractive than a school like UVM will start to let in students they might have rejected in previous years, meaning those students won’t end up at UVM, and UVM will find itself stuck in a difficult dance between maintaining its standards and trying to meet its tuition goals. “You can admit wealthier students with poor grades to keep your income high,” Kevin Carey, vice president of education and labor at New America, told me. “But if your academic reputation deteriorates, people are less willing to pay high tuition fees. » Of course, Andover and Exeter graduates will continue to go to Harvard, Alabama football will continue, and UC Berkeley’s electrical engineering classrooms will almost certainly remain full. But unless a university sells something that students and their families actually want, it could face irreversible decline. “We are facing a winner-take-all situation,” Carey said. “Institutions that have market power will likely benefit from the situation, because they might have fewer competitors. And institutions that don’t have the same market power will fall on hard times.”
It is often said that large language models are mirrors that reveal their users primarily to themselves. This is certainly true for higher education, although in this case the LLMs provided a particularly harsh reflection, which draws attention to the myriad failings of academia. LLMs may have allowed students to cheat in new ways, for example, but that cheating occurred in the context of the “the customer is always right” relationship that now dictates most interactions between students and professors—a dynamic that has also contributed to grade inflation, which effectively kills a student’s incentive to value their own work. The takeaway, then, is not that students are deceitful and depraved or that technology has eroded their moral core. It’s more that many of them don’t see a good reason to finish their studies. Why then? Is this due to a decline in the quality of teaching? In the growing realization that a four-year degree alone won’t save them from downward mobility? Or do they now see the purpose of college simply as early professional accreditation and, therefore, don’t really care whether they’ve actually read Melville or anything?
Likewise, the fear that university administrators will use AI to replace large numbers of lower-level professors and graduate students could be well-founded, and it could certainly put many talented and hard-working people out of work. But, once again, our worry about AI mostly tells the story of existing problems unrelated to the arrival of artificial intelligence – this time, it’s about the fungibility of adjuncts and the overproduction of graduate students by institutions that have exploited cheap labor for years. And while the questions that have been asked recently about the viability of the humanities as a discipline in a future where all writing is outsourced to Claude don’t say much about the value of learning to read and think, they do suggest that young people increasingly see college as a gateway to an expensive, time-consuming, debt-heavy career and don’t want to risk their investment in a degree that won’t lead to any obvious job upon graduation.
