I frequently recount the following story, so forgive me if I do it again. Back in 1999, I joined a group of colleagues to hear a presentation from a first-wave dot-com company about how the selective, wealthy residential college I worked for needed to begin converting right now to being online. The company’s pet academic, an accomplished philosopher, led off by claiming that we were only a few scant years away from being put out of business by fully online rivals, who would outdo us on both quality of education and cost. He didn’t appreciate our universal skepticism, which was, all things considered, pretty polite given the paper-thin phoniness of the entire sales pitch.
That company went out of business. The philosopher went on to revise and repeat his predictions that the end was near, provoking general scorn across academia. Other companies came along with a new version of the pitch. A famous “disruptor” predicted that half of American higher education would be out of business by the mid-2020s.
Somehow online courses never really replaced brick-and-mortar higher education where various advocates most avidly wanted to make inroads, which is in the wealthier, more selective, more elite universities and colleges. That’s where the money was going to be so that’s where they went. Online courses, on the other hand, were already well-established in many for-profit institutions, and have become a major part of the mix of courses offered in community colleges, art schools, trade schools, tertiary public institutions, and so on.
All Americans got a look at what learning online was like during the covid-19 pandemic, and I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of students, teachers and administrators hated the experience and found it deeply unsatisfying compared to face-to-face instruction. That’s not because instructors were bad at using the technology, either: I’m pretty clear that many many teachers did the absolute best that a fairly mature, well-developed set of tools allowed them to do.
As a result, the people who believe in “disruption” as religious dogma have been anxiously looking for a new doomsday story to tell. Most of them are jumping to AI, because a lot of them were either already in Big Tech or wanted to be. Some of them are talking instead about the “demographic cliff” that we are on the edge of, about a dramatic shortfall of young people coming into higher education.
They aren’t wrong that there’s demographic shift coming. They also aren’t wrong that some young Americans are doubting that the expense of college is justified—a rethinking that is especially affecting community colleges, despite their affordability, and some 4-year institutions—for-profits, tertiary publics, tuition-dependent privates—that combine historically high prices with weak outcomes (both in terms of the quality of instruction and job placement) and inconvenient approaches to curricular scheduling that don’t suit the lives of young working adults.
The thing about being a doomsday futurist is that there’s always a new doomsday to predict—often with the intent of herding scared people down some prepared commercial kill-chute the futurist stands to profit from—and nobody ever seems to hold the predictors accountable for missing the mark again and again, so there’s no risk involved in just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
What keeps doomsday from coming, at least some of the time, is that long-standing institutions with established identities and a sense of physical rootedness often are, to use a favored business-speak word, resilient.1 I am sure right now that “enrollment management” consultants and higher education administrators are busy thinking of “resilient” strategies for surviving the fall off the cliff, some of which might actually work.
But I’d wager a fair number of those strategies are about trying to overcome the doubts of young Americans who are on the fence about college—perhaps through marketing rather than actually addressing those doubts substantively—or they are about various forms of enrollment “capture” intended to lock in various pipelines that an institution already sees as belonging to them. (E.g., local feeders, various prep schools, various recruitment targets both in the U.S. and elsewhere). E.g., most strategies being drafted now are about winning out in a competition for scarce resources.
In the past three decades, when American higher education has thought instead about bringing new students into their institutions, that’s mostly been about students from the rest of the world. There was a lag effect for a while where that thinking was being done behind closed doors, in part because the calculation often was that foreign students coming to American institutions would not be included in various need-blind or need-aware policies, and would often be full-paying students who were the children of wealthy businesspeople or of high-level government officials, thus very much contributing to the bottom line. I think the closed doors part was first about competitive secrecy—institutions hoping to beat others to the punch—and partly because there was something unsavory about preaching diversity and recognizing economic need while counting on wealthy foreigners to prop up the operating budget.2
So that’s a strategy with diminishing returns, in significant measure because the United States has become a markedly more hostile and precarious place to come to for a university education—and also because of competition for this pool of students, the rise of competitive local education in many countries, and because many institutions moved to allow foreign students to be eligible for some financial aid.
I want to suggest another way to dodge doomsday.
Continuing education is one of the oldest ideas in higher education, and it’s gone through many cycles of institutional re-invention. Many universities enroll older adults on a part-time or per-course basis. Many community colleges have students who are just there for enrichment, or are working gradually towards a degree or credential that will bump them up a pay grade in their existing career. (My first teaching job in higher education was at a community college where I taught an African history survey: 3/4 of my students were certified middle-school and high-school teachers in their thirties and forties, and the remaining students were mostly retirees who were just interested in the subject.)
But many liberal-arts colleges have student bodies that are very disproportionately made up of 18-24 year olds who live in dormitories on campus. If they do continuing education, it’s either through some subcontractor who rents space on campus in the summer or it’s a largely pro bono project aimed at older alumni and possibly the local community.
Let’s suppose you’re a tuition-dependent liberal arts college that is in a suburb, a small town, or a relatively rural area. You own a fair amount of real estate that may not have a great deal of value if you were to sell it off—and if you sell it, you’re more or less kissing it good-bye forever, even if you only realize pennies to the dollar on its previous value. But you have falling enrollments, and no matter how desperately you flail around offering new degree programs that some consultant has pitched (usually without doing any meaningful market research), the demographic cliff looks like it might be the end of the line—you can’t seem to find another track.
How about this? What’s another growing industry with ridiculously high costs, and one that is far more rife with exploitation than higher education? Assisted living and retirement communities. What’s another problem that a lot of middle-aged people whose children have left home are struggling with that governments are (sometimes) interested in subsidizing? Job retraining, including the possibility of relocation.
Colleges that are struggling sometimes take out significant loans or focus capital campaigns on building a huge new vanity structure—a new arts center, a new science building, a new fieldhouse—intended to bring in new students. Why not raise money for something more modest?
Namely, move your existing 18-24 year old students into one set of your dorms, and vacate several others. Then remodel those dorms so that the living spaces are bigger and nicer, closer to a studio apartment, but still basically cinderblock-spartan. Make sure every floor has a decent communal kitchen, the elevators work reliably, and that there’s laundry facilities on every floor. Refurbish the lounge and put in a good-quality audiovisual system and some places to eat. And offer this as a residential space for older adults, either at market-reasonable rentals or as a co-op sale.
And then? Offer the residents access to courses, degrees and all the events, performances and talks already available on campus. Create price tiers—there’s the “privileged access to all campus events and resources (including the library and its electronic resources” tier for people who just want to live there. A second tier for “one course per semester, no degree progression”, a third tier for “two courses per semester, no degree progression”. Then a fourth tier for “degree progression, full-time student status”.
For the older adult residents, you dump the entire apparatus of student affairs except for the fourth tier degree candidates. You’re still their landlord, so yes, you have to get involved if the 65-year old couple on the third floor are the subject of noise complaints. But you get involved as a landlord does. The mental and physical health of the residents is their own affair—you don’t have to staff to cover that, even though you might provide information. (Or maybe even invest in an urgent-care facility as a revenue-generating operation, if there isn’t one near campus already.) And you skip the entire apparatus of admissions except for the fourth-tier degree candidates, because you don’t have to vet the qualifications of the folks there for enrichment and enlightenment. Whether they struggle with reading Plato or have trouble with the centrifuge is not important in terms of the certification a degree provides—it’s just about the pedagogical responsibilities that faculty incur towards anyone in their classroom.
For degree-seeking older adults who might be looking for retraining, you’d need a few new career-services staff, and you’d need to look at the market demands to decide what you can offer that might appeal in that sense, or where you might be able to add new faculty. But the whole idea is very faculty-centered—you have to retain, in fact add, skilled faculty to work across a broad liberal-arts curriculum. That’s what makes a college like this a good place to live as an older adult, it’s what make the courses interesting, and what might make it a good place to look for retraining that isn’t too narrowcasted and exploitatively priced.
This whole concept might be especially attractive to retirees who are finding it hard to afford where they live now or who want to downsize considerably without having to buy into an expensive real-estate market. Honestly, I’d give it a thought if the refurbished dorm wasn’t too squalid and I could find an off-site place to store my books. (Or heck, let me rent a faculty office!)
The 18-24 year olds would benefit too, I think. For one, retirees would be another source of potentially valuable social networking—many of them will have worked in various professions of interest and be able to connect their younger peer students with useful resources. But also, I think a lot of discussions, especially in humanities and social science classes, would be considerably better if there were a mix of generations involved. Maybe this is the one place you’d have to have admissions or student affairs involved, certainly—some generational mix on some issues or subjects might make the experience worse for everybody.
But anyway, it’s a different way to think about surviving the demographic cliff, by finding another demographic hill to climb. There are a lot of people out there who still want what higher education is able to provide. Institutions that are worried about the supply of young people might stretch their imagination a bit.
This is why I so often get on my hobbyhorse about news stories of colleges and universities failing: they always, even in the higher-ed press, ignore when those institutions were relatively young, or had frequently fundamentally shifted what their educational program was (from 2-year to 4-year to pre-professional to liberal-arts to trade, etc.), had changed names and locations often, etc.—factors that alone are sufficient weaknesses to explain why many of them were losing students. The history of American higher education is full of that kind of failure. Nobody thinks that the restaurant industry is going on under when a single restaurant fails, because everybody understands that’s pretty normal—and often attributable to bad locational decisions, to inconsistent branding, to poor financial discipline, etc.
One of the consequences of the relative secrecy in the early phases of this shift was that faculty at many institutions found themselves teaching significant numbers of new students whose educational background was unfamiliar to the faculty, which made it harder initially to connect with those students. I think that mistake was repeated when many institutions sought to recruit much larger numbers of first-generation, low-income students: in both cases the students arrived without any institution-wide thinking about how to tactically shift curricular planning and pedagogical approaches.
As a retiree, I find that I’m doing quite a lot of online coursework on a topic that I have always found fascinating and stimulating (folklore and fairy tales). I wouldn’t mind living near some of the others who are part of that particular online community, but would I want to live in a cinder block dorm? Um. Not so sure about that. Maybe better to convert some building into one-bedroom flats/condos. If the oldsters don’t work out, that would still be an attractive housing option for student life.
A bit off your main topic (which I like!) but regarding your footnote 2, about institutions not systematically preparing faculty for shifts in student demographics: I think we are still very much living with that. We have COVID and just the usual ongoing generational change layered on top of this shift, so attribution is harder, but either way I think we still need more systematic thinking about, and support for, adapting to these changes in the range of student preparation.