Today’s post is about a scenario for higher ed’s future. It’s not from me, but created by one Matthew F. Wilson, director of Research Translation and AI Strategy at Baylor’s Institute for Global Human Flourishing. “The 2031 Crisis in Higher Education” is a dark one, imagining an accelerating decline for American colleges and universities.
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One key assumption of this scenario is that most colleges and universities will be unable to redesign themselves for the changing time.
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All of that said, it’s a fascinating and daunting scenario. It’s an interesting vision of my post-peak higher ed world.
A graphic from Matthew Wilson:
From DSC: From what I can tell and have read, the things in the above graphic are already happening — and have been happening for some time now.
Also, I don’t think traditional institutions of higher education have the culture(s) it takes to change. So that part about colleges and U’s not being able to redesign themselves for the changing times could easily turn out to be the case.
The conventional explanation for this strategic vacuum points to the speed of technological change; it is moving too fast for institutions built for deliberation. That is true. . . and incomplete. The deeper issue is cultural.In fairness to higher education, many industries are struggling to keep up with the pace of AI advances. Higher education, however, moves even more slowly and is not built for the kind of transformational speed now underway. Getting institutional stakeholders to engage, rethink the work, and move faster may be the central challenge facing presidents and chancellors today, and that’s saying a lot in such volatile times.
From DSC: I highlighted this paragraph because it hits upon the key item involved here — culture.“The deeper issue is cultural.” I think that’s a very true statement.
Part of the culture and setup of many institutions includes giving faculty members full rein of their classes and their departments. Faculty members have a great deal of leeway and power in how they do things. So trying to get X faculty members to get on board — including the Department Chairs — is not an easy task.
Another part of culture involves being willing — or not — to change in the first place. Some institutions are like Google and are used to making changes and being more innovative. But those institutions are not the norm, at least in my experience. And this doesn’t even address another topic the article mentioned — the pace of these changes. As the authors point out, most institutions of traditional higher education are not equipped to deal with the current pace of change (nor are most of our other types of institutions and our corporations as well).
I’m going to end this posting with another brief excerpt from the article:
Institutions rooted in human relationships, committed to truth-seeking, and oriented toward the full development of persons play a central role. AI cannot manufacture the experience of mattering to another human being. It cannot model intellectual courage or ethical discernment. It cannot build the kind of community in which students discover who they are and what they believe.
These are not small things. They are, in fact, the things most worth doing. At their best, colleges and universities are not only preparing better workers but shaping individuals and strengthening society.
From DSC: I used to be able to bring up Firefly on the web and use it “free” of charge — I didn’t have to go purchase tokens or credits. (I was actually paying for the Adobe Creative Cloud Pro suite of tools…so it wasn’t really free.)
But the other day I was trying to figure out what the latest pricing is at Adobe with that suite of tools and the use of credits for AI-based features. They say Adobe Creative Cloud Pro users get 4000 credits a month. Well, I have that suite and I’m still getting prompted to purchase credits. Firefly for individuals runs from $9.99 (2,000 credits/month) to $139.91 per month (50,000 credits per month). Not inexpensive, right? Below are other items along these lines.
The Era of Affordable AI Is Over. What Comes Next? — from builtin.com by Ameya Kanitkar AI providers are shifting to usage-based billing for their services. AI fluency is more important now than ever to make the most of your tools to avoid unnecessary spending.
Summary: The era of cheap, flat-rate AI is ending as providers shift to usage-based billing. Every prompt now carries a direct cost, turning casual use into major budget risks, as seen when Uber depleted its 2026 AI budget in four months. Leaders must now track real-time value and token efficiency.
For a brief window, companies had access to the most transformative technology in a generation at the cost of a streaming subscription. Tools like ChatGPT put AI within reach of anyone with a browser and time for experimentation, while GitHub Copilot came in at just $10 a month, with token costs remaining relatively low. In the beginning, experimentation felt cost-effective, easy and relatively low-risk.
But that era is ending, and the bill is coming due faster than a lot of enterprise leaders anticipated.
Tokenomics will be a hot topic of discussion on university campuses because, as Marc Watkins notes in this article, there is no realistic path forward to providing all students with access to advanced AI.
And now there is a third layer emerging. Institutions are waking up to a systems-level question they are likely not remotely prepared for. Who pays for AI? How are budgets managed when there are unclear token consumption pricing models? How is AI procured? Who decides what tools get used and by whom and who gets access and at what level?
Higher education is under siege, with many students and parents balking at high costs. In a series of op-eds, university leaders lay out their efforts to keep college affordable. This is the first in the series.
For many people across the country, paying for college is the largest investment they will ever make. Increasingly, it’s one that feels out of reach.
Over the past two decades, tuition and fees at private, national universities have jumped by 112 percent; at some “elite” and highly selective schools the annual cost of attendance now approaches $100,000.
If higher education is to rebuild public trust, affordability can’t be an afterthought. It must be at the center of our strategic focus.
Most colleges and universities are not actually organized around learning. They’re organized around teaching, research productivity, rankings, revenue, and the preservation of institutional prestige. Students sense this, even when they can’t articulate it. The public senses it, too. Academic researchers themselves have been making this argument for decades, but it has rarely felt more urgent than it does right now.
The Yale report says, wisely, that “trust is earned by doing what you say you’re going to do.” Universities say they’re about learning. The way to rebuild trust is to actually mean it and to build institutions that prove it.
The Yale committee is right that trust must be rebuilt through action over messaging. The most fundamental action, and the one most often overlooked, is this: Get learning right.
Early data from the 2025-26 academic year shows historically deep tuition discounts getting even deeper at private nonprofit colleges, according to a study released Monday from the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
For first-time undergraduates, the tuition discount rate at these colleges is projected to reach 57.1% in the current academic year. That’s up from 54.5% from the year before, and the highest point in the past decade. For all undergraduates, the discount rate is poised to hit 51.3%, up from 50% last year and above the most recent peak at 50.8% in 2022-23.
However, revenue declines across the undergraduate body pose difficulties for tuition-dependent colleges. It “suggests that retention alone is not enough to eliminate financial strain at many tuition-dependent institutions,” NACUBO said in its report.
Mapping the Structural Divide — from kylesaunders.com by Kyle Saunders Institutional Resilience, Post-College Market Position, and Artificial Intelligence Exposure Across 1,556 U.S. Colleges and Universities
Where does your institution stand?
U.S. four-year colleges and universities face compounding pressures — demographic decline, fiscal stress, and artificial intelligence — that will reshape the sector over the next decade. This project maps where 1,556 institutions are structurally positioned across two dimensions, using federal data anyone can verify.
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X-axis: Institutional Resilience
Can this institution absorb financial and enrollment shocks?
Endowment per student · Revenue diversification · Enrollment trend · Admissions selectivity
Y-axis: Post-College Market Position
How well does this institution position graduates for the labor market ahead?
Completion rate · Earnings-to-debt ratio · AI exposure (inverted) · Demographic trajectory
Putting college on the fast track — from hechingerreport.org by Jon Marcus As students grow impatient, colleges try three-year bachelor’s degrees
Some colleges and the accreditors and states that oversee them are adding and approving three-year bachelor’s degrees that require fewer credits than the traditional four-year kind.
Institutions facing enrollment declines hope the new three-year degrees will attract students unwilling to spend the usual amount of time and money that it takes to graduate. States need those graduates to fill jobs.
Nearly 60 universities and colleges are planning, considering or have already launched reduced-credit, three-year bachelor’s degrees in some disciplines. They’re calling them “applied” or “career-focused” bachelor’s degrees.
While earning bachelor’s degrees with fewer credits may appeal to some students, the idea is so new that there’s a key unanswered question: whether employers, graduate schools and licensing agencies will accept them.
From DSC: Given the often high price of obtaining a degree these days…whether it’s a 4-year program or a 3-year program, the key is whether a student can get a good job coming out of that program. I think the required time doesn’t help as much as making the necessary changes to offer more responsive curricula, relevant programs, and real-world learning experiences (including apprenticeships and internships). I appreciate the experiment to lower the overall costs, but like so many other “innovations,” it’s playing at the fringes. It’s really the same old, same old — just on a shorter time frame.
At current prices, families are FORCED to consider employment prospects. They are demanding a ROI, because they have to.
I was at a meeting earlier this year with other parents and family members who were interested in a particular program at a Michigan-based university. One set of parents really wanted to know if their student would be getting a good job coming out of the program. They didn’t want to take a second mortgage out if the investment wasn’t going to pay off.
A new estimate projects that 442 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities, with a combined 670,000 students, are at risk of closing or having to merge within the next 10 years.
More than 120 institutions are at the very highest risk, according to the forecast, by Huron Consulting Group, which analyzed enrollment trends, tuition revenue, assets, debt, cash on hand and other measures. Many are, like Sterling, small and rural.
“We have too many seats. We have too many classrooms,” said Peter Stokes, a managing director at Huron. “So over the coming five to 10 years, this shakeout is going to take place.”
2026 Survey of College and University Presidents — from insidehighered.com, Liaison, & Jenzabar Download and explore exclusive insights from the 2026 Survey of College and University Presidents to see how these campus leaders are responding to financial volatility, political interference, rapid advances in AI, and where they believe the biggest risks and opportunities lie as they look toward 2030.
In this year’s survey, presidents share perspectives on:
How presidents assess the second Trump administration’s impact on higher education
Which emerging or evolving educational models they plan to add or expand in the coming years
How effective they believe higher education has been in shaping national conversations arout AI
The issues presidents expect will have the greatest impact on higher education by 2030
Now TRIO has come under the scrutiny of the Trump administration, which has already moved to cancel TRIO funding for some participating colleges (though this was paused in January by a federal court and remains in litigation) and proposes to eliminate it altogether; letters from the Department of Education to those colleges show the money was cut off because the programs were considered part of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, efforts.
At a time of rising income inequality, it’s one of several developments advocates worry are converging to make things even harder for lower-income Americans who want to go to and get through college — a group that already faces considerable challenges, and whose proportion of enrollment has been falling for a decade and a half.
What if the biggest change in education isn’t a new app… but the end of the university monopoly on credibility?
Jensen Huang has framed AI as a platform shift—an industrial revolution that turns intelligence into infrastructure. And when intelligence becomes cheap, personal, and always available, education stops being a place you go… and becomes a system that follows you. The question isn’t whether universities will disappear. The question is whether the old model—high cost, slow updates, one-size-fits-all—can survive a world where every student can have a private tutor, a lab partner, and a curriculum designer on demand.
This video explores what AI has in store for education—and why traditional universities may need to reinvent themselves fast.
In this video you’ll discover:
How AI tutors could deliver personalized learning at scale
Why credentials may shift from “degrees” to proof-of-skill portfolios
What happens when the “middle” of studying becomes automated
How universities could evolve: research hubs, networks, and high-trust credentialing
The risks: cheating, dependency, bias, and widening inequality
The 3 skills that become priceless when information is everywhere: judgment, curiosity, and responsibility
From DSC:
There appears to be another, similar video, but with a different date and length of the video. So I’m including this other recording as well here:
What if universities don’t “disappear”… but lose their monopoly on learning, credentials, and opportunity?
AI is turning education into something radically different: personal, instant, adaptive, and always available. When every student can have a 24/7 tutor, a writing coach, a coding partner, and a study plan designed specifically for them, the old model—one professor, one curriculum, one pace for everyone—starts to look outdated. And the biggest disruption isn’t the classroom. It’s the credential. Because in an AI world, proof of skill can become more valuable than a piece of paper.
This video explores the end of universities as we know them: what AI is bringing, what will break, what will survive, and what replaces the traditional path.
In this video you’ll discover:
Why AI tutoring could outperform one-size-fits-all lectures
How “degrees” may shift into skill proof: portfolios, projects, and verified competency
What happens when the “middle” of studying becomes automated
How universities may evolve: research hubs, networks, high-trust credentialing
The dark side: cheating, dependency, inequality, and biased evaluation
The new advantage: judgment, creativity, and responsibility in a world of instant answers
