The University is Not Reforming; It Is Losing Its Soul!

The university as we inherited it is not reforming. It is running out of the institutional confidence, public trust and economic assumptions that sustained it for generations. Beneath all the language about transformation, access, resilience, inclusion and strategic renewal lies a simpler problem. The old university sold a formidable promise: spend several formative years inside an institution devoted to knowledge, acquire a credential that reliably signals competence, and emerge better equipped for adult and professional life. The modern university still charges handsomely for that promise while increasingly delivering something different: credential inflation, administrative expansion, political activism, weakening standards and, in the United States especially, a residential experience priced as though none of these changes had occurred.

The controversies surrounding Jason Arday and the financial difficulties at Syracuse may appear to have little in common. One concerns questions about academic credibility and institutional judgement; the other concerns enrolment and arithmetic. Yet both point towards the same underlying problem. Universities have spent decades assuming that accumulated prestige can substitute indefinitely for demonstrable value, and that assumption is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

The Arday affair illustrated the danger that arises when an institution becomes more interested in the symbolic meaning of an appointment than in the ordinary scepticism academic life is supposed to demand. Cambridge did not merely acquire a scholar; it acquired an inspiring story, the rise of a disadvantaged academic into one of the world's most prestigious universities. Such stories fit almost perfectly with the moral aspirations of the contemporary university. The danger begins when the story itself becomes institutionally valuable, because the incentive to celebrate can then become stronger than the incentive to scrutinise.

The problem extends well beyond any individual appointment. Universities increasingly reward the appearance of novelty, and in some disciplines that creates peculiar incentives. In the natural sciences, genuine discovery is built into the purpose of research: there are new particles, organisms, mechanisms and physical processes to discover. In parts of the humanities and social sciences, however, the basic human material has already been argued over for centuries. The institutional demand for constant novelty can therefore encourage scholars to manufacture it through terminology, ideological reframing or another theoretical lens through which familiar phenomena can be redescribed.

The result can become a kind of discovery theatre. Every paper requires an "intervention"; every scholar must uncover something previously hidden; every discipline needs structures that ordinary people somehow failed to perceive until the theorist arrived. Activism fits easily into this model because it provides a permanent source of novelty. Once scholarship is expected not merely to determine what is true but to expose, disrupt, dismantle or transform, there will always be another hierarchy to interrogate, another tradition to problematise and another concealed structure of power to uncover. The university gradually moves away from transmitting and examining a civilisation and towards diagnosing it.

Parents often notice the change before rankings agencies do, because parents are paying for an undergraduate education rather than participating in an academic fashion. This is where the cultural argument meets the economic one. Syracuse represents the moment at which institutional ambition collides with market arithmetic. For decades, American universities behaved as though demand for the residential degree were almost infinitely elastic. Tuition could rise, another residence hall could be built, another vice-president appointed, another centre created and another layer of student services added because the applicants would continue arriving. The degree had become so culturally important that universities could behave as though demand for it were guaranteed.

That assumption becomes dangerous for a tuition-dependent institution when enrolment targets are missed but spending continues as though every bed will eventually be filled. If fewer domestic students are willing to pay private-university prices, international full-fee enrolments become less dependable and families discover cheaper alternatives, the university begins to resemble any other high-fixed-cost enterprise confronting declining demand. Empty beds cannot be talked away with institutional rhetoric. Neither payroll nor debt servicing cares about a university's mission statement. Eventually there have to be enough paying students to support the physical and administrative structure accumulated during the years of expansion.

The initial response is usually to preserve the advertised price while quietly reducing the price actually paid. Discounts increase, financial aid expands and universities compete more aggressively for students who might previously have been considered marginal applicants. The magnificent sticker price survives while the effective transaction price begins to slide beneath it. There is nothing uniquely academic about this behaviour. It is what organisations do when the market will no longer bear the advertised price.

Prestige and desperation can therefore coexist. A department may remain highly placed in specialist rankings while the university around it struggles with enrolment, debt or unused capacity. There is no contradiction here. Rankings tell us something about how institutions and academic guilds evaluate themselves; enrolment tells us whether enough customers still value the product at something approaching the price required to sustain it.

The rise of campus identity politics did not create this economic model, but it occupied an institution already made vulnerable by decades of expansion and easy money. Once universities embraced the proposition that neutrality itself could be morally suspect, their conception of institutional responsibility widened dramatically. They were no longer merely teaching students, preserving knowledge and conducting research. They were constructing inclusive environments, facilitating belonging, correcting inequities, monitoring institutional culture, managing identity, designing interventions and demonstrating virtue to governments, regulators, donors and students.

Those responsibilities required people to administer them. Offices acquired directors, deputy directors, coordinators, compliance procedures, reporting requirements, training programs and strategic plans. An institution that once required professors, librarians, technicians and a comparatively modest administrative structure gradually acquired something resembling an internal civil service. The process was expensive, but each individual addition could be defended as necessary within the enlarged conception of what a university was supposed to do.

Corporate managerialism supplied another part of the machinery. Students came to be treated simultaneously as customers, sources of revenue and institutional risks. As customers, they required amenities; as revenue sources, they had to be retained; as risks, their academic, emotional and legal experiences had to be managed. This helps explain how climbing walls and bias-response bureaucracies can emerge from the same institutional philosophy. One is designed to attract the student's discretionary choice and the other to manage the student after enrolment. Both cost money, while neither necessarily improves what occurs between a professor and a student trying to understand Plato, organic chemistry or constitutional law.

In the United States, federal student lending helped make the inflation possible by weakening the normal connection between price and immediate ability to pay. Students could borrow large sums against anticipated future earnings, allowing universities to increase tuition without immediately losing the transaction. The university received its money in the present; the graduate carried the obligation into the future. Once that mechanism operated for long enough, costs could become increasingly detached from educational value. Administrative employment expanded, amenities became competitive necessities, compliance functions multiplied and each university felt pressure to provide whatever its competitors provided for fear that failing to do so would make it appear inferior.

No conspiracy was necessary. The peculiar strength of the system was that many individually rational decisions could collectively construct something increasingly irrational. That same incentive structure eventually reached academic standards because the university had created an uncomfortable contradiction: the student was simultaneously the person being assessed and the customer whose departure damaged institutional revenue.

Serious education necessarily includes the possibility of failure. Some students are not ready for university, some do not work hard enough, some discover that a chosen discipline exceeds their abilities, and others should not have been admitted in the first place. A functioning academic institution is supposed to identify such cases. A tuition-dependent institution, however, has reasons to minimise them. Failure damages retention; retention affects revenue; student dissatisfaction appears in surveys; surveys influence management; and management pressures eventually reach departments. Academic difficulty can gradually be reconceived as a service-delivery problem.

Grade inflation is an unsurprising consequence. Work once judged inadequate acquires a passing mark, remedial teaching receives gentler names, deadlines become negotiable and dissatisfied students acquire forms of leverage that earlier generations would scarcely have recognised. None of this requires a vice-chancellor or university president to issue an instruction ordering academics to lower standards. Institutional incentives are usually more effective when nobody has to give the order.

Eventually the labour market begins to notice. The traditional degree possessed economic value partly because it acted as a filter. Employers did not know everything about a graduate, but completing a demanding university program provided evidence of literacy, discipline, general intellectual ability and the capacity to persist with difficult work over several years. As participation expands and standards become less informative, the signal grows noisier. Employers respond by constructing their own filters through internships, aptitude tests, technical assessments, portfolios, work trials, postgraduate qualifications and the wonderfully direct question: "What can you actually do?"

At that point employers are beginning to reconstruct outside the university a sorting mechanism that the degree once provided internally. The credential loses part of its economic function while remaining expensive, and this is the combination universities should fear most. A degree can remain expensive when its value is exceptionally high, and a less valuable credential can remain attractive when it is cheap. It is much harder for a qualification to become simultaneously more expensive and less informative.

Demography is now making these weaknesses harder to conceal. Much of the higher-education sector was constructed during decades when increasing numbers of school-leavers, widening participation and international enrolments created an expectation of continuing growth. Buildings, staffing structures and debt were planned around the implicit assumption that the next entering class would be at least as large as the previous one. In many places that assumption can no longer safely be made.

A shrinking population of traditional college-age students means institutions must compete more fiercely for a smaller pool. The strongest universities will survive. Elite institutions possess scarcity as an asset in itself, while major research universities have laboratories, hospitals, engineering facilities and research infrastructure that cannot simply migrate to YouTube. Universities closely connected to regulated professions also retain an obvious function because medicine, engineering, nursing and similar fields require structured training, practical experience and accreditation.

The real danger lies among expensive, mid-ranking institutions offering weakly differentiated degrees to students who are increasingly uncertain why four residential years are necessary. These universities now face competitors that barely existed a generation ago. Online education can distribute lectures at negligible marginal cost, professional certifications can demonstrate particular competencies, employers can train recruits directly, apprenticeships can combine learning with income, and specialist institutes can focus on particular occupations without carrying the cost of a complete residential campus.

None of these alternatives has to reproduce everything a university does. It only has to reproduce enough of what the marginal student actually wanted, and for many students the principal objective was always the credential. The coming contraction of higher education therefore need not mean the contraction of learning. It may mean precisely the reverse if educational resources become cheaper and more widely available while the expensive institutional package surrounding them loses its monopoly.

Apprenticeships will remain useful, as will technical institutes. Serious religious colleges may retain students if they offer a distinctive formation that secular universities no longer provide. Research institutions with genuine scientific infrastructure will continue to have functions that cannot easily be replicated elsewhere, and elite universities are likely to survive almost anything because elites reproduce themselves partly through elite institutions. What is much harder to defend is the assumption that every moderately able eighteen-year-old should borrow a very large sum, or take on debt, to spend several years living on or near a campus while acquiring a general credential from an institution whose principal distinction is that it too issues general credentials.

That model depended upon a network of beliefs that once reinforced one another. Parents believed university meant intellectual formation; employers believed a degree signalled competence; governments believed expansion increased productivity; and students believed educational debt differed fundamentally from consumption debt because the investment would reliably repay itself. All of these beliefs have weakened, yet universities have often responded by intensifying the very behaviours that contributed to the loss of confidence. Administration expanded while costs were already high, activism increased while many parents wanted education rather than political formation, access widened while admission became a weaker signal, retention was protected while employers questioned graduate competence, and prices rose while technology drove the marginal cost of distributing information towards zero.

The tragedy is that the traditional university performed functions worth preserving. It created places where scholars could pursue questions without an immediate commercial payoff, preserved accumulated knowledge, gave young adults time to become intellectually serious before entering professional life, and maintained libraries, laboratories and communities of argument that no online platform can perfectly reproduce. Those functions still matter. The difficulty is that institutions survive only while they remember which of their functions made them valuable in the first place.

The modern university has too often confused the institution with its mission. Because universities once transmitted knowledge, almost anything a university now does can be described as education. Because university credentials once carried considerable value, the credential is assumed to retain that value regardless of changes in admission or assessment. Because universities once possessed intellectual authority, institutional declarations on fashionable political causes are sometimes presented as though they inherit the authority generated by scholarship. The public, however, is increasingly unwilling to grant those assumptions automatically.

The university once sold intellectual formation and increasingly sold messaging; it once offered a scarce credential and then helped make credentials ubiquitous; it once demanded standards and increasingly found itself treating standards as potential obstacles to retention. Meanwhile, administrative structures originally intended to support teaching and research grew until academics could sometimes appear to be operating inside organisations whose governing culture was primarily managerial.

Campus progressivism supplied part of the sermon, corporate managerialism supplied much of the machinery, government-backed credit supplied a great deal of the money, and grade inflation helped suppress some of the warning signals. Demographic decline is now beginning to remove the customers. That combination presents a more serious threat to universities than another round of culture-war criticism because economic arithmetic is less responsive to institutional rhetoric. Professors can dismiss critics as reactionary, administrative offices can commission reports, communications departments can rename programs and ranking organisations can alter their methodologies, but none of these things can make an empty dormitory pay tuition.

The decisive judgement on the twenty-first-century university may therefore come neither from philosophers nor legislators nor the combatants in the culture wars. It may come quietly from families looking at the price, the debt, the credential and the alternatives and deciding that the proposition no longer adds up. If enough of them reach that conclusion, universities will discover the difference between possessing prestige and possessing a market. What follows will not look much like reform. It will begin as contraction, and for institutions that cannot adapt, it may end in collapse.

https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/31/why-higher-education-is-likely-doomed/