- Higher education has historically faced recurring crises over issues like access, affordability, and skills training, but some argue the current crises over sexual assault, free speech, and unfair admissions practices may be more serious and impactful. - Colleges and universities are facing deeper issues like a bifurcated system where resources and opportunities differ greatly between institutions, a broken business model as costs rise faster than revenues, and intensifying competition from other providers. - If these trends continue, it could lead to a gradual deterioration in academic quality for many regional comprehensive universities that educate more vulnerable students, though some institutions will remain well-resourced and successful.

1. Is This Time Different
Steven Mintz
Higher education has alwaysbeen in crisis. Virtually every decade over the
past century has seen the publication of books and articles on American
colleges and universities with the word “crisis” in the title.
Just as the Great Recession-fueled crises over access, affordability,
attainment, and marketable skills cooled, a new set of crises has emerged:
Over sexual assault, free speech, fraternity hazing, binge drinking, and other
abuses, the gaming of admissions tests, anti-Asian bias in admissions, and
various backdoors and side doors for the wealthy.
We might ask ourselves: Is this time different?
Are today’s crises more worrisome than those in the past? Will public outrage
translate into shifts in policy and practice?
These are questions that the economist Irwin Feller addressed in a 2016
essay “This Time It May Really Be Different.”
In 2010, in their classic study of financial crises, This Time is Different,
economists Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff issued a warning that
bears repeating: Every time someone claims that a new situation bears little
resemblance to the past and that old rules no longer apply, they are proven
wrong.
And certainly some sectors of higher education are thriving: The best
resourced, most highly selective institutions, the technology leaders (Cal Tech,
MIT, Georgia Tech, among others) the mega online non-profit universities
(including Southern New Hampshire and WGU), and certain other emerging
research universities, which, by virtue of location, skilled and visionary
leadership, local investment, and mounting student demand are raising their

2. national profile (for example, Arizona State, Central Florida, and the University
of Houston).
But the troubles that beset higher education as a sector go well beyond those
highlighted in the popular media, or even those that worry campus insiders,
like the Northeastern and Midwestern demographic decline, the decrease in
the number of international students; stagnating state and federal support,
and the increasing reliance on adjuncts, post-docs, teaching assistants, and
undergraduate learning assistants.
Let me spell out those deeper concerns:
The bifurcation of higher education
Higher education is bifurcating along multiple lines. These include not only
financial resources, but students’ college readiness, their academic
preparation in high school, and institutional spending on instruction and
student services.
Increasingly, this bifurcation is making itself felt in the academic experience
itself: In the range of courses, programs, and majors offered and access to
experiential learning opportunities and co-curricular and extra-curricular
experiences.
A broken business model
Higher education’s cost disease is not easing. Indeed, the financial pressures
upon colleges and universities continue to intensify, fueled, in part, by
escalating demand for financial aid, high-cost services, including mental
health services, compliance, research, technology, and the need to invest in
data analytics, marketing, online programming, and expensive areas of
student and employer demand, including computer science, data science, and
neuroscience.

3. The initial efforts at cost savings – course redesign, consolidating of smaller
departments, and increased reliance on adjuncts – and revenue generation –
aggressive fundraising, introduction of professional master’sprograms, and
investments designed to expand funded research – appear to have reached
their limits. The next steps – layoffs, program elimination, and in a few
notable instances, closures and mergers – are especially upsetting, given that
these are taking place in the midst of one of the nation’s longest periods of
economic expansion.
Mounting competition
Irwin Feller worried less about Clayton Christensen’snightmare vision of mass
college closures than a gradual deterioration in academic quality, as a
growing number of institutions became “chronic invalids,” lacking sufficient
resources to invest in emerging programs, technology, and improved support
services.
Competitive pressures Intensify the challenge facing many institutions. In
recent years, students – especially those who are more affluent or who are
better prepared for college – have grown more willing to enroll a greater
distance from their parental home. At the same time, the mega online
providers gradually acquire students who might otherwise enroll in a
neighboring university. Even if the number of students is relatively small, this
can spell the difference between a balanced and an unbalanced budget.
So far, non-traditional providers, including the short-term skills boot camps,
haven’t made much of a dent in enrollment. But as community colleges launch
applied bachelor’s programs and as brand name institutions move
aggressively into the professional master’s and certificate market, the
pressures on many urban institutions and regional comprehensives are likely
to intensify.
Irwin Feller quite rightly worried that this time may really be different, and I’d
agree. Not all institutions are threatened, but we should fear for the future not

4. only of very small institutions located in rural areas, but for quality of the
much larger regionals. So far, state legislatures have proven more willing to
fund regional comprehensives than flagships, but whether this pattern will
continue remains to be seen, especially given the political clout of flagship
and land grant campuses.
We must hope that T.S. Eliot’s grim prophecy, that the end will involve a
whimper, in this case the erosion of quality among the institutions that serve
the most vulnerable students, will proves untrue.
Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin