The End of American Higher Education

Perhaps not a Dark Age but a darker age at least

Sometimes, you can read about the Dark Ages. Sometimes, you get to live through them.

The next several years look to be the grimmest period in the history of U.S. higher education, and their effects could well alter the course of U.S. academia permanently.

Federal and state governments have sometimes been hostile to higher education, but the degree of antipathy the Trump administration displays, even celebrates, outstrips anything universities have confronted before. The administration and many of its supporters seem sincere in describing universities as their enemy, and they have done little to signal that they will treat them as anything other than adversarial. More directly, the assault on the entirety of the research enterprise, from the scientific freedom of federal institutes to the details of research universities’ grant reimbursements, will reduce both the autonomy and the resources of scope for independent research, in which universities play a central role. Simultaneously, and perhaps inadvertently, the transformation of U.S. foreign policy from hegemon to mafia don will crater the attraction of U.S. educational institutions to international audiences. Indeed, one hears Canadian and European institutions are—perhaps optimistically—preparing for an influx of American students escaping the strictures of Trump’s America.

Taken on its own, any single policy change may find some supporters. Not a few researchers have rolled their eyes at the notion of 50 or 60 percent overhead fees on grants, for instance. Yet as with many Trump-era changes, the urge to find something laudatory in a policy that is overwhelmingly, unremittingly hostile is badly misleading. Academics, trained to interrogate any proposition, prove relentlessly bad at taking their own side in an argument. Even if one thinks that 50 percent overhead is too much, the answer is not, cannot be, a blanket 15 percent rule. When dealing with someone who treats you as an enemy, it is not wisdom but folly to try to see the best in their actions.

The immensity of the blow that the sector has taken, in any event, far outstrips the details of any policy in isolation. Consider my own field, political science. Students have a hazy idea that what we do pertains to politics and governance, and many of those who came to study with my departments in the United States intended careers in public service (and many more in the law, but often to go into public service). After the savagery of the assault on the civil service, why should any U.S. undergrad assume that there will be a civil service they can aspire to join? Why would any graduate student—whose tuitions play a disproportionate role in supporting many elite institutions—presume that a master’s degree in, say, international development will be worthwhile? There is essentially no international development sector in the United States at the moment.

The knock-on effects are many. The Presidential Management Fellowship—long a symbol of the federal government’s interest in recruiting talent for the non-defense sector—is dead. Why should talented young people conclude the government has any interest in their services? And, having concluded that, why would political science—and its kindred fields—continue to attract students?

Gut a discipline here, cut demand for a field of study there, and pretty soon you’re talking about entire units of universities. And if the non-economics social sciences were to follow the humanities into oblivion (sociology and anthropology, rather woker than political science, will be targeted more directly), then we are left with STEM and business. And if STEM is being reduced as well—tuition dollars do not pay for good STEM programs; that is what the grants are for—then you can see how, through subtraction, we could see an even larger share of higher education converted into little more than vocational training.

Nor will any of this be easy to come back from. The enrollment cliff is real, even if concentrated in some regions. That means, however, that there’s no nice demographic wave that the sector can ride back to normal after riding out four very tough years. Any recovery will be only partial. Tenure lines will vanish and with them the connections, capital, and energy that sustain disciplines.

A particularly annoying tic of social media is the commenter convinced that all of this is some kind of plan—that elites plan on cutting everyone else off from higher education so that only their children can study non-vocational topics. There’s little evidence to support that proposition. Even at elite schools, the shift from humanities toward vocational degrees is evidence, even if the elevated names of those majors—or concentrations, near Boston—reflect the elevated nature of elite vocations. “Economics” in many schools is just a business degree with less accountancy. STEM is for pre-meds.

The Trump administration looks set to accelerate those trends. Its assault on higher education isn't about preserving it for the few—it's about fundamentally transforming its nature for everyone. They will do this because, again, they do not see higher education as a resource to be hoarded for the rich (even though they flaunt their own Ivy League degrees; thanks, Yale, for the bang-up job you’ve done with elite reproduction—really great work, just top-notch, TYVM). Rather, they see it as the bulwark or even the nerve center of an enemy. Whatever instruction needs to be done will be done through institutions that will look very difficult than what we have come to know.

That explains what would otherwise be paradoxical: that the richest schools may be hit particularly hard, as they also receive the highest research funding. Anyone in a “soft money” position—that is, grant-funded—will be in jeopardy. Rich schools have many of those, and their endowments could not compensate for the loss of research funds in toto even if they were legally capable of being used for them. The stakes are enormous. Once labs shutter, and the postdocs scatter and the grad student lines are yanked, it will be hard to restart them. And once the research funds dry up, maintaining library quality will be hard. (That sounds trivial to anyone outside the field, but I assure you that this does actually matter, and if you think that sci-hub will save us you may not know that it and sites like it can be shut down. Maybe we’ll all be better off when long notes on ArXiV are all that matter, but I’m not sure that essentially moving research entirely to a social-network model will be, ah, positive.)

A vicious cycle will set in. If there’s no raises or jobs to be had by publishing or getting grants, why bother investing in research? If the returns to research careers dry up in the United States, top talent will leave for elsewhere—a reverse of how the dissolution of the Soviet Union sent top Soviet talent into the West. Without jobs, grants, or other motivations, honest academic work will be unrewarded. Social scientists and humanities, less grant-dependent, may assume they will be unspared, but funds to cover those deficits will have to come from somewhere, and that in turn means that universities’ subsidies for things like service to the profession will be cut. (And, yes, a course release from a dean to edit a journal is a cost.) The bleeding of funds will crimp academic associations from two directions: conferences and publication fees. (Conferences will suffer a double whammy as international participation dies.) Everything the dark touches will wither.

At the same time, a larger percentage of money that will be available will be tainted in one way or another. (Imagine the RFK Jr. Fellowships in Vaccine Research or the Nabisco Chair of Anti-Ozempic Studies.) Nor should we assume that independent foundations will remain independent. The IRS can audit those foundations, and perhaps the agency will determine that some lines of foundation sponsored research are partisan or against national security. At the final remove, the IRS and other arms of the government can turn on universities, using financial levers to directly influence curricular and content decisions. A law to tax endowments more will weaken the autonomy of the sector even more.

The downstream effects will be tremendous. Tuition-dependent schools will be hit hard as well, and the degradation of the research enterprise will—over time, and inevitably—weaken the quality of curriculum in those universities. (One of my true annoyances is when people question what research has to do with teaching. Well, in the long run, what are you going to teach?)

Bring all of this together, and you have a recipe for a doom loop.

The punchline, of course, is not that academia will be hurt. The real impact will be on society itself. I am critical of many bits of my industry but the fundamental thesis of universities—that education produces social benefits through training, the conservation of the valuable, and the production of new knowledge—is not something I doubt. (Indeed, it’s because I believe in that proposition that I’m critical of much of the cruft in the sector.) Take away top international students and you make every classroom worse off—nothing helps like learning from peers, and so you want your peers to be as strong as possible. Remove resources and you worsen quality—particularly given the hacksaw nature of the policy changes thus far.

For generations, the U.S. academy has been a pillar of soft power and economic dynamism. That is being thrown away now—not on the scale of years but of months, even weeks. The damage being done is not yet irreparable but that point is rapidly (rapidly) approaching. If any of it matters—and take your pick: independent social research, cancer drug development, understanding the universe, March Madness—then the time to act is now.

Yes, the future’s unknowable and maybe some deus ex machina will save us all. Intellectual honesty compels me to admit that I see slim chances that U.S. colleges will avoid any but the very worst fates—even red-state lawmakers may eventually protest at university breast-cancer institutes being closed. But the past four weeks—we are just one month into this administration!—have seen a federal government agency illegally vaporized, a strike team responsible to a literal oligarch access our most closely guarded federal systems, and NATO rent limb from limb. What exactly could you think is the ground for optimism? Even if a Democratic administration wins in whatever year the next free presidential election will be, the interruption to academic lifecycles and careers bids fair to be long-lasting. At this point, taking a pessimistic view of probable outcomes as the baseline isn’t doomerism—it’s an informed updating of priors. Nor am I comforted that all might work out well in the long run. My career doesn’t have that long left to run, in the broad scope of history.

Academia will persevere. There are other governments, other societies, other values. What else have we learned from history other than that no patron remains generous forever?