College Is Coming Apart After Successive, Overlapping Crises

Artificial intelligence, COVID-19, and federal research-funding cuts have exposed that American higher education is a bundle of incompatible functions held together by habit rather than coherence. AI has made it trivial for students to outsource essays, problem sets, and code while simultaneously accelerating research in protein folding, materials design, and drug discovery; administrators and faculty embrace AI for grants, letters, and papers even as they police classrooms. The pandemic demonstrated that the credentialing role of colleges - awarding degrees and transmitting knowledge - can persist with greatly reduced campus life, and globalization plus the internet already offered the coming-of-age experiences once unique to residential college. As a result, the social maturation and academic labor that once interwove on campuses have been unstitched: students can obtain diplomas without the shared struggles and serendipities that historically justified them.

A longer-standing split lies between research and undergraduate teaching. Large universities depend on massive federal grants - measured as “research expenditures” - to fund labs, buildings, and prestige, and those grants routinely buy faculty out of undergraduate teaching. Cuts to that funding reveal how misaligned the incentives are: research drives the institution while teaching operates as a revenue-maintenance chore. Humanities and liberal-arts work, which attract little federal research money, are especially exposed to automation and budgetary erosion. Campuses now function as employers, health systems, real-estate portfolios, and national entertainment brands, and those competing roles make the composite called “college” increasingly unsustainable.