April has brought more academic cuts, mergers and closures.  I noted examples of this trend in last month (1, 2, 3) but as they used to say on radio, the hits keep coming.  A Hechinger Report article claimed one institutional closure per week, and I recommend the piece for its humanity. In this post I’ll be brief, as I have a week full of travel, meetings, and iffy broadband.  I’ll also reuse my previous categories, starting with… 1. Closing campuses California’s University of Saint Katherine (private; Orthodox Christianity) will shut down, despite enrollment gains.  The ca ..read more

How are demographics changing, and what does that transformation suggest about the future? Recently the American Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published new data on American birthrates. While the results are not surprising to people who follow the topic, they are very useful. The first and major takeaway is that the number of children we have continues to decline. Note that I’m referring to two numbers here: the absolute number of births and also the number of children per 1,000 women. We’re having fewer children, in other words, and fewer women are having them.  The peak was in 2007 ..read more

Today is the 54th Earth Day, a holiday generally aimed at raising global ecological consciousness. It began in 1970 as a UNESCO project and I can’t help but hear Earth as system and Spaceship Earth from that origin then. earthday.org is the organizer now, and declared this year’s theme to be “Planet vs. Plastics.”  They explain what that’s about: advocat[ing] for widespread awareness on the health risk of plastics, rapidly phase out all single use plastics, urgently push for a strong UN Treaty on Plastic Pollution, and demand an end to fast fashion. Join us as we build a plastic-free pl ..read more

Greetings from airportland.  I write this waiting to board a United Flight to San Diego, where I’m scheduled to participate in the ASU-GSV conference. It’s my first time there, in fact. Yes, yes, I’ve heard all the hype and the critique for years. I’m looking forward to the event for a few reasons, starting with researching the flows of capital around education and technology, followed by checking out emerging ed tech projects.  AI is very much in the air and I plan to scope out how financial groups are trying to wrangle the fast-moving technology. I’m also speaking at their AIRshow ..read more

We just saw the new movie Civil War. Afterwards the audience filed out in silence, perhaps stunned.  Our group talked about it energetically, then hit the internet for more, and hence this post. This post also assumed you’ve seen the movie, so if you haven’t, I hereby raise spoiler shields.  In fact, I’ll use the movie poster as a spacer before I get going: Nice image, but never seen in the film. Reminds me of the cover art for the 1976 SPI game Invasion: America. Onward. I know what I’m about to say is a minority view (check ratings here), but I found it overall to be an uneven mi ..read more

Over the past year the United States federal government has been revising its FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) system.  Unfortunately, its rollout over the past few months has been chaotic.  Delays, errors, more delays, having to redo applications, and other problems have beset the effort. My question today is, how will FAFSA problems impact student enrollment this fall semester? “a rolling catastrophe,” according to Ted Mitchell of ACE Naturally DALL-E had a hard time spelling the name. To quickly summarize: the key problem is that financial aid information ..read more

One year ago Johns Hopkins University Press published my book on the future of higher education and the climate crisis, Universities on Fire.  Today I wanted to look back on the book’s progress in the world, how academics and others have responded, and what I think I’ve learned. Copies of the book on sale at Colorado College, where I gave a talk. How do you measure a book’s fate?  Sales is a typical metric, and they have been good, higher than anticipated, according to my excellent editor.  That’s especially positive for a scholarly book published by a scholarly press, too (th ..read more

Some days I feel like I’m live-blogging my new book across a bunch of web browser tabs.  That is, I’m working on Peak Higher Education in several web browsers across three machines, with tabs open to Google Docs, an RSS reader, a few pdfs, a library ebook, and more.  Meanwhile, other browser tabs provide grim updates about colleges and universities cutting programs, merging, cutting staff, facing bad financial problems, or shutting down.  I share these stories across still other browser tabs: social media platforms, email… and this blog. I have other things to blog about (curren ..read more

Nearly a decade ago the comedian John Oliver took on student loans on his remarkably pedagogical show.  It was a good, bracing overview of the problem as it stood then. This week Oliver returned to the theme.  I wanted to share it here, then add some comments: Oliver (and his writing, research team) hit on a good range of essential points.  The show starts with updated data: “over 43 million Americans have student loans, that’s about 13% of the U.S. population, for a total outstanding debt of $1.7 trillion.”  Then Oliver races ahead, sketching out: student loan history bac ..read more

On March 1st I posted about a series of colleges and universities closing and merging, along with cuts to academic programs, faculty, and staff. The post attracted some attention.  Publicly, people commented on the blog, commented on the Medium version, and responded across social media.  Several people also wrote me privately – which is a sign of just how difficult and stressful it can be to even discuss the topic openly.  Some of these responses (both public and private) shared additional stories of academic cuts, and I wanted to share them as part of my research. Also, in the ..read more