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

What’s it like to eat a vegan diet for some years? For most of my life I was a serious carnivore, eating lots of meat and animal products.  Yet in late 2019 I experimented with eating a partially vegan diet.  This turned out so well that in March 2020 I switched to eating solely plant-based foods and have done so for the following four years. The most delicious force in the universe. tl;dr – veganism works very well for me on multiple levels and I’ll keep doing it. I made the switch for two reasons.  First, as I was (and still am) researching climate change and finding a conse ..read more

Greetings from somewhere over the United States.  I’m flying from DC to LA, and will take this lofty moment to announce my next book project. I introduced the peak higher education concept way back in 2013.  It was a scenario describing one path for colleges and universities.  Since then I’ve developed the model in presentations, articles, a book chapter, and workshops.  Meanwhile, the past decade largely embodied what I projected, with enrollments declining along with a steady stream of institutional cuts, closures, and mergers. Now I’d like to announce a full length, scho ..read more

In this new year of 2024, which colleges and universities are cutting academic programs and jobs? For a month I’ve been working on this post, accumulating information about different examples, but the instances have been coming in faster than I’ve been able to note them down. And my own schedule ramped up to a fever pitch again.  Finally I’m drawing a line under stories so far, just to get this out there.  So this is not an exhaustive list. I’ll break this down into several categories, then offer some reflections about what the examples tranche might mean for higher education’s futur ..read more