Higher Education’s Identity Crisis

After the Great Recession sent students flooding back to campus, schools have faced one evolving crisis after another: COVID, government interference, protests, and the chaos of AI tools in the classroom. Despite some positive enrollment trends, schools are also staring down a very near future where there will simply be fewer 18-year-olds to fill their seats.Students have not had it much easier. This spring, graduates are leaving their respective alma maters and entering a job market that is beleaguered with uncertainty. AI has promised to upend entire industries; it’s already changing how employers are thinking about entry-level jobs. There used to be a sequence of events—or at least students and families perceived a sequence of events—that went something like this: You go to college; you graduate with a degree; you get a good job. It was that simple. But that story was never quite right. Finding work after graduation has never been guaranteed, but with rising tuition costs, and institutions that have explicitly tried to marry their programs to the needs of business, it’s easy to see why people might think that it should be.Is the purpose of college just to get a good job, or is there more to it? And though the nation’s colleges and universities have been in rough spots before, is it finally time to start rethinking their entire model? On this week’s Radio Atlantic, the Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost and I sift through the fraught landscape of American higher education.The following is a transcript of the episode:[Music]Adam Harris: It’s graduation season. That means celebrating with family and friends, sweating through outdoor ceremonies that may have been better held inside, inspirational graduation speeches, and in a lot of cases, the beginning of the job hunt.But this year, a subpar economy, constricting job market,