The Costs of Doing Nothing?
The Costs of Doing Nothing?
This is the last of seven installments making the case for higher education's impact. Six installments have made the case for what a university is worth. This one asks what it costs to lose one — and shows what Kent State did to make sure that never happens here.
Doing Nothing Has a Cost. Kent State Chose Motion.
Not Every University Will Make It Through This Decade in Its Current Form.
Not every university will make it through this decade in its current form. Small private colleges are closing. States like Vermont have merged public universities; Pennsylvania is confronting a system built for a population it no longer has. The institutions at risk are the ones that treated the future as optional.
Kent State refuses to be one of them. The university's major, hard decisions of the past several years — consolidations, partnerships, workforce reductions and more — have been taken to protect its balanced budget and transform for all that's next. External factors, like changing demographics, stagnant state support, barriers to international enrollments and sociopolitical culture, require this transformation. It is the alternative to a slow slide. Ohioans deserve to know both halves of this story: The stakes are real, and Kent State is meeting them.
“If you do nothing, what happens?”
Meet the guest
Bryan Alexander is a senior scholar at Georgetown University and a futurist who has tracked higher education's trend lines for two decades. His latest book is “Peak Higher Ed: How to Survive the Looming Academic Crisis.” His previous book, “Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis,” won the 2024 Frederic W. Ness Book Award. He sat down with Kent State President Todd Diacon on the ToddCast for the conversation that runs through this series.
Futurist and Georgetown Senior Scholar Bryan Alexander shares with Kent State President Todd Diacon the continuing outlook for universities and colleges. Alexander's latest book, "Peak Higher Ed," details the combined challenges — the "polycrisis" — forcing a revamped landscape.
Transcript
Diacon: So if you’re an institution of higher education in a post-peak higher ed, and you’re not an elite university and you’re not the flagship public university — if you do nothing, what happens?
Alexander: Well, it depends on who you are. A year and a half ago, I would have said, if you’re an elite university, you’re probably okay. So if you’re a Stanford, a Columbia, a Harvard, you’re probably all right, because you have enormous reputation, enormous wealth, fantastic networks behind you. But of course, these institutions are now targeted. Some small colleges and universities that are elite have managed to escape some of those challenges — last summer’s one big beautiful bill had a carve-out for endowment taxes aimed at small colleges and universities, so some of them get to enjoy that security. Otherwise, I think in many ways a lot of colleges and universities are facing a downward path. You have said — and this quote has been so important to me — that we’ve overbuilt our postsecondary sector for capacity, or we have more supply than there is demand, if you will. And so as a result, we should expect a good number of colleges and universities to cut programs, to cut services, to cut faculty and staff, to shrink their footprint so that perhaps they sell off buildings, to see their population shrink — so not only their faculty and staff, but also the total number of students who go through their doors. And this might be what in economics we refer to as a market correction. Perhaps a campus drops from 20,000 students to 15,000, and there it stays; it rests there at a plateau for years to come. That may be. Or it may be that it continues and circles the drain. And this is where we have colleges that are merging, often in unfavorable situations, or where they close.
If a university does nothing, it faces a downward path. Higher education is overbuilt for capacity — more supply than demand — so expect closures, mergers, program cuts and shrinking enrollments. Some institutions stabilize at a smaller size; others continue declining. This is the market correction.
Kent State Key Facts
- Direct state support covered two-thirds of the university budget in the 1970s
- Direct state support accounts for 22% of the university budget today
- Growth exploded in the 1960s and ’70s under Ohio’s commitment to placing a public university within 30 miles of every Ohioan
- Kent State’s regional footprint of eight campuses and the College of Podiatric Medicine is the size of Connecticut
“We had roughly 30 years of continuous growth. When that growth stops, we’re not really prepared for that.”
The post-World War II transformation, driven by the GI Bill and then the Boomers, has given way to the next era of American higher education. Alexander discusses why letting go of the old structures feels so hard.
Transcript
Diacon: …we are undoing something that seemed to be a given for all of our time in higher education, and now we’re changing. So I don’t know if you encounter much of that attitude, or if in your own work you think about that.
Alexander: I do. Just how change happens — but it assumes that there was never change before the change that’s happening now. I think this is an American habit, where once a new thing is added to the mix, we tend to romanticize the old things, and we naturalize them. There’s a great quote I’ll paraphrase from the wonderful British writer Douglas Adams: anything that was invented until you turn 15 is exciting and cool. Anything invented until you’re 30 is even more exciting, and you could probably get a career off of it. Anything invented after you were 30 is an abomination against the natural order of things. We do tend to expect that, and a lot of our incentives aligned with that. So if we had roughly 30 years of continuous growth — Clay Shirky once said we should think of the 1980s through 2010 or so as a golden age for American higher ed. Well, that’s 30 years. That’s six five-year cycles of strategic planning. That’s how many graduating classes, how many buildings, how many programs. So we have that assumption of continuous growth, and when that growth stops, we’re not really prepared for that. That’s a generation of habits built in, and I think in many ways we’re still trying to get past that.
We romanticize what we inherited and treat it as natural law. Higher education's 30-year "golden age" of growth (1980-2010) built habits so deep that institutions assumed expansion would never stop. When growth ended, universities found themselves unprepared — every strategic plan, every building, every program was designed for a future that never arrived.
Leading the Transformation
Higher education is changing. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime transformation.
Kent State has steadily balanced its budget, reshaped its programs and staffing, taken facilities offline, and opened new markets and new ways to deliver teaching and learning to learners at all levels.
The question is this: Will your university drive the change or get run over by it? Kent State drives.
The Case, In Seven Parts
The case for higher education's impact, in seven parts:
- College is still worth it. The data haven't changed; the conversation has.
- Kent State provides the best student support in the world.
- Change is Kent State's story.
- Ohio stepped back. Kent State stepped up.
- Fewer 18-year-olds means more reasons Kent State matters.
- When the world gets complicated, you want a university nearby.
- Doing nothing has a cost. Kent State chose motion.
