On “Eight Predictions for the Future of Higher Education”

Greetings from a sunny, steaming mid-Atlantic in June. I write this quickly, before a trip further south, where I’m keynoting the University of Central Florida’s Teaching and Learning with AI conference. I hope to share that speech on my AI newsletter. On this blog, there are a series of posts in the hopper, but today I wanted to quickly respond to a prominent column on higher education’s future. Jay Caspian Kang recently shared “Eight Predictions for the Future of Higher Education” and it’s a very good introduction to the topic. Because it’s behind a paywall, I’ll summarize it here, then add some reflections. Interesting cartoon the New Yorker added. Kang’s framing imagines how higher ed might turn out in 2035. He starts with demographics, emphasizing Nathan Grawe’s demographic cliff model (here’s my blog post on that book; here’s our Future Trends Forum conversation with the author). He sees this as having a drastic impact: “A winner-take-all dynamic will emerge quickly, as hundreds…