Ferdinand Avila-Medina

Right about the fire

ferdinandavila

Jeffrey Selingo has covered higher education for decades. Long enough that university leaders (probably) call him when they want to think out loud, before they’re ready to say something in public. He writes books on how college admissions and the higher-ed business actually work. So when he says the financial model behind American colleges is breaking, that’s not a hot take. It’s someone who has watched the machinery from the inside, telling you what he sees.

I don’t have that vantage point. What I know comes from ground level experience: spreadsheets, program reviews, meetings where enrollment numbers get discussed in careful language. So I’ll say this upfront. I read his recent TIME piece closely, and what follows isn’t a takedown. It’s a few honest questions from someone who agrees about the fire, and has some doubts about the extinguisher.

The argument, as fairly as I can put it

He opens with something colleges rarely let happen in public: a chancellor telling the truth before he had to. J. Michael Haynie announced that Syracuse missed its enrollment target and will run a deficit this year. Syracuse has a national brand, a deep alumni base, and resources most schools can only budget for in their dreams. Not a struggling regional college nobody’s heard of. Syracuse.

That’s a smart choice of example. If a school with Syracuse’s brand and balance sheet can get “blindsided”, the story stops being about one institution’s competence. It becomes a story about the entire higher education ecosystem at once.

The ecosystem is currently shifting from two directions. One is demographic. It’s been visible on a spreadsheet for two decades. The high school class of 2026 is the first of a long run of smaller ones, the delayed bill for a birth rate that fell during the Great Recession and never recovered. The other is political, and newer. Research funding cut, with more cuts proposed. International enrollment down more than a third after visa restrictions. And, as of July 1, a federal loan overhaul: most graduate borrowing capped at $20,500 a year, “professional” programs like law capped at $50,000, Parent PLUS loans limited to $20,000 a year with a $65,000 lifetime ceiling. Any one of those makes for a hard budget year. Together, Selingo argues, they break a machine built on the assumption that undergraduate enrollment, graduate enrollment, tuition, amenities, and debt could all keep climbing at once.

That’s a clean way of naming the problem. Before anything critical, here’s what I believe he gets right.

A correct diagnosis

One line in the piece is easy to skim past: colleges have been treating enrollment as a recruitment problem when it’s really a product problem. That sounds small. It isn’t. Sit in on almost any enrollment meeting and the conversation is about the funnel: search behavior, CRM cadence, yield modeling, where to buy names. Almost none of it is about whether the thing at the bottom of the funnel is what the person actually needs. Selingo is naming a blind spot the industry built entire departments around ignoring.

He’s also right that the “trust us” era of talking about a degree’s value is over. It deserved to end. For years, colleges pointed to one aggregate lifetime-earnings number and called the ROI question settled. Families increasingly know that number hides more than it reveals, particularly as it relates to student debt after college.

A couple of numbers stuck with me. The share of high school graduates enrolling immediately in college fell from 70% in 2016 to 62% in 2022. That’s a fast drop, and it happened before any of the current federal changes arrived. The population of adults with some college and no credential is genuinely enormous, usually put somewhere between 33 and 43 million depending on the report. I hadn’t sat with one detail before: roughly a third of the ones who do come back return to their own former school. Small fact. A lot in it about where institutional loyalty actually lives.

Where the confidence outruns the evidence

Here’s my hesitation. The diagnosis is careful and Selingo is not the only one making it. The four fixes he offers though, work-connected learning, cutting academic programs, leaning on online education for adult learners, and being more transparent about outcomes, get written about with the same confidence as the diagnosis. I looked at some literature behind each one. The confidence doesn’t hold up evenly.

Work-connected learning has the strongest case behind it. Studies of co-op programs, including a long-running one at the University of Cincinnati, keep finding better retention, better grades, stronger early-career outcomes. What goes unmentioned: an employer network like Cincinnati’s, built on partnerships with thousands of companies, took decades to assemble. It depends on a regional economy dense enough to absorb that many student-workers. Real advantage for a well-placed research university. Not something a smaller, more remote college can build by next fall.

The program-cutting idea gives me the most trouble. I’ve sat through more strategic planning conversations than I can count where some version of “we’ll sharpen the institution by trimming what isn’t working” gets said with real conviction. The most careful study I read on this looked at six Canadian universities that went through formal program prioritization. Most of those processes never reached implementation. The ones that did produced no measurable budget improvement. What they reliably produced was mistrust between faculty and administration. It sounds like discipline. In the data, it behaves more like a rough reorganization with an uncertain payoff.

The case for leaning on online education to reach adult learners is where I push back hardest. The research is least kind to this one. Several studies, a national look at students enrolled exclusively online, work out of California’s community college system, an analysis of federal enrollment data by learning format, keep finding the same pattern. Students who take all their courses online finish at meaningfully lower rates than students who take even some in person. The gap is largest exactly where colleges hope online helps most: in for-profit and adult-serving programs. Online enrollment growing is real. More adults actually finishing is a different fact. A business model needs the second one.

The “43 million” figure gets treated like a market waiting to come back. The re-engagement research says otherwise. National re-enrollment for this group runs around 2.6 to 2.7% a year. The interventions actually tested, reminder texts, and in one large study, tuition waivers, moved that number only slightly. Most people who stopped out didn’t stop because nobody called. A job, a child, a bill, or all three got in the way. A better online option doesn’t remove any of that.

On transparency: we all want this one to be true. The federal College Scorecard has published program-level earnings and debt data since 2015, doing exactly what Selingo recommends. An early study found a small shift in student search behavior right after launch. The most recent, more thorough look at years of Scorecard data found essentially no shift in where students applied or enrolled. Not at any earnings level. Not in any sector. Families say they want the numbers. Having the numbers hasn’t changed much about where people go.

One gap worth naming

The old formula is finished. Steady undergraduate growth, expanding graduate programs, rising prices, more buildings, more borrowing. No amount of trimming brings that back, and Selingo is right that it won’t.

But look at who can afford to try his four fixes. Syracuse, and others with similar resources, can build an employer network over time. Syracuse can survive a botched program review. Syracuse has room to test online expansion without betting the institution on it. The schools running out of runway, the ones this crisis actually threatens, have the least capacity to attempt any of it well.

That gap is where the next version of this story needs to go.

Further Reading