I talked about the “demographic revolution” and what it means for universities a couple days ago, and now I owe you the second half of the thought. Here is that second half. Sorry it took me a few days; I’ll communicate it a bit telegraphically, because I’m sure I’ll be coming back to this in later posts as well.

I genuinely think we could be at an inflection point where it comes to changing the fundamental nature of higher education. Think about this:

1. Demographics are changing, both in the United States and, over the coming half-century or so, worldwide. We are no longer increasing in population size, generation over generation. In terms of human demographics, the “inflationary period” (to borrow from the physics of the early universe) is ending. Where once the population resembled a “pyramid” of age brackets—with an ever-larger new generation arising on which the progressively smaller older generations sit—now the population increasingly resembles a “pillar,” with each generation roughly the same size as the ones that have gone before it. If we survive for the millennia to come, it will be as a broadly mature species, that has maximized our sustainable exploitation of all ecological niches, and our population will stay stable, or even slightly decline.

Furthermore, people are living longer, working shorter, and staying active and engaged longer. Once upon a time the idea of a “retirement stage” was, to be bloody-minded and blunt, brief: you worked until you were benched, and then you quickly died. Nowadays, people have decades of active life ahead of them, often. What could be done with that?

2. The socio-economic system is changing, or really has already largely changed. Even fifty years ago it was possible to imagine securing a stable job in early adulthood and sticking with that career, even that company, until retirement. Progress in terms of promotions and maturation of skill-sets were all internal to the employment setting. It is obvious today that such a system no longer exists.

Famous reports suggest that we will soon see the roboticization of many jobs, and those that aren’t roboticized may be taken over by artificial intelligence. (Uhh, seeing that now, I realize that that's two ways of saying the same thing. Don't be angry at me; my basic comprehension of this stuff goes back to the Flight of the Conchords.) I think this is overdone, but I also think that the economy has changed: While the idea of the “gig economy” is a disaster for workers and massively favors corporations, the conditions of capitalist employment have changed so that workers are considered more or less free agents—at least, corporations no longer possess any long-term obligations to them. When we complain about “neoliberalism,” that evacuation of institutional loyalty to human beings is one of the things we mean.

3. The higher-ed market is changing. A few things are important here. First, as I’ve cried out to the Lord before, the American post-World War II model of state-supported mass public education has suffered some shocks in recent decades. This is deplorable and needs to be corrected, and I hope it will be. But even if it is corrected, it has challenged how universities fund themselves—increasingly by direct financial means (especially larger tuition bills and corporate grants). If university expenses continue to rise, and I don’t think it’s only administrative costs that are driving that, where will they find revenue? Overseas students? Perhaps for a while, but that is also a finite market, if not now in a few decades.

Secondly, the pressure on traditional 18-22yo students to think in short-term ways grows ever more profound. As somehave noted, the current crisis in liberal arts degrees, and especially the humanities, seems related to the decline in the JD as a trustworthy postgraduate degree. In the 2008 crisis and after, law schools got hammered, as it became clear that a law degree was not the way to a remunerative career. They are recovering a bit now, but it’s still pretty tough for them. The collapse of the “law school solution” for undergraduates made more of them think that they could not defer a course of professionalization until after their undergraduate career; they had to legitimate themselves for employment now. That seems to have been a crucial part of the problem. This is interesting: at the heart of the liberal arts crisis is the question of “why should I get that kind of degree?” They may worry, in fact, that the liberal arts really only prepares them for being a professor in the liberal arts.

Third, the population of American teenagers is shrinking, and because of this, universities will face a crisis in coming years. This is going to be a big deal--hell, it already is a big deal--and will cause some real pain in the higher-ed world.

4. Is there a solution to all of these problems? I don’t know about a “solution.” But I do know that they all seem, to me anyway, to be part of this larger challenge: the model of American higher education is coming under serious strain. That is because universities have centrally located themselves at the entrance to adulthood. Whatever else they are, whatever else they do, their central location has been as a gatekeeper to the adult world.

Here's what I mean: Universities are a major part of the system of “making adults” in the United States. Not everyone goes to college, but a lot of people do. Universities credential young people for employment, and they introduce students into networks of friends and associates who shape what a friend of mine called their “life choices”. In these ways, universities are a kind of sorting mechanism for pathways through life. (This is why elite universities are probably more valuable for their networks than the distinctive education they provide. But that’s a topic for another time.)

We think this is obvious, banal, the only way to organize things because we cannot imagine a system of higher education that functions differently. But I think we can imagine a system of higher education that functions differently. We can do so by imagining how universities may be able to capitalize on changing demographics in the US, and find ways to welcome people in diverse age brackets (and not just the 18-22 demographic) to revitalize and reorient their lives with further higher education.

Imagine a university setting where, say, 60% of the students on-grounds are traditional students. They live in their own dorms, they have their university culture, they live a standard life. But there is also a significant proportion—say, a third—of students who are not “traditional.” They live in their own houses off-campus, or there may be a special community for them to live in—a residential college, a kind of “long-term suites” rental place, a retirement community, a number of options present themselves as partial possibilities here. (There can be multiple forms of living/learning here, depending on peoples’ age & stage.) These non-traditional students do take courses with the traditional students, at least some courses; but there may be other curricular structures for them, advisory seminars, reading groups, what have you. Their point in being there is not so much to get credentialed—though some of them may seek that—but to enrich and deepen their skill-set and their capacities for experience.

None of this is to jettison our obligation to help form 18 to 22 year olds as at least reasonably self-managing adults. That job doesn’t need to go away. But a lot of what we’ve done for those kids is not simply, nor really centrally, designed to be done by them. Certainly some skill-mastery functions—technical skills, linguistic skills, training in composition of argument and writing and presentation—are things they need to master, and we can help them master them. But the largerand deeper issues that those skill-sets enable—the capacity to engage in serious self-scrutiny, to reflectively critique their assumptions, to ask deep questions: those are the issues that never go away, and may get more urgent as life goes on. Everyone needs these skills.

5. The ultimate aim is to change from the university from a stage of life, to a part of life, a place where you can repeatedly return, again and again, as changes happen to you. We need to refuse the idea of going “back to school,” with all the connotations of reversion to a time of immaturity, and conceive of university as a site of reflection and contemplation and reinvention.

The power of this for the older students is immense. They find a place to ask questions that, now more than earlier in their lives, are deeply gripping; and they find they have a lifetime of experience which to employ. Right now, retirees often head out to the golf course; but imagine a retirement community based in the middle of a learning community. Imagine making universities places where people come intentionally not to be credentialed, but also, when they are ready for it, to become wise, and to deepen the wisdom they already possess. The potential for growth and vital activity is pretty powerful.

This will benefit universities too. First of all, I suspect a number of people, both at retirement stage and—once we figure out how to do it—at intervals throughout their career, would flock to this kind of setting, a place intentionally, structurally “set apart” from the quotidian grind, retooling their skill-set and learning to improve their capacity to ask longer-term questions. People simply would be grateful, in multiple ways, for places that let them ask these questions in a non-teleological manner. And in this way universities can move away from (or, to be nostalgic, back from) establishing merely transactional relationships to relationships over the life course. A college becomes not only a relationship you understand, for most of your life, in the past tense, but a vital part of your experience that remains alive and present through all of your days.

Second, and more directly pedagogically, I tend to think that some of the problems of college are anchored in the claustrophobic fishbowl experience of mashing a bunch of 18 to 22 year olds together with nobody outside of that age bracket. (This is why faculty living on campus can be so powerfully a good thing—to give kids an reminder of family life, even at a telescopic distance, helps put the immediacy of their peer group into perspective.) Imagine if in many (but not all) of your classes, you were learning alongside someone twenty, forty, fifty years older than you. Imagine being around people who, with real experience of life, take education seriously in a way that really inspires you.

I’ve had some experience teaching older students, in continuing ed classes and the like, across thirty years. They were a self-selecting group, of course. But they were wonderful. I imagine the larger self-selecting group of non-traditional students who would do this, would be similarly terrific. These are people whose concerns are not quite what our students are, and they have advantages because of that. As Longfellow writes:

For age is opportunity no less

Than youth itself, though in another dress,

And as the evening twilight fades away

The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day

All of this would undoubtedly cause complications, some of them huge—I can imagine the lawyers freaking out. But it would be a very large shift, so “complications” are I think part of the challenge. And anyway, I think something like it is inevitable.

Universities as sites where people get educated, people get skill-sets, and people learn wisdom: It’s a real possibility, I think—in fact, if universities survive, I believe it's an inevitability. Perhaps it's a very long-term and utopian one, but one I sincerely believe is more or less inevitable, given the demographic and economic changes that are coming, and the cultural changes I hope we cultivate and secure.