Much of the trust crisis that has engulfed higher education stems from the fact that in the minds of a growing number of Americans, universities have been implicated in many of the intellectual maladies that afflict the present moment. Indeed, the academy, particularly at its most prestigious institutions, is increasingly seen as a breeding ground for anti-democratic elites as well as ground zero for the spread of the cult of identity, which aims to abolish history and even learning on behalf of perfect “equity” among victim groups. 

Meanwhile, a significant number of university faculty promote the postmodernist notion that truth and science are empty constructs wielded by oppressors, which must be rejected by all right-thinking people. As if this wasn’t enough, universities have also been charged with training a generation of students to fear the clash of ideas as “harm” and to demand “safe spaces” from disagreeable opinions.

At the same time, and not coincidentally, the academy has been battered by the turbulence inherent to the digital age. A feudal institution reformed along rigid German lines more than a century ago, the university confronts an environment of instant communication and collapsed categories, defined by a deafening cacophony of voices and a near-infinite supply of information. This development, more even than concerns about “wokeism” and the like on campus, poses the greatest threat to the future of higher education.

The leading institutions of the 21st century received their structural form in the 20th, and based their authority on the possession of information when this was a rare commodity. With the arrival of the digital tsunami, institutions have lapsed into a crisis of authority—and the university is no exception. In the last century, academic scholarship mapped out many domains for general discussion, in economic and constitutional affairs, for example. 

Today, everything gets shouted out in the Babel of the web. Every institutional failure, too, is exposed to the eyes of a mistrustful public—from corrupt university admissions policies to actual research fraud. Academics who speak ex cathedra are mocked without mercy for their pretension. Those who claim to be scholars or experts either get buried alive in the digital din or learn to scream along with the amateurs.

The hemorrhage of authority, on the face of it, appears surprising. An institution dedicated to learning and research should be expected to thrive in a “knowledge economy” and an age of information. However, the digital landscape favors speed and fluidity, and the university remains frozen in an inflexible industrial model driven by funding and growth, which must prioritize relations with patrons in the great hierarchies of government and business. 

A feudal institution reformed along rigid German lines more than a century ago, the university confronts an environment of instant communication and collapsed categories, defined by a deafening cacophony of voices and a near-infinite supply of information. 

Typically, in the U.S., the president of a university isn’t a beacon of scholarship but a proficient and well-connected fundraiser. The university, as an industry, does still manage to produce the “meritocratic” elites that populate our society’s hierarchies; otherwise, students are almost incidental to its functions.

At many universities, the average American student has become a mere conduit for massive government largesse: federal loans that inflate the system to the tune of $1.8 trillion (2026). These universities take the money but make no commitments regarding the quality or usefulness of their product; in fact, they are resistant to most efforts to quantify the value of their credentialing. The student is guaranteed only the debt. The federal government also bestows $65 billion on academic research grants (2024). Corporate and private “endowments” to universities—gifts with strings attached—reached a market value of $944.3 billion in 2026. At $1 billion per year, the income extracted from the performance of unpaid student athletes amounts to pocket change.

The current purpose—if not quite the mission—of the university is increasingly focused on the accumulation of large sums of money, which are lavished on magnificent construction projects and a fast-growing army of administrative drones. Success is highly skewed. On the far tail of the power curve, 521 U.S. colleges closed or merged during the last 10 years. At the top, Harvard, whose endowment of nearly $57 billion is more than double the gross national product of Nicaragua, increasingly seems to be less a place of learning than a miniature but pleasant nation-state, like Monaco or Dubai. If Harvard so wished, it could easily dispense with students altogether.

The marginalization of the student in the digital age has brought the university to a moment of reckoning. Because of access to easy federal money, the cost of attending a four-year school has doubled since 2000. The ballooning student debt burden has become a political scandal. The economic sacrifice is now prolonged and often futile: nearly 4 out of 10 students never graduate, and those who do take an average of six years to earn a four-year degree. Not surprisingly, overall enrollment peaked in 2010 and has since declined by more than 10%. An ever-expanding array of other choices, often involving online education, are both available and affordable.

At the top, Harvard, increasingly seems to be less a place of learning than a miniature but pleasant nation-state, like Monaco or Dubai. If Harvard so wished, it could easily dispense with students altogether.

So far, the decline has been relatively gentle. Students are marginalized but not yet alienated. Despite the cost and the institutional indifference, there has been no revolt or mass migration away from the university system. However, much of the perceived value that lures 20 million young Americans to campus every year depends on two uncertain and increasingly dubious propositions. One is that the university offers a gateway to truth and can initiate individuals into the methods of science and wisdom. The other is that college networking and degrees are necessary for material success in the modern world.

Neither claim conforms to current reality. The wisdom of the Western tradition that might have served as an anchor to young minds in the midst of the digital storm has largely been repudiated in favor of a robotic activism on behalf of the great progressive omnicause. For the same reason, the only networking that is considered legitimate runs along racial, sexual, and other identitarian lines.

Sitting atop a mountain of money, prestige universities increasingly play with the sanity of students they no longer really need. The other schools, though less privileged, follow their lead. This can’t last. The old norms of higher learning have been abandoned by its practitioners. A revolt may soon be coming that will sweep aside what remains. 

Whether it comes from the abused and indebted students, the parents who often pay exorbitantly for the miseducation of their children, or new schools with more adaptive norms and curriculums—or all of the above—I’m in no position to say. But a glimpse at the present system should be enough to see that the American university is moribund, and that without a major reassessment of its mission and methods, what we now call higher education might no longer exist in a few decades time.